Formed some 4.5 billion years ago, this planet that we call the Earth is about half way through its lifespan. A catastrophe awaiting us of proportions that we cannot even begin to conceive. Forget what happened to the dinosaurs or the Permian Extinction event, they are nothing compared to what is coming our way.

There is no future and no hope...

The Earth’s ultimate fate is inextricably tied to the life cycle of the Sun and there is nothing we can do about that. As our Sun ages, it will slowly expand, brighten, and heat up, triggering a series of catastrophic events that will strip the planet of its oceans and atmosphere, ultimately ending in its total destruction. In about a billion years as the Sun runs low on hydrogen fuel, it will steadily increase in brightness by about 10%, causing the Earth to warm. This will trigger a runaway greenhouse effect where the oceans begin to rapidly evaporate. As carbon dioxide levels plummet, plants will no longer be able to photosynthesise, eventually resulting in the collapse of the oxygen-rich atmosphere and the extinction of nearly all complex life.

This is our absolutely maximum window to get out of the solar system and find at least one friendly star with a suitable planet to call home.

Back to the Earth, between two to four billion years surface temperatures will soar even beyond the present day conditions on Venus (which have often been described a a run away greenhouse effect) and the crust will begin to melt. The tectonic plates and magnetic field that offers the Earth some protection will cease to exist and even the most resilient subterranean extremophiles will be destroyed as the planet transitions into an uninhabitable, glowing ball of rock and magma, just like it was in the beginning.

Absolutely nothing will be left. The planet will be bereft of life.

In something like 5 - 8 billion years the Sun will finally exhaust its core hydrogen entirely. As a result it will swell into a massive "red giant". As it expands, it will envelop and consume the inner planets. Scientists generally agree that the Earth and its scorched core will be swallowed entirely by the dying star and reduced to vapor, or stripped down to a bare, lifeless cinder orbiting a fading white dwarf. And that my friends is what is going to happen to us.

However, just to put a billion years into perspective it is estimated that if you include the earliest hominids, we have been around for about a million years (I am going long estimate on this because it actually reduces the percentage of the timeline that we have been about and thus it paints a more positive picture. That means hominids have been around for about 0.001% of that time. Another way of looking at it is that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago or 0.065% of the time we have left! Death is inevitable but there is plenty of time, assuming we don't accelerate our own destruction.

So why am I talking about this?

You are probably aware of last week's SpaceX IPO which made Elon Musk the first trillionnaire in human history. Very simply I wrote a post about this which I will serve up tomorrow. It is quite a lengthy analysis of what his plans are and I thought it warranted some kind of an introduction.

Hence today's post. 

The late great Stephen Hawking warned that humanity must establish colonies on other planets as a "backup plan" to avoid extinction. He famously stated that keeping our species entirely on one planet is like putting "all our eggs in one basket" and urged humanity to spread out into the cosmos. Hawking suggested back in 2010 that we have a few hundred years and by 2017 he had reduced that timeline to 100 to 600 years and stated that this is the tipping point where we will eventually be lost without off-world bases. To be honest when I was checking this I did recall something about him saying if we don't leave in the next 100 years then we never will and thus that was the basis of my search. The results as you can see were just a bit :) different.

The reason for his warning to be so dire is very simple. He argued that humanity is at its most dangerous moment, possessing the technology to destroy itself but not the ability to escape it. He cited climate change, nuclear war, genetically engineered viruses, artificial intelligence, and cosmic events (such as asteroid strikes) as existential risks and this is why we need to move on.

So now that has been established and I have laid the groundwork I will use tomorrow's post to expand on what Elon Musk, the money they IPO raised and SpaceX have in mind when it comes to getting us out into space and off this ultimately doomed rock and just maybe humanity as a species (but there will be an us and them I am afraid) may survive among the stars.

And so on that note I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you again tomorrow and for you to stay safe and well my friends.