• Question: is the world really going to end or is it just stories from other religouns or from people that do not understand (mad people)

    Asked by scibtings123 to Ed, Hayley, Jason, Nathan, Sophie on 12 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by archimedes.
    • Photo: Hayley Evers-King

      Hayley Evers-King answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      The world will eventually end as the sun doesn’t have unlimited fuel to keep burning forever. The process of the sun ‘dying’ will make life as we know it impossible. This won’t happen for a very long time, but there are other things that could be ‘world ending’ for humans. There have been a lot of extinctions in history – caused by changes in climate and things like meteor impacts. We are very adaptable but an event like that could make life very difficult for us. Scientists are working hard to understand and potentially predict things like this. The stories from various religions and ‘mad people’ have never been proven to have any factual basis yet!

    • Photo: Edward Bovill

      Edward Bovill answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      There have been religious extremists who have predicted the end of the world for thousands of years and not one of them has got it right, yet!

      The world probably won’t end until our Sun starts to die in a few billion years time. When this happens the Sun will start to expand and will eventually consume our entire planet in a giant fireball.

      In the meantime it is entirely possible that humans will wipe themselves out through nuclear war, or an asteroid impact will render the planet uninhabitable for us. However, mass extinctions have happened several times in the planet’s history where over 50% of species have become extinct and life has still flourished afterwards. We as a species may not last until the end of the world but life almost certainly will continue in our stead!

Comments