What will be the fate of our planet?

The prevailing view until now has been that when the Sun exhausts its fuel, it will expand into a red giant star and, in the process, swallow Mercury, Venus, and Earth. This scenario is reflected, for instance, in images released a few years ago by the European Space Agency; it is the official, widely accepted version, the one likely being taught in schools.

The idea is that Earth would be incinerated and disintegrated by the Sun's expansion. However, a small group of "rebel" scientists has long argued that there might be hope for Earth, that it could perhaps escape doom at the last moment. A study published on June 19 scores a point for the camp arguing that Earth will survive. These researchers calculated that, while the Sun’s expansion in about 5 billion years is indeed inevitable, that expansion comes at a cost.

They calculated how much mass the Sun will lose to stellar winds, apparently around 30% to 40% of its current mass. This means it will have significantly less gravitational pull on the planets; less mass translates to less gravity. Consequently, the planets' orbits will expand. According to the researchers, this is possible if the process happens gradually, since a sudden change would send the planets flying off in different directions, but the expansion will be a slow, progressive event. It will take millions of years to unfold, during which time the Sun will lose mass, and Earth and the other planets will drift further away from it.

If the Sun lost 40% of its mass, the Earth could move about 100 million kilometers away from its current position; it would be spared the effects our Sun would have on it and would orbit at a distance similar to that of Mars today; I put this in quotes because, of course, even if we moved 100 million kilometers away from our current position, we’d still be practically brushing against the Sun, so Earth would continue to receive too much heat; it would still exist as a rocky planet, but the swollen Sun would be scorching Earth, making it uninhabitable; it would likely be a volcanic planet at that point.

The habitable zone would be around Jupiter, and the most pleasant places to live would be its giant moons. Ganymede and Callisto, for example; not Europa, even though it appears in some movies like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where it’s warm and has jungles—and it’s not recommended, first of all because of the method described in the novel and the movie, since that would involve greatly increasing Jupiter’s mass and would throw everything else into disarray; it would swallow up Europa, but on top of that, Europa is exposed to a great deal of radiation from Jupiter.

Europa receives so much radiation from Jupiter that, if you were to spend a few days on Europa’s surface, well, the radioactive exposure you’d receive would be fatal. Ganymede receives some radiation, but I think that, with a magnetic shield—Ganymede already has a magnetic shield because it has a huge subsurface ocean—but anyway, if we boosted the strength of its magnetic shield a little, there wouldn’t be much of a problem on Ganymede, and the best of them all would be Callisto. It’s a giant moon that isn’t talked about much, but it’s the one farthest from Jupiter; it’s in a much calmer region and also has a lot of water beneath the surface—though at great depths.

Despite this—which will happen in about 5,000 million years—life on Earth will become extinct much sooner, in about 1,000 million years, because by that time the Sun will be gradually increasing its brightness, and with that, the Earth’s temperature will also be gradually rising. And in 1 million years, life on Earth will be impossible due to the heat it receives from the Sun. This has nothing to do with climate change because it is a very slow increase—we’re talking about tens of millions of years.

But that won't happen for another 4,000 million years, when the sun begins to swell. But long before the sun expands, long before the heat from the sun's rays makes Earth uninhabitable—perhaps long before we have to leave Earth, or whoever is here at that time.

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