Future of The Earth, The Solar System and The Universe
| Years from now | Event | |
|---|---|---|
| 36,000 | The small red dwarf star Ross 248 passes within 3.024 light years of Earth, becoming the closest star to the Sun. | |
| 42,000 | Alpha Centauri becomes the nearest star system to the Sun once more as Ross 248 recedes. | |
| 50,000 | According to the work of Berger and Loutre, at this time the current interglacial ends, sending the Earth back into a glacial period of the current ice age, assuming limited effects of anthropogenic global warming.
Niagara Falls erodes away the remaining 32 km to Lake Erie and ceases to exist. |
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| 50,000 | Because lunar tides act as a braking force on the Earth's rotation—a process called tidal acceleration- the length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping will now be about 86,401 SI seconds. Under the present day timekeeping system, a leap second will need to be added to the clock every day. | |
| 100,000 | The proper motion of stars across the celestial sphere, which is the result of their movement through the galaxy, renders many of the constellations unrecognisable.
The hypergiant star VY Canis Majoris will have likely exploded in a hypernova. |
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| 100,000 | Earth will likely have undergone a supervolcanic eruption large enough to erupt 400 km3 of magma. | |
| 250,000 | Lōʻihi, the youngest volcano in the Hawaiian–Emperor seamount chain, will rise above the surface of the ocean and become a new volcanic island. | |
| 500,000 | Earth will have likely suffered an impact by a meteorite of roughly 1 km in diameter, assuming it cannot be averted. | |
| 1 million | Earth will likely have undergone a supervolcanic eruption large enough to erupt 3,200 km3 of magma; an event comparable to the Toba supereruption 75,000 years ago. | |
| 1 million | Highest estimated time until the red supergiant star Betelgeuse explodes in a supernova. The explosion is expected to be easily visible in daylight. | |
| 1.4 million | The star Gliese 710 passes as close as 1.1 light years to the Sun before moving away. This may gravitationally perturb members of the Oort cloud; a halo of icy bodies orbiting at the edge of the Solar System. As a consequence, the likelihood of a cometary impact in the inner Solar System will increase. | |
| 8 million | The moon Phobos comes within 7,000 km of Mars, the Roche limit, at which point tidal forces will disintegrate the moon and turn it into a ring of orbiting debris. This material will continue to spiral in toward the planet. | |
| 10 million | The widening East African Rift valley is flooded by the Red Sea, causing a new ocean basin to divide the continent of Africa. | |
| 11 million | The ring of debris around Mars impacts the surface of the planet. | |
| 50 million | Due to its northward movement along the San Andreas Fault, the Californian coast begins to be subducted into the Aleutian Trench.
Africa will have collided with Eurasia, closing the Mediterranean Basin and creating a mountain range similar to the Himalayas. |
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| 100 million | Earth will have likely been impacted by a meteorite comparable in size to that which triggered the K–Pg extinction 65 million years ago. | |
| 230 million | Beyond this time, the orbits of the planets become impossible to predict. | |
| 240 million | From its present position, the Solar System will have completed one full orbit of the Galactic center. | |
| 250 million | All the continents on Earth fuse into a possible supercontinent. Three potential arrangements of this configuration have been dubbed Amasia, Novopangaea, and Pangaea Ultima. | |
| 500-600 million | Estimated time until a gamma ray burst, or massive, hyperenergetic supernova, occurs within 6,500 light-years of Earth; close enough for its rays to affect Earth's ozone layer and potentially trigger a mass extinction, assuming the hypothesis is correct that a previous such explosion triggered the Ordovician–Silurian extinction event. However, the supernova would have to be precisely oriented relative to Earth to have any negative effect. | |
| 600 million | Tidal acceleration moves the Moon far enough from Earth that total solar eclipses are no longer possible. | |
| 600 million | The Sun's increasing luminosity begins to disrupt the carbonate-silicate cycle; higher luminosity increases weathering of surface rocks, which traps carbon dioxide in the ground as carbonate. As water evaporates from the Earth's surface, rocks harden, causing plate tectonics to slow and eventually stop. Without volcanoes to recycle carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels begin to fall. By this time, they will fall to the point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All plants that utilize C3 photosynthesis (~99 percent of species) will die. | |
