How will life end on Earth? Study rules out meteorites and climate change

A NASA-led study has now confirmed that the end of life on planet Earth will be through the lack of oxygen, and not by an extraterrestrial occurrence. According to a Toho University study that tries to understand how the planet would see the end of life, the slow fade of life on Earth won’t come all of a sudden. Instead, it will happen with a lack of oxygen in the air, the most necessary element of human existence on the planet.

New study in Japan reveals interesting data

The study done by Toho University in Japan is powered by NASA modelling, and it hints at oxygen loss as a subtle reason for annihilation of human life.

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However, the study also suggests that it will not happen anytime soon, but is instead billions of years away.

How did they come to this conclusion?

Toho University researchers used planetary and atmospheric simulations to try and understand how Earth’s climate and chemical build-up will look like year-by-year. They found that in a billion years, the Sun will grow even more luminous, causing a major change in the Earth's balance of gases. This would then lead to a disruption of oxygen levels on Planet Earth, resulting in the loss of human lives.

With rising temperatures on the planet, the Earth's carbon cycle will be hampered, leading to the loss of flora and fauna. This would directly impact the process of photosynthesis, which is necessary to maintain the oxygen levels of the Earth. Earth will slowly emerge into a planet that be rich in methane and greenhouse gases, but short on oxygen supply. The end, therefore, would be inevitable at that stage.

Eventually, the remaining oxygen is used up, and aerobic organisms, those that depend on oxygen for survival, begin to die off. The only survivors might be anaerobic bacteria and microbes that do not need to rely on oxygen for their existence on the planet.