Most Life on Earth Will Be Killed by Lack of Oxygen in a Billion Years (newscientist.com) 165
One billion years from now, Earth's atmosphere will contain very little oxygen, making it uninhabitable for complex aerobic life. From a report: Today, oxygen makes up around 21 per cent of Earth's atmosphere. Its oxygen-rich nature is ideal for large and complex organisms, like humans, that require the gas to survive. But early in Earth's history, oxygen levels were much lower -- and they are likely to be low again in the distant future. Kazumi Ozaki at Toho University in Funabashi, Japan, and Chris Reinhard at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta modelled Earth's climatic, biological and geological systems to predict how atmospheric conditions on Earth will change. The researchers say that Earth's atmosphere will maintain high levels of oxygen for the next billion years before dramatically returning to low levels reminiscent of those that existed prior to what is known as the Great Oxidation Event of about 2.4 billion years ago. "We find that the Earth's oxygenated atmosphere will not be a permanent feature," says Ozaki. One central reason for the shift is that, as our sun ages, it will become hotter and release more energy.
The researchers calculate that this will lead to a decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as CO2 absorbs heat and then breaks down. Ozaki and Reinhard estimate that in a billion years, carbon dioxide levels will become so low that photosynthesising organisms -- including plants -- will be unable to survive and produce oxygen. The mass extinction of these photosynthetic organisms will be the primary cause of the huge reduction in oxygen. "The drop in oxygen is very, very extreme -- we're talking around a million times less oxygen than there is today," says Reinhard.
The researchers calculate that this will lead to a decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as CO2 absorbs heat and then breaks down. Ozaki and Reinhard estimate that in a billion years, carbon dioxide levels will become so low that photosynthesising organisms -- including plants -- will be unable to survive and produce oxygen. The mass extinction of these photosynthetic organisms will be the primary cause of the huge reduction in oxygen. "The drop in oxygen is very, very extreme -- we're talking around a million times less oxygen than there is today," says Reinhard.
jokes on you (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
ill be dead
True - one way, or the other.
Re:jokes on you (Score:5, Funny)
ill be dead
Too bad you'll miss it, it'll be the "Year of the Linux Desktop" ... :-)
Re: (Score:2)
The dark forest (Score:2)
If humans are still in charge then, the Dark Forest Aliens will have detonated our sun by then.
Re: (Score:2)
I thought they made space in the Solar System be 2-dimensional?
Nonsense (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is overthinking the issue.
If we keep destroying greenspaces, then yes there will be a dramatic increase in CO2, in turn heating the atmosphere. That is not being replaced with electrolysis, that's inefficient. Humans are not going to be around in a billion years, at the rate we are going, we won't be around in 200.
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Didn't people say the same thing, um, a century ago?
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
A billion years ago, multicellular organisms were yet to evolve on planet Earth. It's a long time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Parent said "within the next century, we will be among the stars."
People said the same thing a century ago. Didn't happen.
Re: (Score:2)
That, I don't dispute :)
Re: Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking the same thing. FTL travel is going to be hard to obtain.
Re: Nonsense (Score:3)
Make that impossible unless we discover some entirely new physics.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How do you power them? There's only so much energy in a gram of matter, and much less of it is available through fission or fusion and antimatter matter reaction puts out nothing but gamma rays, which are a bitch to harvest.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't need FTL speed to travel large distances. As you approach light speed relative to your destination the distance to said destination shrinks to zero from your perspective.
But it still sure as hell wouldn't be easy to do so. There are also unexpected consequences such as blue shifting EM radiation you'd encounter to energies that would destroy your ship.
Re: (Score:2)
^^^ This.
We can know the facts of XYZ, and possess the engineering skill for a problem, but be incapable of sustainably keeping a life-sustaining space going for decades in hard vacuum. Say that again for 'economically incapable'. Say that again for getting there and failing on arrival (cargo cult, insurvivable planets, etc).
Decades or centuries in deep space are big 'unknown unknowns', to steal a line from Rumsfeld.
Re: Nonsense (Score:2)
We went from no powered flight to men on the moon in less than seventy years.
Re: (Score:3)
Airplanes don't really have much to do with it. The main innovation that enabled the Wright Brothers was the development of sufficiently lightweight and powerful piston engines, which aren't relevant to space travel. And the lift came from an airfoil wing, which is also irrelevant. Control came from warping the wing, also irrelevant.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There's still the power requirements as there is only so much energy in a gram of matter, convert it all to energy and maybe get to 50% of light, less if you have a payload. Colony ships have a similar problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with antimatter is the energy released is in the form of gamma rays, very hard to harvest and even then, you'd be lucky to accelerate a gram of matter to 50% light speed by burning a gram and still have to slow down at the end.
