Perhaps that explains our insecurity as a species and why we have spent so much of our recorded history predicting the end of the world as we know it – or at least the end of humanity’s time on Earth. Even now in 2020, cosmological events including predictable solar eclipses are taken by some people as evidence of an approaching Armageddon, and any new scientific advancements the rapture.
Yet very few scientists would suggest that our home will always be the beautiful ‘Blue Marble’ photographed by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. Even assuming that we humans manage to hold out for significantly longer than most mammalian species on the planet have done so – say a few hundred million years – the small rock that we call home will inevitably become quite a different place during the next few billion years.
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