After the world ends what will happen

Any of the devastating scenarios above, while undoubtedly terrible for life, are just a fraction as bad as future Earth's ultimate fate.

Gamma-ray burst or not, in about a billion years, most life on Earth will eventually die anyway due to a lack of oxygen. The researchers suggest that our oxygen-rich atmosphere is not a permanent feature of the planet.

Instead, in about a billion years, solar activity will cause atmospheric oxygen to plummet back down to the level it was at before the Great Oxidation Event. To determine this, the authors combined climate models and biogeochemistry models to simulate what will happen to the atmosphere as the Sun ages and puts out more energy. They found that, eventually, Earth reaches a point where atmospheric carbon dioxide breaks down.

At that point, oxygen-producing plants and organisms that rely on photosynthesis will die out. The precise timing of when that starts and how long it takes — the deoxygenation process could take as few as 10, years — depends on a broad range of factors. But, in the end, the authors say this cataclysm is an unavoidable one for the planet. Receive news, sky-event information, observing tips, and more from Astronomy's weekly email newsletter.

View our Privacy Policy. By signing up you may also receive reader surveys and occasional special offers.

We do not sell, rent or trade our email lists. Login or Register Customer Service. RISE —. PHASE —. Tonight's Sky — Change location. US state, Canadian province, or country. Tonight's Sky — Select location.

Tonight's Sky — Enter coordinates. UTC Offset:. Picture of the Day Image Galleries. Watch : Mining the Moon for rocket fuel. Queen guitarist Brian May and David Eicher launch new astronomy book.

Last chance to join our Costa Rica Star Party! Learn about the Moon in a great new book New book chronicles the space program. Dave's Universe Year of Pluto.

In this list, WIRED has gathered a handful of far-reaching goals as a framework for what to expect in the decade ahead. Space colonies. A mega-expansion in genome sequencing. Sweet little nuclear power plants. It's never too early to start holding the promise-makers responsible for their claims.

After all, even a bajillionaire needs an accountability buddy. But NASA says this time around things will be different. The agency is planning a crewed mission to the moon in , and this time it wants to stick around.

But this year NASA has made big strides on the mission. The agency has selected a handful of companies to build components for its lunar gateway, a space station that will be in orbit around the moon, and it has solicited designs for a lunar lander. In October the UN warned that humanity has 12 years left to avoid catastrophic climate change. But the report is spot-on in its mantra: The faster we switch to a world economy run on renewable energy, the better we can attenuate the consequences—stronger storms, rising seas, fiercer wildfires.

So what can we do? Sixty years of drought, overuse of water, and the impacts of climate change have reduced the lake by 90 percent.

Its massive reduction has adversely affected the livelihoods of more than 40 million people in Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon that depend on it. Scholars believe this moment in history constitutes a new geological era, called the Anthropocene. In this new era, humans are the primary change agents, rapidly degrading what makes the planet habitable, intensifying greenhouse gas concentration, and damaging the health of marine ecosystems.

Twice in modern history, plagues have swept across the world, killing an estimated 15 percent of the population in a few decades. Luckily, deadly diseases with the capacity to spread globally are rare. But they do happen — a century ago, the Spanish flu killed more than 50 million people. Antibiotics, our greatest defense against disease, are becoming less effective as some strains of bacteria become resistant to them. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are responsible for an estimated , annual deaths.

Asteroids are rocks that revolve around the sun and that occasionally collide with the Earth. An asteroid large enough to cause a global catastrophe hits Earth every , years, scientists estimate. Scientists estimate it could release enough particles to block the sun for months and cause a famine killing hundreds of millions. NASA announced in that it had mapped more than 90 percent of objects in space larger than 1 kilometer in diameter, and that none of them are likely to hit Earth.

A supervolcanic explosion 74, years ago ejected so much debris into the atmosphere that scientists believe it caused the Earth to cool by several degrees Celsius. Some experts believe this caused the greatest mass plant and animal extinction in human history, bringing the species to the brink of extinction. How likely is that to happen today? For now, it only exists in computer models, but the first experiment is being planned by Harvard researchers.

Solar geoengineering is one of two emerging technologies that could manipulate the atmosphere and reduce climate risk. The Mayan calendar apocalypse. The rapture.

A new great flood. An unstoppable fire. A biblical prophesy. A supervolcano. Or a rogue asteroid or comet slamming into us. Every few years, or maybe even every few months depending where on the internet you go , a new story, speculation, or conspiracy will go viral, claiming that the end of the world is near. Some claims are very specific; others are more vague. Yet we don't live in a world where myth and mysticism dominate our thinking; we know that we can comprehend all that's to come using the predictive power of science.

Based on what we know, there are four ways the Earth will meet its eventual end, and they're all going to happen someday. Here's what that's going to look like. The largest human-made explosion to ever occur on Earth. Nuclear war, and the subsequent damage to The extinction of humanity. This is not just prophesy; this is an inevitability.

Although there are over seven billion of us and growing today, humans have only been around in our current form for under a million years, with all of the great apes having existed for only a few million years. Evolution may be slow to occur in our species on the timescale of a single human lifetime, but over millions of years, it's inevitable. As the Earth changes, the pressures on different species to survive will change as well, all while random genetic mutations occur.

Some mutations are beneficial to surviving the present pressures, and those are the genes that are most likely to get passed on. Evolutionarily speaking, human beings - or homo sapiens - have been around for a cosmic Based on how evolution works, it is unlikely there will be any humans left even just a few million years from now. Whether those offspring of humanity millions of years from now remain sentient, as we know it, is beside the point; the point is that millions of years from now, even if there are descendants of humans still around, they won't be human any longer.