The Stars Foretell Our Doom
We pretty much know how all this ends—“this” being the time that life gets to enjoy existing on Earth. That Earth gets to enjoy existing at all. It goes something like this: It’s 5 billion years from now. The sun is growing unstable, running out of hydrogen fuel in its core. Eventually the core collapses under its own weight, heats up from all that mass squeezing together, and switches to burning another gas, helium. Its outer layers begin to puff up dramatically, vaporizing and then swallowing the two innermost planets, Mercury and Venus. Earth may be pushed to a wider orbit, or follow Venus and Mercury to fiery destruction.
This is not as big a deal as you might imagine, as life on Earth, at (a future we can look forward to about 1 billion years from now).
