John Carlos Baez on Nostr: On the bright side.... The Sun is slowly getting brighter, and in about a billion ...
On the bright side....
The Sun is slowly getting brighter, and in about a billion years its luminosity will be 10% higher than today. This will evaporate enough water to create a strong greenhouse effect, which will heat the Earth even more, leading to a feedback loop that eventually evaporates all the oceans and creates a thick cloud layer.
The temperature will rise to 47 °C. There may still be water near the poles, and there may be occasional rainstorms, but most of the Earth will become a desert, with large dune fields covering its equator, and salt flats on what was once the ocean floor.
At this point a lot of water will be in the stratosphere, where ultraviolet light from the Sun breaks down water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is very light, so it will gradually escape the atmosphere. All the Earth's seawater will be gone by 1.5 billion years from now.
With no water to serve as a lubricant, plate tectonics will likely stop. Some microbes will survive, such as those already adapted to high temperatures, and life might even find refuge in the atmosphere. However, by 3 billion years all life may go extinct, with the last organisms living underground.
Four billion years from now, the continued brightening of the Sun will heat the Earth's surface enough to melt it. When the Sun switches from burning hydrogen within its core to burning hydrogen in a shell around its core, it will start to expand. By about 12 billion years it should be 3000 times brighter than now.
As this happens, the Earth's temperature will rise to 2000°C. Most of the atmosphere will be lost to space, and the surface will be a lava ocean.
And nobody will complain.
The Sun is slowly getting brighter, and in about a billion years its luminosity will be 10% higher than today. This will evaporate enough water to create a strong greenhouse effect, which will heat the Earth even more, leading to a feedback loop that eventually evaporates all the oceans and creates a thick cloud layer.
The temperature will rise to 47 °C. There may still be water near the poles, and there may be occasional rainstorms, but most of the Earth will become a desert, with large dune fields covering its equator, and salt flats on what was once the ocean floor.
At this point a lot of water will be in the stratosphere, where ultraviolet light from the Sun breaks down water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is very light, so it will gradually escape the atmosphere. All the Earth's seawater will be gone by 1.5 billion years from now.
With no water to serve as a lubricant, plate tectonics will likely stop. Some microbes will survive, such as those already adapted to high temperatures, and life might even find refuge in the atmosphere. However, by 3 billion years all life may go extinct, with the last organisms living underground.
Four billion years from now, the continued brightening of the Sun will heat the Earth's surface enough to melt it. When the Sun switches from burning hydrogen within its core to burning hydrogen in a shell around its core, it will start to expand. By about 12 billion years it should be 3000 times brighter than now.
As this happens, the Earth's temperature will rise to 2000°C. Most of the atmosphere will be lost to space, and the surface will be a lava ocean.
And nobody will complain.