{"id":86,"date":"2009-04-21T20:43:49","date_gmt":"2009-04-21T08:43:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2009\/04\/21\/the_fate_of_the_earth_were_all\/"},"modified":"2009-04-21T20:43:49","modified_gmt":"2009-04-21T08:43:49","slug":"the-fate-of-the-earth-were-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2009\/04\/21\/the-fate-of-the-earth-were-all\/","title":{"rendered":"The fate of the earth (We&#8217;re all doomed)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just been reading <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/science\/nature\/8008473.stm\">this article on the BBC website<\/a> about the puzzling lack of sunspots. The sun should be entering a period of high activity (equals lots of sunspots) but observations show otherwise. Maybe it&#8217;s just a bit late, or possibly our star is doing something rather different to normal. I&#8217;ll&nbsp;leave discussion on what this might mean for global warming to the people who know what they are talking about (it is a highly debated issue) and instead look a few more years into the future (a few billion to be more precise).<\/p>\n<p>Life on Earth is fundamentally temporary. If God doesn&#8217;t end it first, it will get ended by the sun. In about five billion years time, the sun is likely to become a red giant star, and pretty well swallow up the earth. Not that there will be anyone around to see it &#8211; the planet will have got so hot that it will be uninhabitable long before then. We are well and truly doomed.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>When I was much much younger (maybe about 8) and read about the fate of the earth in a book, it worried me. What with the sun expanding, the earth was going to get hotter, and I imagined that in about 50 years time (i.e. within my lifetime) it would be unpleasantly hot and our crops would die etc. This was&nbsp;most likely because I failed &nbsp;to grasp just how big a billion really was &#8211; (see <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/sci.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2009\/04\/ninety-eight-ninety-nine-a-hun.shtml\">yesterday&#8217;s blog entry<\/a>) &#8211; and as my maths improved my worries subsided.<\/p>\n<p>Little did I know all those years ago that in thirty years time people would be talking about the earth getting much hotter in our lifetimes.&nbsp;Maybe I was right to be scared after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just been reading this article on the BBC website about the puzzling lack of sunspots. The sun should be entering a period of high activity (equals lots of sunspots) but observations show otherwise. Maybe it&#8217;s just a bit late, or possibly our star is doing something rather different to normal. I&#8217;ll&nbsp;leave discussion on what [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":837,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,8],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The fate of the earth (We&#039;re all doomed) : Physics Stop<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2009\/04\/21\/the-fate-of-the-earth-were-all\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The fate of the earth (We&#039;re all doomed) : Physics Stop\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I&#8217;ve just been reading this article on the BBC website about the puzzling lack of sunspots. 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