Scientists: Earth Could Actually Be Habitable For Another 2.3 Billion Years

Wired:

The Earth could be habitable for another 2.3 billion years, extending previous estimates of life's horizon by more than 1 billion years.

King Fai Li and his colleagues at Caltech hypothesize that Earth's atmospheric pressure has always varied, and that it could fall in the distant future, keeping Earth from frying for far longer than previous research had shown.

Read the whole story: Wired

Comments

[Burner]

Guess I should go ahead and get that oil change.

[truthartbeauty]

this is the last century for humans on this earth. the cockroaches will have the run of it.

[olephart]

They already have, they're called Republicans.

[Joethepauper]

That's great for whatever species replaces us! We aren't going to last much longer at the rate we're going. Whatever species replaces us is going to have a tough time when/if they become technological/industrial because we have already sucked-up most of the fossil fuels.

[rabiddog6708]

Yeah, but the human race won't be here to the end. The c0ckr0aches will have the run of the place long before then.

[Salvadore69]

Actually, fruit flies are much more hardy than cockroaches. The levels of radiation a cockroach can endure is miniscule compared to the fruit fly.

Of course, we may have several restrarts on all life on the planet in it's potential lifespan, assuming no intergalactic highway is put through the neighborhood.

[LupotheButcher]

give or take...

[SamEllison]

Cuz!

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/

[SiberianRat]

I wonder what sort of species will be around then. Microbes?

[glockman]

"King Fai Li and his colleagues at Caltech hypothesize that Earth’s atmospheric pressure has always varied, and that it could fall in the distant future, keeping Earth from frying for far longer than previous research had shown."

"Over the next hundreds of millions of years, the sun will continue to get brighter until eventually, Earth becomes too hot to inhabit. Previous calculations had pegged that time at about a billion years from now, but the new paper argues that earlier models had neglected the role of atmospheric pressure in regulating the temperature of the planet on astronomical time scale"

But I thought global warming...er, climate change, was going to kill us all sooner than that.

[tre]

That's not what Al Gore says.

[cloudmaker]

When evangelicals see articles like this where do they imagine these facts and observations
come from? How can they possibly buy all that biblical nonsense in the blazing light of so
much science?

[Salvadore69]

If you go by their concepts, we probably only have another 6500 years left here.

[jmsent]

Actually, I think the next "second coming" is scheduled for 2012.

[toochie]

We need more chickens then.

[j-rich]

Let's just wait and see how things turn out. Because this report won't stop the Polar Icecaps from melting.

[Cosmic-Zantor]

And melting polar ice caps aren't going to make the planet uninhabitable nor kill every human on Earth. Global warming isn't going to lead to the extinction of humanity. Humanitarian disaster, a lot of displaced people, a lot of famines, yes. Tragedy, yes. Apocalypse? No.

[factotem]

I guess I'm going to need a bigger day planner.

[Earl]

Maybe the sun will cooperate, but what about that dust cloud we're flying toward? Last I heard, that was going to kill everything on the planet when we fly into it in 50,000 years. (A friendly shout out to the moderators since this subversive message has obvious keyword problems.)

[Bpeirce]

Not if the republicans are in power!!!