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Asked by maddi123 to Alison, Artem, Caroline, John, Gunther on 19 Jun 2012.
Question: when the world ends what will happen ???!
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Artem Evdokimov answered on 19 Jun 2012:
It depends on the definition of ‘end of the world’ 🙂 If this is a reference to Apocalypse-style event which happens rapidly and cannot be avoided or prevented via human agency — then we can expect total extinction of higher life forms (and possibly all life if things get bad enough) and then the planet (should it survive intact) will have a chance to re-start from scratch, more or less. If the end of the world refers to the inevitable (but very far away!) demise of our Solar system – well, I hope that by then humanity (or whatever we evolve into) has figured out a way to propagate ourselves away from just one star system, so that we can carry on. If you refer to the end of the Universe – then what happens ‘after’ that is unclear in the same way that it’s unclear what happened before the Big Bang 🙂
Does this help?
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John Short answered on 20 Jun 2012:
Our world will probably end by the sun ending.. and hopefully not by us having a nuclear war or zombie apocalypse lol
About 1.1 billion years from now as the sun reaches the end of its life, it will begin to grow larger and hotter. The earth’s ice caps will melt and, as the planet grows hotter, the oceans will boil away. Eventually Earth will lose all its water to space. It will be a hot, dry planet. All life will end at this point, but not bacteria, they always find a way to survive in extreme conditions such as on volcanoes in space etc.
3.5 billion years from now, as the sun steadily grows larger and hotter, the earth will resemble the inferno of today’s Venus.
As the ever-growing sun becomes a huge orange giant star, dominating the sky, the surface of Earth will glow with a red heat and mountains will begin to melt. A bloated red giant sun will engulf the orbits of Mercury and Venus. Its tenuous outer atmosphere may even reach the orbit of the earth.
Roughly 12.4 billion years from now, the sun has blown off its outer layers. All that is now left of our star is a white-hot dwarf probably not much larger than the planet Earth had been. The Earth will remains as a burned-out, lifeless cinder that is the corpse of our world.
Pretty grim eh? Best enjoy life whilst we can 🙂
Comments
Artem commented on :
I respectfully disagree on the timing. 1.1 billion years is not when the Sun leaves main sequence – that’s supposed to happen around 5.4 billion years from now. The Earth would be already cooked pretty well by +1.3 billion though. Incidentally the really big problems are not that far away – supervolcanic eruptions can and do happen and the estimated time frame for having a ‘really big’ (volcanic winter for a hundred years kind of big) eruption is within the next million years or so. And if things continue as they are now, we can expect that the Earth will run out of CO2 by about 800 million years from now, anyway.
kypc8785 commented on :
it will blow up :()
jakeleeds commented on :
blow up
chumly commented on :
we will probably die 😛