Scientists think they’ve calculated doomsday, and… it isn’t what you think 

A supercomputer has done the dirty work of counting down the days until the end times. According to its calculations, we now we know the results: Humanity will end. In 250 million years.

In some ways, it’s a bit of a relief—at least the world won’t end in our lifetimes unless we figure out immortality in the next century or so. But according to the researchers at the University of Bristol, UK, who authored the paper, the timeline shouldn’t give us license to lose sight of climate change goals.

“While we are predicting an uninhabitable planet in 250 million years, today we are already experiencing extreme heat that is detrimental to human health,” co-author Eunice Lo said in a press release from the university about the paper, which was published in the journal Nature Geoscience. “This is why it is crucial to reach net-zero emissions as soon as possible.”

According to the published research, heat will be the death of us: “All life will eventually perish in a runaway greenhouse once absorbed solar radiation exceeds the emission of thermal radiation in several billions of years.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “runaway greenhouse,” it refers to a situation in which a planet’s water sources turn to vapor and act as a greenhouse gas, speeding up the warming process until everything essentially boils. This is potentially why Venus is as hot as it is. Regardless of climate change, the Earth is expected to vacate the sun’s habitable zone within the next few billion years, meaning we’ll be a little too close for comfort as the sun turns into a red giant and engulfs our home planet in its dying millennia.

Before then (but still in the comfortably distant future), the interior of Pangea Ultima will be too hot and dry to sustain most life, though birds and reptiles may fare better than mammals, according to New Scientist. And since birds are related to dinosaurs, maybe we’d even see the return (through evolution) of such creatures. 

It’s possible humans could continue to survive with the help of technology, researcher Alexander Farnsworth told the publication. But he’s not optimistic about what life would look like here. “You’d hope that we’d be a space-faring civilization by that point,” he said.

In the relatively immediate future, the paper claims that we’ll see a global temperature rise of about 12 degrees Celsius by the time we’ve burned all the fossil fuels available to us. That’s expected to happen in the year 2300, if we stay on the track we’re on now. Even still, we can plan on calling Earth home for quite a while longer than that, the University of Bristol says. “Research suggests the planet should largely remain habitable until this seismic landmass change in the deep future,” the university’s news release says.

Which is at least a bit comforting, no? In the meantime, it’s up to us to decide how comfortable (and relatively safe) we can make our time on this planet and for the generations that will follow us.

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