The Last Day On Earth

Our star, the sun, was born from a gaseous nebula about 5 billion years ago. Quite possibly other stars were formed from this cloud at the same time, so the sun may have siblings wondering through the Milky Way galaxy. A few hundred million years or so after it was born, the sun started converting hydrogen into helium and entered what is known as the Main Sequence. This is a very stable time in the life of an average star and it will continue converting hydrogen into helium for about another 5 billion years or so and then things here on earth will change forever.

Picture a day like yesterday or today only 5 billion years in the future, the last perfect day on earth. After that the sun will leave the stable Main Sequence stage of its life where it converted hydrogen into helium, because it has run out of its primary fuel. As a consequence it will undergo changes so significant, that the earth will become inhospitable for life as the sun swells in size to become a red giant. The earth will either be consumed by the red giant as it swells in size, or it may just be radically heated so that the outer layers melt and turn molten as it was at its birth. In either case life will be extinguished.

The sun will then shed the outer layers of its atmosphere into inter-stellar space forming huge gas clouds, and eventually the once mighty sun will shrink to about the size of the earth. The sun will then continue to cool for another few billion years. Eventually all that will remain will be the core, however, no visible light, or heat, will be generated. The solar system, as we know it, will be extinct.

All stars that are about the same mass as our sun will eventually go through the same process. If intelligent alien civilizations exist either here in the Milky Way galaxy or in one of the billions of other galaxies in the universe, and they just happen to be orbiting a star like our sun, then they also face the same fate.

Hopefully long before these events occur, mankind will have found a way to move his civilization to another planet orbiting around another star, either in our Milky Way galaxy, or another. But what of alien civilizations? Did they have citizens like our Newton, and Einstein? Are they as advanced as we are and actively looking for solutions to enable space exploration, or did they reach that level of technology eons ago, and they will be knocking on our door any minute?

By: Sam Pontier

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