• Question: Do you think world will end?

    Asked by 582evoa37 to Anthea, Chloe, Kevin, Michel, Sean on 18 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Anthea Lacchia

      Anthea Lacchia answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Hi there,
      If by world you mean the universe, then yes it probably will. I’m not an expert but I looked this up and apparently there are several ways in which this might happen and they all sound painful :/
      -Big freeze, in which the universe essentially freezes to a stop.
      -Big rip, in which all objects in the universe disintegrate into elementary particles and radiation.
      -Big Crunch: all the matter and space-time in the universe collapses into itself, but may restart another universe (Big Bounce).
      Worried? Don’t be: as a human race, we are likely to become extinct a long time before this ever happens with many possible causes like nuclear war, epidemics, climate change, asteroid impacts! In the geological timescale (which measures time in billions of years) we have been around for a miniscule portion of Earth’s history 😉

    • Photo: Kevin Healy

      Kevin Healy answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Well so much for upbeat questions 🙂 I think Anthea’s response covers a lot of the anwsers and I like her comment saying dont worry we’ll go extinct before the world ends. I thought I might add a few other ways for the world to end.
      The longest the earth as a planet could possible last is about 5-6 billion years (the earth is 3.5 billion years so its halfway through its life). This is because the sun will start to run out of its fuel and turn into what is called a red giant. This would be so big it might engulf the planet essentailly melting it away. If it is’nt melted away the sun might then blow up in what is called a super nova which would also detroy the earth. If the sun doesnt blow up (its hard to predict) the earth is in for a long freeze with nothing but the remains of the sun called a dwarf star its only source of heat.

      If you dont want to wait on the sun for the end of the earth another way is for a nearby star explodes in a super nova. While most stars that look like they might blow up are far enough away for us not to worry smaller dwarf stars that we know less about might catch us off gaurd. The other thing is that because radiation that would destroy the earth would travel at the same speed of as the light during coming from such a super nova you would’nt even know it was coming until it was here!

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