It takes about a year of acceleration at 1G to get close enough to light speed for relativistic effects to help and takes a lot of energy to accelerate at 1G. Currently I believe our capabilities are measured in minutes and using fission could be extended to hours.
I don't
Re: Nonsense (Score:2)
Because it's really hip n trendy fotw cool to declare doom n gloom for the future. Almost every generation has declared the end of the world, civilization, all life, etc within a generation. It must be in our genes or something to believe we're the best and last of humanity and it's all downhill after us.
The reality is the opposite. Every generation with rare exceptions has lived better, longer, happier, healthier, wealthier lives than the previous. I'd rather be an average nobody today than the emperor
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
Global warming isn't even remotely likely to result in the extinction of humans. Some other animals yes, and it could shift around what is considered prime real estate, but nah, we aren't going anywhere.
During the Eocene period the temperature was much higher than any global warming scenario has predicted, and life was thriving during that period. It was very different life and many current animals wouldn't have time to adapt if the shift to such a climate occurred too rapidly, but humanity is about the most adaptable organism on the planet. We'll be fine. Heck even for other species human intervention in selective breeding (eg, how we do with dog breeds) or direct genetic manipulation may even allow us to bring plenty of other species along for the ride.
Re: (Score:2)
It depends on whether global warming leads to nuclear war, which it might well do. While nuclear war won't wipe out humanity by itself, it will set us back enough that other stuff might wipe us out.
Then there is the biological warfare possibilities, just takes one extreme nutcase to release something really scary
Re: Destroying greenspaces (Score:2)
Intensive agriculture hardly counts as green space. It might technically be green but so is astroturf and the latter doesnt require fertiliser and pesticides manufactured from oil.
Re: (Score:2)
Use this opportunity to learn, because your ignorance is appalling.
Re: (Score:2)
Ahh yes I'm so glad you can tell my level of intelligence or my wife's from a single sentence over the internet.
Normally I'd agree that she is smarter than me, but then she was dumb enough to marry me, so that can't obviously be true as I'm not dumb enough to marry me... hell of a conundrum.
But hey on topic - do feel free to educate me - who/what else is hurt by reducing CO2 emission?
Re: (Score:2)
The plants are hurt by more CO2. Feeding them more CO2 without boosting everything is like feeding a person more sugar. Sure they put on weight, but not exactly healthy.
Why (Score:2)
Sure, but we could do almost anything via geoengineering, and it's irrelevant to making predictions as to what natural processes will tend toward. It also makes the huge assumption that we'll still be around in a billion years, or care if we are.
That said, the article leaves out the most important element: Why?
I mean, they even mention that plant life will die out some time later in response to the loss of CO2 - so presumably the oxygen is disappearing while plants are still chucking tons of oxygen into th
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, yeah, I know - no oxygen = no oxygen fires. Slapped me upside the head as I hit the submit button. But volcanoes are still belching it out, right?
Re: (Score:2)
For that matter, why would CO2 stop entering the atmosphere? Does fire go out of style?
The long carbon cycle involves things like CO2 going into the ocean and being sequestered in limestone or by dead plants getting buried in peat bogs and the like. Basically not all the carbon consumed by plant respiration is returned to the atmosphere through fire or decomposition. This is gradually replaced by weathering rock and volcanic activity. However, as time goes by and less new rock is exposed due to Earth becoming less tectonically active, overall CO2 levels will drop as more carbon is sequeste
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
We have plenty of time to maintain status quos through terraforming and geo-engineering projects.
Who's this 'we'? There will be nothing remotely resembling humans living on Earth in a billion years. Either we'll be extinct or we'll have evolved into something unrecognizable.
Eugenicists like to complain that humans have stopped evolving. They're fooling themselves. We haven't. Our DNA is just as subject to transcription errors as it ever was. The mutations are inevitable, they are happening, and they are changing us, whether we're aware of it or not. Over geological timescales like this, we will either be gone or be something else.
It's a moot point anyway. It just adds a little color to the inevitable end of Earth, physically. If we understand main sequence stars correctly, the heating modeled in the paper is just the precursor to the expansion of Sol into a red giant, which will engulf the planet in nuclear fire, stripping it of all fluids entirely, and eventually eating away the rock itself. The drag of the plasma surrounding it will inevitably decay Earth's orbit until it falls into Sol and gets incorporated into a plasma sludge that will one day become a white dwarf after Sol burps off its outer layers in an explosion so tepid by stellar standards that astrophysicists don't bother calling it a nova.
