Nothing Lasts Forever Eventually the planet we are on is going to die. There is only one thing which might save it and that is if we become so advanced before this happens we can control the galaxy and reach the highest point of efficiency for a civilization. How long could this take? Will we even succeed in this? Where are we now? We are nowhere right now in the scheme of things. We can’t even control the weather on our planet. There is a time limit we have to be aware of, and thankfully it is far in our future. I am assuming all the predictions of climate catastrophe continue to be wrong. Some scientists have stuck their necks out and made a prediction that a super continent may emerge with elevated CO2 rendering only between 8 to 16 percent of the land remaining habitable. I don’t know how they can make a prediction like this about events which would be so far into the future. Climate control has become a joke with countries like China building as many as 1 coal fired plant every week. India is said to be pretty much ignoring climate control, as are some other countries, which means no matter what anyone else would do, things will just keep getting worse unless a way is found to contain all this CO2. It is also being said the earth could be knocked out of orbit in about 1 billion years and with luck fall into the habitable zone of a rogue star which is headed this way. Rogue stars are stars which have been knocked out of their orbits and there are far more of them than was originally expected. That is a lot of supposition. So many things could happen to the earth before we ever reach that next billion year mark. One of those things is we could all be wiped out by an asteroid strike, disease, or war, just to mention a few ways. Another thing which could happen is we get advanced enough to all leave the planet and head to a terraformed Mars or even another solar system. One thing I have wondered about is would we be better off in a planet orbiting a young star, or one which is a little older because it has demonstrated stability longer? At the rate our technology is advancing, it seems in a couple of hundred years we may routinely be flying to other solar systems. I think it would all depends on how much time we really had before the planet conditions would become a problem. If we had a couple of hundred years and knew we couldn’t correct things, we might have enough time to transfer the entire population to a new world, but if we had only a couple of weeks before disaster struck, look for all the politicians trying to fill the seats on the space craft. Scientists used to think evidence of a destroyed planet was illustrated by the asteroid belt. It is only lately where the scientists have added up the mass and have come to the opinion there is not enough mass to indicate a planet ever existed there. It has been determined the asteroids are what is left over from the formation of our solar system. It is interesting to note there are some minor planets mixed in and some scientists believe there could be a chance of life on 1 or more. There are other ways the earth could be destroyed and one of them is by powerful gamma-rays originating outside of our solar system. They have quite a range. There is about one a day being observed in the universe. The average gamma-ray burst produces more energy in one second than our sun does in 10 billion years. The thinking is the average gamma-ray burst would have to be about 200 light years away or closer to destroy the earth if it hits us. Scientists are saying they had studied all the stars within that distance and they believe none of them are candidates for such a burst. That is good to know. The planet could destroy itself from within. We live on a very dynamic planet. Volcanoes are all over it. A volcanic eruption was said to usher us into the ice age because it spew so much junk into the atmosphere it blotted out the sun for years. If we had a couple of super explosions from them maybe things would get so bad before the earth recovered, life would have died out. It is thought by some even one super volcanic eruption might be able to destroy us or at least kill most of the population. One has to wonder if there was a nuclear war, would any of the bombs set off a super volcanic eruption? Nuclear war is always a possibility and that possibility is getting more relevant as more nations get nuclear weapons. So far the nations that have them today do not seem willing to use them despite threats of doing so. This may not be true for what we call the rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran when they get one. This means a device which was invented to save lives by stopping an invasion might become known as the bomb that ended life on earth. The first step might be the use of tactical battlefield nuclear weapons such as the ones Russia has threatened to use on Ukraine. North Korea might someday send a nuke into space to knock out satellites and that could start a nuclear war. Iranians might all believe if they died in a nuclear war it is okay as long as they kill us because they believe they will all go to paradise. There are just so many ways we could all be destroyed. It seems diseases keep popping up in China. While Covid didn’t kill everyone it killed many people and new diseases are said to be appearing in other places but mainly in China. As the glaciers melt, dormant bacteria are a threat to our health along with the new viruses. It seems being human means we are always in some kind of danger. If we were to worry about all this stuff, we would become neurotic and that is no way to live. The best thing for us to do is not even think about these dangers because most of them we can do nothing about. We should just live our lives and be thankful for what we have.
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