Elon Musk warned this week that ‘eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun’ – now scientists have confirmed when that could happen.
Researchers from NASA and Tōhō University in Japan used advanced supercomputers and mathematical models to forecast the sun’s long-term evolution.
Their calculations suggest that life on Earth will become impossible by the year 1,000,002,021, as the sun grows hotter and brighter that will raise global temperatures and gradually reduced oxygen levels.
They also found that in about five billion years, the sun will enter its red giant phase—a stage when it runs out of hydrogen fuel and dramatically expands.
At that point, the swollen red giant will likely engulf the inner planets, including Mercury, Venus and possibly Earth.
While this cosmic end is still far off, it’s one of the reasons Musk continues to push for colonizing Mars.
‘Mars is life insurance for life collectively,’ he told Fox’s Jesse Watters on Monday.
‘The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multi-planet civilization because Earth will be incinerated.’
Elon Musk warned this week that ‘eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun,’ and scientists have confirmed when that could happen
NASA has long warned that, eventually, the Sun will run out of energy, but it also notes that the Sun is still less than halfway through its lifetime and is expected to last another five billion years.
Researchers created year-by-year simulations to predict changes in climate and gas composition, according to the study published in Nature Geoscience.
They ran more than 400,000 simulation to forecast when the world will end.
They found that the increasing brightness of the sun will drive these changes, making Earth’s climate unstable.
The study, published in Nature Geoscience, determined that the loss of oxygen will lead to a mass extinction on Earth.
As a result, oxygen-producing organisms will decline, and this process will continue until only anaerobic microbes—organisms that can survive without oxygen—remain.
Using a random-based method, scientists estimated that Earth’s atmosphere, with oxygen levels more than one percent of today’s levels, will last around 1.08 billion years, give or take 0.14 billion years.
Musk is eager to ensure Mars is ‘sufficiently self-sustaining’ within his lifetime, describing it as ‘the fundamental fork in the road of destiny.’
Their calculations suggest that life on Earth will become impossible by the year 1,000,002,021, as the sun grows hotter and brighter that will raise global temperatures and gradually reduced oxygen levels
Musk often uses the ‘fork in the road’ analogy when explaining his big picture plans, including during his takeover of Twitter.
President Donald Trump used the same phrase when he initiated a voluntary redundancy rollout for federal government employees, and Musk hinted at the time that he helped to orchestrate the plan.
Musk said on Monday his mission for Mars is for it to one day ‘grow by itself if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, whether that is because civilization died with a bang or a whimper.’
‘If the resupply ships are necessary for Mars to survive, then we have not created life insurance. We’ve not created life insurance for life collectively.
‘So that’s the key point in the future where [the] destiny of life, as we know it, will forever be affected, is when Mars becomes self-sustaining.’
President Trump took the first step in helping Musk reach this lofty goal, by signing off on a massive shift in funding priorities at NASA – including the largest cut to the space agency’s budget in its history.
On May 1, the Trump administration slashed $6 billion that would have paid for research, operations on the International Space Station, and future missions, including the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission.
That project has already cost NASA billions and aimed to bring samples collected by the Martian rovers back to Earth to be studied.
At the same time, the cuts will allow NASA to allocate over $1 billion to manned space missions, ensuring ‘that America’s human space exploration efforts remain unparalleled, innovative, and efficient.’
The White House proposal emphasizes the importance of NASA beating China back to the moon and putting the first humans on Mars, with the latter being the overarching goal of Musk’s spaceflight company, SpaceX.