But there won't be anything human around to care.
Re: (Score:2)
We can already separate oxygen from water via electrolysis.
Are we completely sure there will any any water left in a billion years though?
The natural increase in solar luminosity -- a very slow process unrelated to current climate warming -- will cause the Earth's temperatures to rise over the next few hundred million years. This will result in the complete evaporation of the oceans. The first three-dimensional climate model able to simulate the phenomenon predicts that liquid water will disappear on Earth in approximately one billion years, extending previous est [sciencedaily.com]
doomsday prepping (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I have some to sell you for cheap. I even give you N2 and CO2 (among others) for free with any purchase. I can deliver worldwide, instantly. No refunds tho.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Deal. You just have to bring your own scuba tank. And compressor. From there you'll be able to pump my air in. Please don't spill any in the process, I'll have to charge for that too.
If we're still stuck on this rock in 1b years (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolution (Score:3)
Last 40,000 years (Score:4, Interesting)
It we think about the fact that "anatomically modern humans" appeared about 40K years ago, we can speculate about how humans will look in 40,000 years from now. As a species, we do evolve.
Then look at 4 million years ago (I believe "Lucy" is that old) and then extrapolate how humans may look 4 million years in the future.
Then extrapolate to 1B years.
Re: (Score:3)
In about 100 years, Robots will rule the earth (Score:3)
Robots generally don't breath.
Re: Last 40,000 years (Score:2)
If we last anywhere close to even a million years never mind a billion I doubt we'll still be biological, or at least not naturally evolved biology so guessing what we'd look like- if we look like anything, we could be a dispersed consciousness is some machine network - is pointless.
Re: (Score:3)
Who knows if we work out orbiting colonies maybe someday the entire Earth will become a National Park and place people go to relax, explore or go on adventures.
What about Venus? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about Venus' atmosphere, which is 96.5% carbon dioxide? At what point does that break down? Why hasn't it begun already?
Re: (Score:3)
Probably albedo, the sulfuric acid droplets in the clouds make it one of the most reflective bodies in the solar system. That's also why global warming wasn't being seen on Earth in the 1970s, the sulfur dioxide from the coal plants increased our albedo. When we started scrubbing the sulfur dioxide out of the smokestack emissions to eliminate acid rain we started seeing warming.
Re: (Score:3)
Only guessing, but I'd imagine it is breaking down, but the atmosphere of Venus is ~90 times the density of Earth's atmosphere, so there's that much more CO2. As you say, the atmosphere of Venus is 96.5% CO2, whereas Earth's is ~%.04 CO2 so Venus has (roughly) 225,000 times the CO2 that Earth does. Also the solar radiation doesn't penetrate very far into the atmosphere, and there's no reactive gases, like oxygen (I dunno really, still only guessing), so it'll take a while... Probably a lot longer than 1 bi
Um... evolution? (Score:3, Insightful)
carbon dioxide levels will become so low that photosynthesising organisms -- including plants -- will be unable to survive and produce oxygen
Don't life forms adapt to changing conditions? I seem to recall someone writing a book about that...
Re: (Score:2)
To a point, sure. But a million times less oxygen? That may be tricky.
Presuming of course we haven't killed ourselves off by then, through the ongoing pretense that some are entitled to rule over others, and therefore to rob, enslave and murder them if they so choose, without the latter's voluntary, informed, and revocable consent.
Re: (Score:2)
Populations can adapt, providing change is slow. The mass extinction even due to the Great Oxygenation Event was a rapid increase in oxygen, which many species simply did not have time to adapt to. Even if it takes a few hundred thousand years for oxygen levels to drop, that will likely wipe out most organisms. Further, higher oxygen levels are largely responsible for why larger and more active species exist, and without that metabolic pathway, I'd argue most of the multicellular organisms we see today simp
Re: (Score:3)
Sometimes the progeny of a life form adapt. Quite often they become extinct and are supplanted by better adapted organisms.
So don't imagine something that looks like a human but has somehow evolved to not need oxygen. Imagine humans replaced by sheets formed of colonies of anaerobic bacteria. As far as nature is concerned one is just as good a way to generate entropy as another.
Re:Um... evolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
carbon dioxide levels will become so low that photosynthesising organisms -- including plants -- will be unable to survive and produce oxygen
Don't life forms adapt to changing conditions? I seem to recall someone writing a book about that...
