The Actual End . . . For Real
Source: The Conversation
All of this is great fun, unless you’re one of the hundreds of millions of people who have been bilked out of money, or worse, by the doom prophets. But how will the world really end? After all, all things must end eventually, surely there must be some end we can actually predict, right?
You betcha.
Source: Noosphere Geologic
As it happens, life on Earth, which is the only kind we really care about, is staring down the barrel of quite a few ends, and surviving any of them is unlikely. The first is a result of the Sun’s increasing radiant heat. We have very good evidence that the Sun has been getting hotter throughout its history, and there’s no theoretical reason why it should reverse the trend over the long term.
Given the present rate of increase, a little over 1 billion years from now Earth will be too hot to sustain green-chlorophyll photosynthesis. When this happens, green plants will no longer exist—though this end is going to happen so gradually it’s possible that plants will have time to evolve new colors, such as black and white, to protect themselves. 1,000,000,000 years from now, meadows might look like spilled salt and pepper.
In 1000000000 AD, the world will resemble an Ansel Adams print. Source: IMG Kid
Another end comes 4 billion years after that, as the Sun – again – expands into a red giant. When this happens, Earth will not only be scorched by the now-very close Sun’s surface, but slowed by friction with the solar atmosphere. This puts a drag on Earth’s orbit, robbing it of energy and causing the planet to spiral closer to the Sun. This will not end well.
Not well at all.
Source: Krazy Globe
Finally, 1 googol years hence (10^100 years), all of the usable energy in the universe will have been consumed, and the last white dwarf stars will cool to near absolute zero. The age of stars, which began when the universe was 300,000 years old, will then be over – forever. No more energy will ever enter the system, and the highest temperature anywhere will be quantum fractions of a degree above 0K.
So . . . How do we know these predictions are the real deal, and not another scam? For starters, nobody is really making money off them, which is a good sign. More importantly, science uses actual data, which can be examined by every skeptic in the world, to arrive at logical models for systems. If new data becomes available, science – unlike every other system of thought ever – changes its conclusions to match the new facts. Take the above with a grain of salt, since it could be wrong, but rest assured that the real doomsday prophets – astrophysicists – are doing likewise.