| 800 million | Carbon dioxide levels fall to the point at which C4 photosynthesis is no longer possible. Multicellular life dies out. | |
| 1 billion | The Sun's luminosity has increased by 10 percent, causing Earth's surface temperatures to reach an average of 47°C. The atmosphere will become a "moist greenhouse", resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans. Pockets of water may still be present at the poles, allowing abodes for simple life. | |
| 1.3 billion | Eukaryotic life dies out due to carbon dioxide starvation. Only prokaryotes remain. | |
| 1.5–1.6 billion | The Sun's increasing luminosity causes its circumstellar habitable zone to move outwards; as carbon dioxide increases in Mars's atmosphere, its surface temperature rises to levels akin to Earth during the ice age. | |
| 2.3 billion | Time until the Earth's outer core freezes, if the inner core continues to grow at its current rate of 1 mm per year. Without its liquid outer core, the Earth's magnetic field shuts down. | |
| 2.8 billion | Earth's surface temperature, even at the poles, reaches an average of 147°C. At this point life, now reduced to unicellular colonies in isolated, scattered microenvironments such as high-altitude lakes or subsurface caves, will completely die out. | |
| 3 billion | Median point at which the Moon's increasing distance from the Earth lessens its stabilising effect on the Earth's axial tilt. As a consequence, Earth's true polar wander becomes chaotic and extreme. | |
| 3.3 billion | 1 percent chance that Mercury's orbit may become so elongated as to collide with Venus, sending the inner Solar System into chaos and potentially leading to a planetary collision with Earth. | |
| 3.5 billion | Surface conditions on Earth are comparable to those on Venus today. | |
| 3.6 billion | Neptune's moon Triton falls through the planet's Roche limit, potentially disintegrating into a planetary ring system similar to Saturn's. | |
| 4 billion | Median point by which the Andromeda Galaxy will have collided with the Milky Way, which will thereafter merge to form a galaxy dubbed "Milkomeda". Due to the vast distances between stars, the Solar System is not expected to be affected by this collision. | |
| 5.4 billion | With the hydrogen supply exhausted at its core, the Sun leaves the main sequence and begins to evolve into a red giant. | |
| 7.5 billion | Earth and Mars may become tidally locked with the expanding Sun. | |
| 7.9 billion | The Sun reaches the tip of the red giant branch, achieving its maximum radius of 256 times the present day value. In the process, Mercury, Venus and possibly Earth are destroyed.
During these times, it is possible that Saturn's moon Titan could achieve surface temperatures necessary to support life. |
|
| 8 billion | Sun becomes a carbon-oxygen white dwarf with about 54.05 percent its present mass. | |
| 14.4 billion | Sun becomes a black dwarf as its luminosity falls below three trillionths its current level, while its temperature falls to 2239 K, making it invisible to human eyes. | |
| 20 billion | The end of the Universe in the Big Rip scenario. Observations of galaxy cluster speeds by the Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest that this will not occur. | |
| 50 billion | Assuming both survive the Sun's expansion, by this time the Earth and the Moon become tidelocked, with each showing only one face to the other. Thereafter, the tidal action of the Sun will extract angular momentum from the system, causing the lunar orbit to decay and the Earth's spin to accelerate. | |
| 100 billion | The Universe's expansion causes all galaxies beyond the Milky Way's Local Group to disappear beyond the cosmic light horizon, removing them from the observable universe. | |
| 150 billion | The cosmic microwave background cools from its current temperature of ~2.7 K to 0.3 K, rendering it essentially undetectable with current technology. | |
| 450 billion | Median point by which the ~47 galaxies of the Local Group will coalesce into a single large galaxy. | |
| 800 billion | Expected time when the net light emission from the combined Milkomeda galaxy begins to decline as the red dwarf stars pass through their "blue dwarf" stage of peak luminosity. | |
| 1012 (1 trillion) | Low estimate for the time until star formation ends in galaxies as galaxies are depleted of the gas clouds they need to form stars.
