How long till earth is destroyed

It's driven by the immense human desire for material consumption. And paradoxically it is a consequence of human life itself. For every bit of this material we use, there is a growing web of global actions that is slowly stripping human's emotional health , depleting Earth's resources and degrading our planet's habitats. If left unchecked, is there a risk that human consumption may finally turn the Earth into an uninhabitable world?

Do we have it in us to stop before it is too late? A team of researchers from Weizmann Institute of Sciences, Israel, recently published a study that compared human-made mass — aka anthropogenic mass — with all the living mass, or biomass, on the globe. They revealed that for the first time in human history the former has either surpassed the latter or is close to doing so in coming years.

The Weizmann Institute study estimates that on average, each person on the globe now produces more anthropogenic mass than his or her bodyweight every week. This revelation comes as no surprise to many who consider that humans have already ushered in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene — the age of humans, a term popularised by Nobel Laureate and chemist Paul Crutzen. While the exact beginning of this era is debatable, there is no denying that humans have become a dominant force on this planet, altering every other form of life through our actions.

The scale and size of the anthropogenic matter is alarming. Take the case of plastic — the birth of the modern plastics era came only in , but today we produce million tons of plastics every year.

Further, the realisation that after water, concrete is the most widely used substance on Earth is beyond comprehension. The massive geoengineering process initiated by humans took an accelerated upswing when materials like concrete and aggregates became widely available. These two materials make up a major component of the growth in anthropogenic mass.

Even the relatively recent human adventures of space exploration, which began about 60 years ago, is triggering a disastrous space junk problem. Alongside this we haphazardly observe polar cap melts, permafrost thaws, and global temperatures getting hotter. So, why has this happened? Are humans genetically inclined to be materialistic to the point of our own destruction?

Is the accumulation of anthropogenic matter merely a measure of humans' annihilation rate? Or will nature equip humans to cope with this problem? These are highly unsettled questions. Source: The Conversation. Sources: Cornell , Scientific American.

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Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. It could smash into another planet, be swallowed by a black hole, or get pummelled to death by asteroids. There's really no way to tell which doomsday scenario will be the cause of our planet's demise.

But one thing is for sure - even if Earth spends the rest of its aeons escaping alien attacks, dodging space rocks, and avoiding a nuclear apocalypse, there will come a day when our own sun will eventually destroy us. This process won't be pretty, as Business Insider's video team recently illustrated when they took a look at what will happen to Earth when the sun finally does die out in a blaze of glory.

And as Jillian Scudder, an astrophysicist at the University of Sussex, explained to Business Insider in an email, the day might come sooner than we think. The sun survives by burning hydrogen atoms into helium atoms in its core. In fact, it burns through million tonnes of hydrogen every second.

And as the sun's core becomes saturated with this helium, it shrinks, causing nuclear fusion reactions to speed up - which means that the sun spits out more energy. That is especially bad because the Amazon alone provides 20 percent of our oxygen. Then there are the more familiar forms of pollution. Literally unbreathable. That year, smog was responsible for a third of all deaths in the country.

The violence baked into heat. Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria. They want you to know that while climate change did produce a drought that contributed to civil war, it is not exactly fair to saythat the conflict is the result of warming; next door, for instance, Lebanon suffered the same crop failures. But researchers like Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang have managed to quantify some of the non-obvious relationships between temperature and violence: For every half-degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict.

In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century. This is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke to pointed out, the U.

What accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict? Some of it comes down to agriculture and economics; a lot has to do with forced migration, already at a record high, with at least 65 million displaced people wandering the planet right now. But there is also the simple fact of individual irritability. Heat increases municipal crime rates, and swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major-league pitcher, coming to the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch, will hit an opposing batter in retaliation.

And the arrival of air-conditioning in the developed world, in the middle of the past century, did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave. Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world. The murmuring mantra of global neoliberalism, which prevailed between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Great Recession, is that economic growth would save us from anything and everything.

Before fossil fuels, nobody lived better than their parents or grandparents or ancestors from years before, except in the immediate aftermath of a great plague like the Black Death, which allowed the lucky survivors to gobble up the resources liberated by mass graves. Of course, that onetime injection has a devastating long-term cost: climate change. The most exciting research on the economics of warming has also come from Hsiang and his colleagues, who are not historians of fossil capitalism but who offer some very bleak analysis of their own: Every degree Celsius of warming costs, on average, 1.

This is the sterling work in the field, and their median projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century resulting from changes in agriculture, crime, storms, energy, mortality, and labor.

Tracing the shape of the probability curve is even scarier: There is a 12 percent chance that climate change will reduce global output by more than 50 percent by , they say, and a 51 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by 20 percent or more by then, unless emissions decline. By comparison, the Great Recession lowered global GDP by about 6 percent, in a onetime shock; Hsiang and his colleagues estimate a one-in-eight chance of an ongoing and irreversible effect by the end of the century that is eight times worse.

The scale of that economic devastation is hard to comprehend, but you can start by imagining what the world would look like today with an economy half as big, which would produce only half as much value, generating only half as much to offer the workers of the world. It makes the grounding of flights out of heat-stricken Phoenix last month seem like pathetically small economic potatoes. And, among other things, it makes the idea of postponing government action on reducing emissions and relying solely on growth and technology to solve the problem an absurd business calculation.

Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice. Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast. That the sea will become a killer is a given. Barring a radical reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise and possibly ten by the end of the century. At least million people live within ten meters of sea level today. But the drowning of those homelands is just the start.

There, the small fish die out, unable to breathe, which means oxygen-eating bacteria thrive, and the feedback loop doubles back. Hydrogen sulfide is so toxic that evolution has trained us to recognize the tiniest, safest traces of it, which is why our noses are so exquisitely skilled at registering flatulence.

Plants, too. It was millions of years before the oceans recovered. Our present eeriness cannot last. Surely this blindness will not last — the world we are about to inhabit will not permit it.

Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past. You can find it already watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea — a feeling of history happening all at once. It is. Many people perceive climate change as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries — a helpful perspective, in a way, since it is the carbon-burning processes that began in 18th-century England that lit the fuse of everything that followed.

But more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. She has been smoking for 57 of those years, unfiltered. Some of the men who first identified a changing climate and given the generation, those who became famous were men are still alive; a few are even still working.

Like most of those who first raised the alarm, he believes that no amount of emissions reduction alone can meaningfully help avoid disaster.