by By Laura M.
Excerpt: Oxygen is over. We are not talking about the script of a post-apocalyptic movie, nor about a very distant future (don’t worry, you can keep defrosting tonight’s dinner). But the world as we know it has an expiration date. We are not going to witness the end of the world, but oxygen is over, and, unfortunately, it seems the countdown has already started… It won’t happen like the Mayans predicted, nor like Nostradamus said, but NASA (Nexus for Exoplanet System Science), together with researchers from Toho University, have already set a date. One billion years is what’s left for our atmosphere, which, as you know, is responsible for keeping us alive.
Although none of us here will live to see the world run out of oxygen, the discovery is so serious that it has forced scientists to rethink the models we use to understand how a planet’s atmosphere evolves and how long it can remain habitable. And yes, the fault, once again, lies with the Sun, which is heating up more than it should and is going to alter carbon dioxide levels. We’ll tell you everything this study says.
A chain of events will cause CO2 to drop
Almost like a domino effect, as the Sun keeps heating up (something that is not new, it’s been happening for millions of years), a chain of consequences will be triggered that doesn’t seem very friendly for complex life, because by heating up, it will break the CO2 molecules in the atmosphere, which will cause carbon dioxide levels to drop so much that plants will stop performing photosynthesis, and without photosynthesis… there’s no more oxygen. That’s how simple it seems, and how serious it will be. According to the researchers, that process will start desertifying our planet until it becomes what it was billions of years ago, a giant rock.
An announced extinction: without oxygen, there is no complex life
Basically, life as we know it ends. Plants will not survive without CO2, and that means there will also be no oxygen for animals or humans. Scientists estimate that this transformation could begin in about 10,000 years. And once it starts, there will be no turning back. Also, without oxygen, the ozone layer disappears too, so Earth will be exposed to lethal levels of solar radiation. The only ones that could adapt to this new reality would be anaerobic microorganisms. The rest will disappear.
When will this transformation happen exactly?
Scientists Kazumi Ozaki and Christopher Reinhard developed large-scale simulations to anticipate the moment when Earth will no longer be habitable, but their date is not near, as we mentioned, they estimate it will happen in one billion years, although it will be noticeable thousands of years earlier.
Although this is not an immediate problem for us, it completely changes how we understand life on Earth and on other planets.
More methane, less oxygen
And as if that weren’t enough, another effect of this atmospheric transformation will be the increase in methane. That will further accelerate the deterioration of the atmosphere, making the air more and more toxic and contributing to the progressive extinction of many species. The outlook is clear: the Earth of the future will look nothing like the one we know today.
What does all this mean for us?
This discovery should not alarm us because of a calendar issue, since we won’t be the ones to live it (or maybe we will, who knows), but it does force us to think about how fragile the balance that sustains life on this planet is. Knowing that oxygen won’t last forever reminds us that not even the most basic elements of our existence are eternal.
It also opens new questions about what conditions a planet must meet to be truly habitable and for how long.