The universe's expansion, assuming a constant dark energy density, multiplies the wavelength of the cosmic microwave background by 1029, exceeding the scale of the cosmic light horizon and rendering its evidence of the Big Bang undetectable. However, it may still be possible to determine the expansion of the universe through the study of hypervelocity stars. |
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| 3×1013 (30 trillion) | Estimated time for the black dwarf Sun to undergo a close encounter with another star in the local Solar neighborhood. Whenever two stars (or stellar remnants) pass close to each other, their planets' orbits can be disrupted, potentially ejecting them from the system entirely. On average, the closer a planet's orbit to its parent star, the longer it takes to be ejected in this manner, because stars rarely pass so closely. | |
| 1014 (100 trillion) | High estimate for the time until star formation ends in galaxies. This marks the transition from the Stelliferous Era to the Degenerate Era; with no free hydrogen to form new stars, all remaining stars slowly exhaust their fuel and die. | |
| 1.1–1.2×1014 (110–120 trillion) | Time by which all stars in the universe will have exhausted their fuel (the longest-lived stars, low-mass red dwarfs, have lifespans of roughly 10–20 trillion years). After this point, the only stellar-mass objects remaining are stellar remnants (white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes). Brown dwarfs also remain. | |
| 1015 (1 quadrillion) | Estimated time until stellar close encounters detach all planets in the Solar System from their orbits.
By this point, the Sun will have cooled to five degrees above absolute zero. |
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| 1019 to 1020 | Estimated time until brown dwarfs and stellar remnants are ejected from galaxies. When two objects pass close enough to each other, they exchange orbital energy, with lower-mass objects tending to gain energy. Through repeated encounters, the lower-mass objects can gain enough energy in this manner to be ejected from their galaxy. This process eventually causes the galaxy to eject the majority of its brown dwarfs and stellar remnants. | |
| 1020 | Estimated time until the Earth's orbit around the Sun decays via emission of gravitational radiation, if the Earth is neither first engulfed by the red giant Sun a few billion years from now nor subsequently ejected from its orbit by a stellar encounter. | |
| 2×1036 | The estimated time for all nucleons in the observable Universe to decay, if the proton half-life takes its smallest possible value (8.2×1033 years). | |
| 3×1043 | Estimated time for all nucleons in the observable Universe to decay, if the proton half-life takes the largest possible value, 1041 years, assuming that the Big Bang was inflationary and that the same process that made baryons predominate over anti-baryons in the early Universe makes protons decay. By this time, if protons do decay, the Black Hole Era, in which black holes are the only remaining celestial objects, begins. | |
| 1065 | Assuming that protons do not decay, estimated time for rigid objects like rocks to rearrange their atoms and molecules via quantum tunneling. On this timescale all matter is liquid. | |
| 1.7×10106 | Estimated time until a supermassive black hole with a mass of 20 trillion solar masses decays by the Hawking process. This marks the end of the Black Hole Era. Beyond this time, if protons do decay, the Universe enters the Dark Era, in which all physical objects have decayed to subatomic particles, gradually winding down to their final energy state. | |
| 101500 | Assuming protons do not decay, the estimated time until all baryonic matter has either fused together to form iron-56 or decayed from a higher mass element into iron-56. (see iron star) | |
| Low estimate for the time until all matter collapses into black holes, assuming no proton decay. Subsequent Black Hole Era and transition to the Dark Era are, on this timescale, instantaneous. | ||
| Estimated time for a Boltzmann brain to appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease. | ||
| Estimated time for random quantum fluctuations to generate a new Big Bang, according to Caroll and Chen. | ||
| High estimate for the time until all matter collapses into black holes, again assuming no proton decay. | ||
| High estimate for the time for the Universe to reach its final energy state. | ||
| Scale of an estimated Poincaré recurrence time for the quantum state of a hypothetical box containing an isolated black hole of stellar mass. This time assumes a statistical model subject to Poincaré recurrence. A much simplified way of thinking about this time is that in a model in which history repeats itself arbitrarily many times due to properties of statistical mechanics, this is the time scale when it will first be somewhat similar (for a reasonable choice of "similar") to its current state again. | ||
| Scale of an estimated Poincaré recurrence time for the quantum state of a hypothetical box containing a black hole with the mass within the presently visible region of the Universe. | ||
| Scale of an estimated Poincaré recurrence time for the quantum state of a hypothetical box containing a black hole with the estimated mass of the entire Universe, observable or not, assuming Linde's chaotic inflationary model with an inflaton whose mass is 10−6 Planck masses. |
Read more about this topic: Timeline Of The Far Future
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