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Published online 21 December 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.384
Column: Muse
We're all going to die
Can humanity be saved from catastrophe, and is the cost worth it?
As a scientific journalist, one of my jobs seems to be telling you what you’re going to die of this week. At the moment, climate change is pretty popular, cancer once took the top slot, next week another ‘planet killer’ asteroid could be discovered ready to smash into our fragile blue planet.
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I would encourage you to get your facts stright on the Sun's evolution. The Sun is expected to make the Earth uninhabitable within a billion years, but not by becoming a red giant. I have seen various estimates on that event, but none are for less than 3 billion years into the future. (A recent Sky and Telescope article even puts the start of the red giant transition as being over 7 billion years from now.) Instead, the issue is that even as a main sequence star the Sun is slowly growing brighter. In a billion years the Sun will be 10% brighter, and that extra warmth is enough to cause the oceans to dry up due to a runaway greenhouse effect. As a result, the Earth would be a dry and probably lifeless place by that time. On the other hand, proposals have already been put forward for avoiding this fate, but I think that getting past the next few million years may be more of a priority than worrying about the next billion years or so.
Measures to prevent human extinction (except those involving divine intervention) must ultimately address the problem of dark energy, which is causing the average density of the universe to approach zero. As more and more of the resources of the universe move beyond our reach, we are left with fewer and fewer options. Dark energy places a dispropriate burden on the poor, so we must immediately implement dramatic tax increases on the rich and increased regulations on corporations.