How many years does Earth have left?

The date indicated was 2012. That year, according to the Mayan calendar, it would be the end of our planet, as we know it today. Then some experts said that the true date was 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic.

And although global warming is a concrete fact, none of these prophecies have come true. Life on Earth continues and, according to scientists, will continue many more years.

Because the end will come when the star around which our planet orbits, the Sun becomes a “white dwarf”. So yes, life on our planet will have come to an end.

How many years does Earth have left?

Ten years ago the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Gaia space probe. His mission is to “create an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of more than 1 billion stars in our galaxy and the Milky Way.”

Equipped with a 1 billion pixel camera, Gaia provided data that enabled scientists calculate the moment when the Sun stops emitting light and heat towards the planets that revolve around it, including Earth.

Since then the Sun has been going through its middle age It is approximately 4.57 billion years old, according to astronomers’ calculations. The star goes through a comfortable period during which it fuses hydrogen into helium and remains quite stable.

However, when the hydrogen fuel runs out and changes in the fusion process begin, it will become a red giant star. Then, the surface temperature will decrease.

According to ESA scientists, this will happen when the Sun turns 8,000 million years old. From then on it will increase in size until it becomes a red giant in 10,000 or 11,000 million years. At the end of this phase, the Sun will be a “faint white dwarf”.

So when will the end of life on Earth occur? It is likely that the increase in temperature of the Sun (red giant star) will wipe out all species, including humans.

Therefore, for science, the end of the world would come in about 6 billion years. But man would have become extinct already between 1,000 and 2,000 million years earlier due to global warming.

Fortunately, NASA discovered it more than 5,000 exoplanets (located beyond the Milky Way). Many of them would meet the conditions for human life according to the most optimistic forecasts. Of course, to get there you’ll need spaceships that travel at the speed of light. Even so, they would take a long time to arrive.