A home away from earth

For your planning purposes, scientists have determined that Earth will end in 7.59 billion years.

Billion? For a second you had me scared there. I thought you said million. These kinds of huge numbers should be left to deep-space astronomers and the gnomes who draw up the federal budget.

If you must know, a gaseously expanding sun will suck Earth out of its orbit and engulf it in a lethal fiery embrace. Earth, so to speak, will be toast.

Earth could survive. We won’t, but our planet, now reduced to a lifeless cinder, could be kicked into a higher orbit where it would circle what little is left of the sun to the end of time, serving as a warning to passersby: Pick your solar system very, very carefully.

In fact, we’ll go much earlier.

The science section of The New York Times, reporting on the end of days, says, “About a billion years from now, the sun will be 10 percent brighter. Oceans on Earth will boil away.” And that can’t come soon enough for the global-warming crowd, who see immolation as a small price to pay for telling the rest of us, “We told you so but you wouldn’t listen.”

The real trouble begins in about 5.5 billion years, when the sun transforms itself into a red giant. The fun-loving astronomers who calculated all this, Klaus-Peter Schroeder of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico and Robert Connon Smith of the University of Sussex in England, say that as a red giant the sun will be 256 times as big as it is today and 2,730 times brighter. That’s beyond sun block, people.

Gas giants

About 15 years ago, no one had seen a planet outside our solar system and many believe one might not exist.

But as the search techniques have improved, astronomers have begun finding smaller, more Earthlike planets, some very likely with water and organic compounds. NASA’s Featured Planet, Gliese 581c, is only five times the size of Earth, reasonably convenient at 20.5 light-years away and in the “habitable zone” of its sun, although NASA’s idea of “habitable” is not quite the same as yours and mine. However, its “year” is only 13.5 days, a little too whirlwind for our tastes.

Viewed another way, we have 999,999,999 years to find another nice planet in a solar system whose sun won’t incinerate us and arrange a move there. Start looking.

Scripps Howard News Service