Barring some doomsday scenario like a giant asteroid crashing into Earth, British researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) say that it will be another couple of billion years before the Sun gets hot enough to boil away the oceans and all life, including the hardiest of microbes, perishes. A new study detailing these portentous calculations is published today (Sept. 19) in the journal Astrobiology. According to the study’s authors, sometime between 1.75 and 3.3 billion years from now, planet Earth will cease to be in the Sun’s “habitable zone”– defined as the distance from a planet’s star where temperatures are right for the presence of liquid water on its surface. The team used models of stellar evolution to estimate when a planet would no longer be in the habitable zone, according to co-author Andrew Rushby of UEA’s school of Environmental Sciences. When Earth meets this inevitable fate, it will mean “a catastrophic and terminal extinction event for all life,” Rushby told Voice of America. The researchers’ primary concern was not, however, predicting when life on Earth would be extinguished; rather, they were mainly interested in the search for life on other planets and applied their modeling technique to eight planets besides Earth, including Mars. According to Rushby, if humans want to get away from the heat, Mars may be the best place to move. Read more: http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news...se-to-support-life-but-not-yet/#ixzz2fSywHFkT
While I'm all for prepping for the future I think these studies are a waste of resources as we have plenty of other problems that's ruining the quality of life now and could lead to our extinction plus we have little control over asteroids etc. BUT do have control over other things which need to be addressed.
Prepping is smart, with or without a catastrophe in the near future. We have control over a lot of things, but politics, both here and abroad keeps them from being solved.
