Question: when is the end of the world?

Naomi Green answered on 13 Mar 2015:

Hi there 329heab47 🙂

The end of the world for me is when there is no chocolate left in my flat! LOL! but seriously that is a hard question. I don’t think it will be in our lifetime or that of our children.

One end of the world possibility is this. The sun will not always be like it is now. In about 5 billion years it will start to die, because it will have run out of fuel. It will expand so that it’s width reaches the Earth! Before it reaches that point life on Earth will have long since died due to the massive changes in temperature.

Another possibility which is much more likely in my opinion is that the human race will be what kills life on Earth. There are a few possibilities, a nuclear war where countries fight against one another with nuclear weapons which wipe out life, or I think more likely climate change. The atmosphere is a careful balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen. When we burn fuels like oil and coal, we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Too much carbon dioxide and the temperature of the earth starts to increase, this leads to changes in weather patterns, more severe storms for example, a rise in sea levels which will change where people can live, animal species being made extinct and lots of other things. Engineers have a big part to play in trying to solve these problems. We can design other sources of fuel to use, or vehicles which use less fuel, more efficient power stations, better ways of monitoring and predicting what is happening to our planet and lots, lots more!

Hope that helps 🙂