Look at deserts, there is life, but it's very limited compared to the rain forest. And deserts are literally surrounded by thriving ecosystems filled with selective pressure to fill in that big empty landscape.
There's things that evolution can adapt to, and things it can't. A massive shortage of one of the basic ingredients of life (water, CO2, O2) tend to be one of the things it can't adapt to.
Re: (Score:2)
People seem to forget that evolution takes time. It's one thing to adapt to a changing environment over a thousand years. It's quite another to have some careless moronic stuckup biped come and raze your forest within a decade.
Re: Um... evolution? (Score:2)
There's things that evolution can adapt to, and things
it's still working on
Re: (Score:2)
Don't life forms adapt to changing conditions? I seem to recall someone writing a book about that...
In theory, we wouldn't even need to adapt. If we spent the next billion years carefully shepherding an asteroid back and forth between here and Jupiter, we could nudge the Earth's orbit out to keep things ideal as the sun increases its output.
However, given the many shortcomings of the human species (especially in the areas of working together to tackle long-term threats, managing weaponizable technologies, or even keeping a stable civilization going for more than a couple of centuries), I think that the od
Re: (Score:2)
Many go extinct, but yes, so far something has always survived changes.
It seems pretty reasonable that a billion years from now, almost no (or absolutely no) of the life forms with which you're familiar will still exist, just as they didn't exist a billion years ago. Something (even if it's just extremophile archaea) which is adapted to the conditions of the time may very well be around, though, and if so, it will have descended from something that is alive today (assuming no interstellar immigrants).
A bill
Re: (Score:2)
Too Soon (Score:3, Funny)
Drill baby drill (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Next (Score:5, Funny)
the huge reduction in oxygen. "The drop in oxygen is very, very extreme -- we're talking around a million times less oxygen than there is today," says Reinhard.
And politicians will still be using up most of it.
Re:Next (Score:4, Funny)
That's why the dinosaurs went extinct (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
... they didn't have a Space Program.
and they had brains the size of a walnut [pinimg.com].
Re: (Score:2)
That's why the dinosaurs went extinct... they didn't have a Space Program.
Maybe not space, but they had a top notch aerospace program and they didn't go extinct at all.
Moot Point (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Not new news (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I can't wait ... (Score:3)
These is plenty of time for other things to go wrong first!
They're waiting in the wings... (Score:2)
Those darn anaerobic bacteria are just rubbing their little hands (so to speak) with glee... "Just you wait, oxygen-breathers... just you wait..."
If Al Gore is there.... (Score:2)
...he's absolutely going to blame it on greedy selfish white Republicans driving SUVs, you know, like the last climatological trend that he anthropified.
A billion years from now...really? (Score:2)
But at the same time, this is why science is cool. A billion years from now, if humanity is alive, (a big IF), I'm sure we'll be able to terraform our planet to ensure it'll survive any changes in a few hours...well, maybe a week.
That said, I'm sure by then we'll have Venus, Mars, maybe a few planets around Jupiter and Saturn setup for habitation by the species in our planet. Because, as humans, we value pet companionshi
I'm busy now. (Score:2)
I'm busy now. Would it be too late if I respond tomorrow?
Far out orbit please (Score:2)
Earth spaceship need change orbits by then
Long Time (Score:2)
A billion years is a long time, I wouldn't hold your breath.
H2O to the rescure (Score:2)
Lets just split it... faster than lightening.
oh well (Score:2)
In Other News (Score:2)
Walmart shoppers start hording O2 supplies - Walmart considers limiting each shopper to just one cart full per visit.
doubt it will last that long. (Score:2)
say what ?!?! (Score:2)
Sorry, I panicked for a moment. I wasn't paying close attention and I thought TFS said we'd run out of oxygen in a million years. Whew! Not to worry- it's a BILLION years!
Too hot for liquid water (Score:2)
I think that might be a problem before the earth runs out of oxygen. Even anaerobic bacteria need liquid water.
But in 500,000 years... (Score:2)
Moot point (Score:2)
In a billion years the earth will have easily surpassed threshold for "hothouse" runaway. Even if you could breath it wouldn't make much difference when surface temperatures are measured in thousands of degrees.
Technology exists today to regulate earths temperature on these timescales slowly changing its orbit by preferentially perturbing the paths of a manageable number of asteroids each century.
God No (Score:2)
Please don't tell the Doom Goblin : she will lose the plot completely
How Dare You (Score:2)
WHAT??!? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No species of animal life has lasted anywhere near a billion years. Given the pleasure we take in playing with fire, we'll be doing well to last a million.
Re: (Score:2)