Earth is a great place to live, but it won’t last forever. At press time, Earth was expected to die in about 5 billion years.
How will Earth die? Assuming all goes to plan, the Sun will become an enormous fiery ball and consume the inner planets of the solar system. As part of its life cycle as a G2V star, the Sun will enter a red giant phase in a few billion years, at which time it will swell past the orbits of Mercury and Venus, incinerating them.
Though the Sun’s gravitational pull will weaken as it loses mass, potentially allowing Earth to widen its orbit out of danger, it’s believed that Earth won’t escape. And, the oceans will have boiled by then, which will be unpleasant.
We must leave Earth and find new places to live.
[…] reason to plan on colonizing elsewhere before our 5 billion years are up: asteroid […]