oes the earth have an expiration date?

[Thisica]

The end of the Earth is called, "The Apocalypse". And the apocalypse is a religious concept expressed in my favourite and last book of the Bible called, "Revelations".

However it is people of the Book, who believe in the apocalypse because because books are linear and sequential with a beginning, a middle and an end. And so we conclude that as a book ends, so the Earth ends.

Spoken cultures are not linear and sequential rather they see the world as the eternal return. For spoken cultures see the world as recurring cycles without end.

So the people of the Book are fascinated by the end of the Earth, the apocalypse, because we are imbued with our religion of the Book - even our atheists.

Or if you take General Relativity to heart, you'll find out that the whole concept of time 'passing' is an illusion, due to the relativity of simultaneity. So there

 

[INTP]

that star alignment happens every year..

 

[Curator]

I'm watching 2012 and I dont believe the fairly flimbsy story that if the planets align in a particular way the earth will fall to pieces but I got to ask is there any evidence to suggest that the earth or even the human species has an expiration date?

Does it change anything if it does?

yeah it does, its on the back of the package... oh wait...woops, thats the sell by date! we may still be able to get another couple hundred years or so out of it...

 

[Thisica]

that star alignment happens every year..

...and gravitational forces decrease as the inverse square of the distance.

 

[Fluffywolf]

Humans do, the earth does not. :>

As for the 2012 alignment thingy. It happens every 200 thousand years or so (dont know exact figure), and the earth has been here for several billion years. So you do the math. :>

 

[guesswho]

It is ridiculous to pretend to know such things, nature generally is very symmetrical, elegant, everything in it is precisely calculated.

What we do know is that:
1. The Earth will cease to exist when the sun will swallow it.
2. We as humans have an expiration date, if we look back at the dinosaurs, they lived for quite a while...and they've been replaced by more adaptable species. Right now we are the most "high tech" thing on Earth, but what are the odds that in the next million years we're going to kill each others?

This is the problem. We think we're sooooo above from other animals, so smarter.
But that smartness has given us nuclear bombs and hydrogen bombs, pollution and other stuff.

It is estimated that the dinosaurs lived for about 165 million years.

How will our bombs and pollution influence the planet we live on, on such a large period of time?

This is the real question people should ask themselves, not faerie tales.

We now have the potential to destroy the planet in an war. What are the odds of an war occurring in such vast amounts of time???

Has technology helped us?

Obviously technology is useful, but it's what you do with the knowledge, if you take a destructive path, or a constructive path.

I don't think life only exists on Earth, I can't ignore the possibilities. It's like saying the earth is flat.

So even though life on Earth will eventually die at some point in time, life will still exist in other places, and we might also leave Earth one day...I mean do the math, the advances in technology are exponential. So it is close to impossible to imagine what will be invented in the next hundred of years.

 

[Fluffywolf]

It is ridiculous to pretend to know such things, nature generally is very symmetrical, elegant, everything in it is precisely calculated.

What we do know is that:
1. The Earth will cease to exist when the sun will swallow it.
2. We as humans have an expiration date, if we look back at the dinosaurs, they lived for quite a while...and they've been replaced by more adaptable species. Right now we are the most "high tech" thing on Earth, but what are the odds that in the next million years we're going to kill each others?

This is the problem. We think we're sooooo above from other animals, so smarter.
But that smartness has given us nuclear bombs and hydrogen bombs, pollution and other stuff.

It is estimated that the dinosaurs lived for about 165 million years.

How will our bombs and pollution influence the planet we live on, on such a large period of time?

This is the real question people should ask themselves, not faerie tales.

We now have the potential to destroy the planet in an war. What are the odds of an war occurring in such vast amounts of time???

Has technology helped us?

Obviously technology is useful, but it's what you do with the knowledge, if you take a destructive path, or a constructive path.

I don't think life only exists on Earth, I can't ignore the possibilities. It's like saying the earth is flat.

So even though life on Earth will eventually die at some point in time, life will still exist in other places, and we might also leave Earth one day...I mean do the math, the advances in technology are exponential. So it is close to impossible to imagine what will be invented in the next hundred of years.

Aye, without technology, we will not be able to escape our atmosphere and survive the sun swallowing the earth billions of years from now in our little spaceships. xD

So I should revise my earlier statement. Humans have the potential to become lasting, without expiration date. (Or at least last until the next superfusion of all matter in the galaxy resulting in a new big bang. Should this indeed be the cycle of the universe and we not being able to propel ourselves from it. Ofcourse by that time we might even have a solution for surviving the big bang itself.)

Whilest the planet will eventually, without a doubt, become part of other celestial bodies.

 

[guesswho]

Aye, without technology, we will not be able to escape our atmosphere and survive the sun swallowing the earth billions of years from now in our little spaceships. xD

We won't get to do that if we start killing each other off.

War is so stupid.

 

[JediVulcanisim]

Entropy proves the end of the physical perceivable Earth. Most projections of the concept point to an end to the physical object. Therefore, the only "end" of Earth is the communication of what once was Earth.

Unless Human beings are able to communicate to a broader spectrum of sentient beings, or broaden the species group sentience, that a rock moving through space that had the capability of sustaining a large ecology of carbon based organisms was once called "Earth" that moved in one specific communicated area of the known 'verse at one specific communicated time.

All of this information is needed while maintaining an amount of data over time that is greater than our current perceivable data storage structure.

 

[Arclight]

The Earth could have an expiry date.
You totally have an expiry date.
Live each day like you mean it and care for people like you mean it.
Life is fleeting.

 

[figsfiggyfigs]

Everything has an expiration date.

 

[Vie]

At the rate the world is going, we'll all be dead soon. I'm sure that the humans will die off, or at least be massively endangered, in a relatively "short" period of time (short compared to how long we've been around total) but I'm unsure about Earth on a whole becoming extinct. When I say Earth, I mean that as in the plant species and organisms and maybe some animals....but then again, I distinctly remember a lecture in a middle school science class that plant life could not exist without humans because of the CO2/O2 exchange, but I could just be making that up, haha.

In short, yeah I do think the earth does have an expiration date. As YWIR said, everything does.....

[[EVEN Crisco apparently! WHOKNEW!?!?]]