There is still some bad news for those who peeked out the window this morning and heaved a sigh of relief that the world had not ended and the fake Mayan doomsday prediction was indeed false despite the Internet hysteria.
Scientists are 100 per cent certain the world is coming to an end.
Fortunately there is no need to cancel Christmas this year. You can max out the credit card this weekend on last minute presents and take the turkey out of the freezer to defrost in time for the holiday dinner.
Actually we can go on enjoying another five billion Christmases. Scientists believe the Sun is halfway through its ten billion year life span before it dies and causes all life on Earth to end. A dying Sun will be the real apocalypse, said Professor Michael Reid, an astronomer at the University of Toronto.
“It is in the category of things that we are definitely, 100 per cent sure will happen,” he said. “It is a complete inevitability.” The Sun is made up 75 per cent of hydrogen and as it spends remaining reserves of the chemical element it will start cooling down and grow larger and redder. As it becomes a “red giant” the Sun will expand by about 100 times its current diameter of 1.4 million kilometres, swallowing its nearest neighbours Mercury and Venus, said Reid. The impact on Earth, which is dependent on the sun for energy, will be catastrophic.
“Even at a cooler temperature it is producing more heat because there is more sun filling our sky so that means it’ll get really hot on Earth,” he said. Over the course of several thousand years the planet will become uninhabitable as the temperature on the surface of the Earth rises to 100 degrees Celsius. Oceans will start boiling and evaporate. The atmosphere will be stripped of gases such as oxygen and nitrogen that make life possible. The heat waves alone would kill most people.
“Imagine if one day it becomes hotter and never stops becoming hotter,” he said. “You hear about heat waves in places like India and people dying. It would be like that and slowly spread everywhere.” Scientists know how the event will unfold because all over the universe stars such as the sun are dying.
Sirius, the brightest star in the sky that can be seen with the naked eye, is in fact two stars orbiting one another — the one that cannot be seen easily underwent the same process as our sun did millions of years ago. “Now it is like a little relic floating around,” said Reid. A more pressing concern for astronomers is asteroids. A glance through the fossil record shows asteroids large enough to cause mass extinctions, that is, at least 10 km wide, hit the earth every 30 to 60 million years. “We know that we are on course for an asteroid impact, it is just a matter of time,” said Reid. The last time it happened was 65 million years ago when an asteroid measuring about 10 km long wiped out the dinosaurs.
Travelling at the speed of 30 kilometres per second, it would plow through the Earth’s crust and detonate like a bomb. The dust scattered into the atmosphere would block out the Sun for months or years, killing off plants and setting off the collapse of the food chain. The odds of an asteroid impact happening in a lifetime range between one in a million to one in 10 million, said Reid.
“That is comparable to your odds of dying by a fireworks accident or terrorism — things that are rare but do happen,” he said. Getting out of planet Earth may be one option to avoid an apocalypse.
Stephen Hawking, the eminent British physicist, told the BBC earlier this year that the human race needed to colonize space because it was under the threat of extinction within the next thousand years from disasters such as nuclear war or global warming. But escaping Earth could mean the emergence of another threat — alien civilizations. “If aliens decided to visit us then the outcome might be similar to when Europeans arrived in the Americas,” he said. That did not turn out well for the Native Americans.”
