Be prepared — the end of the world is nigh...
Idon’t mean to be alarmist but I have been giving some thought to the end of the world. It will not be any time soon and you and I will not be around to witness it.
I have not joined a Doomsday cult. I am not going to put a date on the last days of our planet as I always felt sorry for those people who set a day, and then have to deal with the world continuing after that day when there was no great flood and no one from Venus arrived in a spaceship to collect them.
In the 1950s, psychologist Leon Festinger studied this phenomenon in an interesting book called When Prophecy Fails.
Some members sensibly leave the cult, but oddly others develop even more commitment — it was their behaviour, or prayer, that made God change his mind is what comes out of their deranged minds.
I am on a much sounder footing. I have always had an interest in science. Scientific method is my default way of approaching any question. What does the evidence say and take it from there.
Our world will die because our sun will run out of gas. Life will be no more long before the sun is running on empty. Things will have changed a lot by the time this happens in eight or 10bn years. As the sun dies it will expand and we will get hotter and hotter. If we haven’t colonised some other planet by then we will be cooked.
Given our human inability to live sensibly on this planet it seems unlikely that any of our descendants will still be around. They will have either blown the place up or treated the planet with such scant respect that it will cease to be able to support life.
The figures involved are staggering. Single cell life appeared on earth about 3.5bn years ago and Homo sapiens, us, only date back about 200,000 years.
We have got a fair bit done in a blink of an eye in the life of the universe. But a few minutes looking at the night sky should reduce any sense of significance we might feel and replace it with feelings of awe.
Just supposing we take ourselves forward for a million years when, if we behave ourselves, the planet will still support life. That is five times the length of time we have already been here. And most of the time we have been here we didn’t achieve much to be proud of.
It is not yet 1,000 years since the Marco Polos of the world sailed into the unknown. It must have taken extraordinary bravery.
The longer humans are here the more urgent it will become to colonise away from our sun. In the next 100 years the answer to David Bowie may well be ‘yes, there is life on Mars’. It will be our new generation of intrepid explorers. Billionaire Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX says we could have a million people on Mars in a century. He is going.