Scientists Predict When World Will End

[Astraea]

NASA/SOHO Consortium/ESA

A coronal mass ejection, a huge arc of magnetic superheated plasma, shoots from the sun out into space in February 2000.



Scientist have nailed down how and when the Earth will cease to exist.
The sun will slowly expand into a red giant, pushing the Earth farther out into space, but not far enough.
Our home planet will be snagged by the sun's outer atmosphere, gradually plunging to its doom inside the fiery stellar furnace.
"The drag caused by this low-density gas is enough to cause the Earth to drift inwards, and finally to be captured and vaporized by the sun," explains astronomer Robert Smith of the University of Sussex in southern England.
Previous projections had all figured that the Earth would avoid falling into the sun, even during our star's red-giant phase.


The good news: This won't happen for another 7.6 billion years.
The bad news: Life on Earth will end long before then.
In fact, we've only got a billion years left before the slowly expanding sun boils off the oceans and reduces our planet to an uninhabitable cinder, says Smith.


That may sound like a long time, but in fact life on Earth's been around a lot longer than that — a total of 3.7 billion years, according to the latest estimates.
For those first three billion years, true, we were nothing but pond scum. Still, the new figures indicate the long story of life on our fair blue-green planet may be entering its last act.
Is there any way our future descendants can save themselves? Why, yes, explains Smith.
He cites a recent study emanating from the University of California, Santa Cruz. It proposes taming an asteroid to swing by the Earth every few thousand years, slowly nudging the Earth into higher solar orbit, enough to outpace the sun's own outward growth.
"This sounds like science fiction," says Smith. "But it seems that the energy requirements are just about possible and the technology could be developed over the next few centuries."

[Astraea]

Solar System Like Ours Found 5,000 Light-Years Away

[Lazy Bastard]

I think by the time we can control large enough asteroids to modify earth's orbit that much, we'll just leave the planet. I don't think this will be an issue, if we manage to outlive our penchant for making more and more advanced weapons, and somehow allowing them to fall into less and less intelligent hands (e.g., the nuclear weapon being pretty much everywhere now). If only we'd not give secrets to friends who have Russian spies as the directors of their intelligence agencies, we'd be a bit better off (we gave Britain everything they needed to know to build nuclear weapons, and it almost immediately ended up in Russia, as the director of their primary intelligence agency, MI5, was a Russian spy at the time, as were quite a few of their top intelligence agents. Then it went to China, and later, Russia fell apart, Russia left plenty of nukes and plans to build them in places like Ukraine, and various scientists ran around selling the secrets personally, to people like India, Pakistan, etc).