THE LAST DAYS OF EARTH

In the grand cosmic scale of the universe, our planet is doomed. All About Space explores what will occur during Earth’s final moments

- Paul Cockburn

Apollo 17 may have been the 20th century’s final crewed mission beyond Earth orbit, but its crew left us with one very public legacy – the iconic ‘Blue Marble’ image of planet Earth, which during the last 48 years has become one of the most reproduced images in human history. Admittedly that’s barely a pinprick when compared to the history of life on Earth as a whole: when you consider that the first ‘living’ molecules appeared some 3.8 billion years ago – and that by current estimates the last are likely to disappear from existence around 3 billion years from now – we’re still pretty much the new kids on the block.

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.