When Will The World End?

Hey, guess what? This world isn't gonna last forever. No matter what we do, no matter how hard we try, one day the end of the world will arrive. We could stop all manufacturing, all CO2 emissions, all pollution, and go back to the way things were when humans and neanderthals still roamed the Earth together, and it wouldn't matter. One day the sun will get too hot or an asteroid will strike the planet or some aliens will come blow everything up and it will be the end times. It's an unavoidable certainty. The real question is, when?

Well, if you were going to find a real authority to answer that question, you might turn to Stephen Hawking, who pretty much knew everything. According to CNBC, two weeks before his death, Hawkins completed a paper predicting a rather anti-climactic end to the universe, with all the stars just burning out and everything going dark. The Earth will die out long before that happens, though, and, in fact, sooner than you think if Hawking's older theory is correct. In 2017, Hawking told a crowd at the 2017 Tencent WE Summit Earth that we have about 600 years to go before the Earth will be totally uninhabitable. "By the year 2600," he said, "the world's population would be standing shoulder to shoulder, and the electricity consumption would make the Earth glow red-hot." Sunny disposition, that guy. 

Stephen Hawkings didn't literally know everything, though, and maybe doomsday is one of the things he really didn't have a handle on. Other theories say that the end of the world won't happen for another two billion years, when the sun starts to heat up and expand, eventually becoming so hot that the seas will boil. In a similar scenario, the sun will turn into a red giant, and everything on planet earth will burn up. That will happen around five to seven billion years in the future, assuming that everything didn't already die during the whole oceans boiling thing. Actually, Hawking's prediction isn't sounding so bad anymore. Hey, at least we'll all be dead by then anyway.