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Topics: NASA, Science, Space, Technology, Weather
Anish Vij
Scientists from Toho University in Japan have collaborated with NASA researchers to determine when the world will end.
It might sound scary until you realise that it would mean never having to do taxes, emails, or group projects ever again.
But in all seriousness, clever people are now saying that the apocalypse may come far sooner than they thought.
While we can only hope to get GTA 6 before then, supercomputer simulations have revealed when life - both human and microbial - will ultimately cease to exist.
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According to a study titled 'The future lifespan of Earth’s oxygenated atmosphere', the fate of life on Earth is tied directly to the lifespan and evolution of the Sun.
Over billions of years, the Sun will continue to expand and emit more heat, slowly transforming Earth into an increasingly hostile environment.
Even though that might be good news for your tan, the results from 400,000 computer simulations predict that our planet will become unlivable in the year 1,000,002,021.
Basically, the surface will become so hot that even the most resilient microorganisms won't make it.
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At that stage, the oceans will have evaporated, the atmosphere will have thinned, and surface temperatures will make life impossible.
Yet humanity is unlikely to make it anywhere near that far.
The supercomputer models predict that human life could end much earlier as the Sun’s intensifying radiation triggers severe atmospheric and environmental changes.
Rising temperatures, declining oxygen levels, and deteriorating air quality will progressively render the planet less hospitable.
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These effects, modelled using detailed simulations of climate change and solar radiation, suggest that the window for human habitability won't be as long.
Early signs of these long-term changes are already observable. Scientists have noted increasing solar activity, such as coronal mass ejections and solar storms, which disturb Earth’s magnetic field and subtly reduce atmospheric oxygen. When combined with human-driven climate change - marked by record-high global temperatures and accelerating ice melt - these factors paint a troubling picture of a planet slowly losing its balance.
“For many years, the lifespan of Earth’s biosphere has been discussed based on the steady brightening of the Sun,” said Kazumi Ozaki, the study’s lead author.
Before, Ozaki said estimates gave life around two billion years, but newer models pretty much cut that period in half.
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“If true,” he wrote: “One can expect atmospheric O₂ levels will also eventually decrease in the distant future.”
In other words, anything that needs oxygen to survive will be gone in about a billion years.
As long as we get to play GTA 6 by then, there's no need to panic just yet.