Living in a Hot Flash

Watch out for the hot flushes (a few billion years away): Earth enters its mid-life crisis 

Don’t be surprised if the Earth buys a Ferrari, dons a leather jacket and starts bulk buying ‘Just for Men’ in the next few years as according to scientists our planet as entered middle age.

Astrobiologists from Scotland’s St Andrew’s University have predicted a death date for the Earth, which is 4.54 billion-years-old, as 2000002013, making our home a relative 50 in human years.

According to leading scientist Jack O’Malley-James, life on Earth will perish in more than a billion years when a warming sun boils oceans and forces out CO2, damning plants and subsequently animals.

Most life will have died by the planet reaches 70s (or 6.5 billion-years-old), he says, with any microorganisms confined to pools of residual water.

However, at present we should just be grateful to be living in a hot flash in the present.  For most of the last 2 million years, earth has been descending in to the ice age, with relatively brief periods of warmth like the modern one: