Good News: Life On Earth Will Not Boil Away As Soon As Previously Thought

Coronal Mass Ejection

Look around you. See the plants, the animals; most importantly, feel the earth beneath your toes. One day, the sun will brighten, and everything on the planet will burn. The oceans will vaporize. Complex life–eventually, even microbes–will no longer survive. But wait: new research offers hope.

Ha ha. Juuuuust kidding. _We are _screwed.

We just have a little longer than we thought. Maybe.

A previous climate model suggested that the sun, which is getting brighter at a rate of about 1 percent every 100 million years, would destroy the planet’s water in 600 or so million years. But that model–showing how slowly evaporating water and heat would be trapped in the earth’s atmosphere, quickly baking everything inside–wasn’t complicated enough, according to two recently published studies. Adding in factors like cloud coverage and regional differences, other models now estimate that the inevitable transformation of earth into a lifeless apocalyptic hellscape will occur closer to 1 billion and 1.5 billion years from now.

So, great! Take comfort in the fact that you, and indeed everyone you have ever met or will meet, will have certainly have met their demises long before that.