🖖 There's still time

The Earth won’t be around forever.

Astronomers have concluded that our sun as been around for at least 4.5 billion years. And physics suggests that the planets also formed around the same time the sun did.

I read that our sun will expand to the orbit of Venus and raise Earth’s temperature to at least 1000° vaporising our oceans.

It will then contract and expand again.

The sun will contract one more time. When that happens it will be a dim white dwarf star unable to provide heat for any life.

All within the next 5 billion years.

So sad.

Our mission

Nothing lasts forever.

But this news brings me renewed confidence that I’m on the right track with these emails.

If the human race is to continue, it will have to figure out how to leave this rock before it’s too late.

We’ll need to figure out how to live long term on spacecraft that can take us to different worlds.

We’ll need to eat out there. And plant our food crops in different environments.

This also supports the position that investing and working towards space travel is worth our efforts. Not only will it improve life on Earth, but it will help us thrive when Earth is no longer habitable.

Don’t take my word for it

There are a number of sci-fi universes where Earth is a memory of the distant past- almost forgotten.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is about humans who have moved into all corners of the galaxy. The societies written by Frank Herbert in DUNE also originated from Earth.

I take this as a sign that I’m supposed to continue this work I’ve started. I wish I could be on that ship when humans see, in first person, an exoplanet (a planet outside of our Solar system) for the first time.

Can you imagine?

There would be no words to describe it.

We call Earth the cradle of life.

But every species leaves the nest eventually.

P.S. I’ll get back to writing longer emails. Unless you like them shorter like this. Just let me know.