time to get serious

Warning: man will disappear ... in 500 million years

WASHINGTON (AFP) Jan 14, 2003
Two US scientists have warned in a book released Tuesday that the end of the
world has started ... but it will take 500 million years to life to
disappear from Earth.
In "The Life and Death Of Planet Earth", Donald Brownlee and Peter Ward
describe the way Earth will eventually self-destruct and say this should
encourage man to take better care of the planet.

They said that when compared to a 24 hour clock, the planet is currently at
4:30 am after about 4.5 billion years of existence.

At 5:00 am, the University of Washington professors write, animal and
vegetable life will end after one billion years on Earth. By 8:00 am, the
oceans will have vaporised and at midday, after 12 billion years, the Earth
will have been absorbed by the Sun.

By that time, the Sun will have become huge, destroyed any sign of the human
presence and dispersed atoms and molecules across space.

"The disappearance of our planet is still 7.5 billion years away, but people
really should consider the fate of our world and have a realistic
understanding of where we are going," said Brownlee.

"We live in a fabulous place at a fabulous time. It's a healthy thing for
people to realize what a treasure this is in space and time, and fully
appreciate and protect their environment as much as possible."

Brownlee and Ward said that the possibility of man moving to another planet
in that time is remote. Even if a planet could be found it would be
virtually impossible to get there.

But they said it might be possible to send DNA samples on inter-galactic
space ships in the future in a move like throwing a message in a bottle out
to sea.

At the rate at which the Sun is growing and becoming hotter, it is certain
to absorb Mercury and Venus, the two planets closer to the Sun. And even if
the Earth were to escape the star's expansion, it would still make life on
Earth impossible.

And Man's time will come long before the end of the planet.

Rising temperatures will force all living creatures to seek refuge in the
sea, the scientists wrote, and those that can adapt will survive for a
while. But eventually even the oceans will become too hot to support life.

The Earth's slow death, which has already seen the extinction of dinosaurs,
will hand the same fate to elephants, trees, glaciers, oceans and eventually
to the last living cells.

"The last life may look much like the first life -- a single-celled
bacterium, survivor and descendant of all that came before," the authors
wrote.

Ward said the predictions are based on what the scientists know already
about life on Earth and the existence of other stars and planets.

Ward is a paleontologist and Brownlee an astro-physicist. In a previous
book, entitled "Rare Earth" they said that life in its most basic form was
once quite common across the universe but that it was able to develop on
Earth because of a rare combination of factors.