future planet earth
At least for the foreseeable future, this planet is the only home we’ve got. It would be useful to know, then, whether it will continue to be habitable.
Sometimes contemplating the future just means wondering whether it will snow tomorrow, or whether it will be a hot summer this year. We can think bigger, though. What will the climate be like a hundred years from now, or a thousand or a million? Will the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere ever reach an upper limit and start to diminish? Will our planet ultimately end up like the super-heated surface of Venus, or like the frozen wasteland of Mars, or will it continue to move up and down within a range of temperatures that are hospitable to life as we know it?
We can think even bigger: climate is just one aspect of the evolving system that is the planet Earth. Will the plate tectonics that cause earthquakes and volcanoes ever decrease in activity? As Earth’s human population continues to grow, how can urban centres in areas of high risk – flood zones, fault lines, etc. – cope with or plan for the natural hazards they will inevitably face. How would it change things if the great oceanic currents were radically altered? Will there be mass extinctions in the future as there have been in the past? And most important, how do air and earth and water affect one another to shape the Earth’s evolution? What is the relationship between changes in the Earth’s upper atmosphere and its inner core?
The real magnitude of this question comes from considering the entire planet as a single system. Modeling any component of this system is challenging enough. Put them all together, and the task becomes much more onerous. Yet, without exploring this question to its fullest, we would inevitably miss key pieces of the puzzle. This question is big in its complexity, and even bigger in its urgency for we human beings who contemplate it.
The Bottom Line
“What does the future hold for our planet?” is the Next Big Question because the
Sometimes contemplating the future just means wondering whether it will snow tomorrow, or whether it will be a hot summer this year. We can think bigger, though. What will the climate be like a hundred years from now, or a thousand or a million? Will the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere ever reach an upper limit and start to diminish? Will our planet ultimately end up like the super-heated surface of Venus, or like the frozen wasteland of Mars, or will it continue to move up and down within a range of temperatures that are hospitable to life as we know it?
We can think even bigger: climate is just one aspect of the evolving system that is the planet Earth. Will the plate tectonics that cause earthquakes and volcanoes ever decrease in activity? As Earth’s human population continues to grow, how can urban centres in areas of high risk – flood zones, fault lines, etc. – cope with or plan for the natural hazards they will inevitably face. How would it change things if the great oceanic currents were radically altered? Will there be mass extinctions in the future as there have been in the past? And most important, how do air and earth and water affect one another to shape the Earth’s evolution? What is the relationship between changes in the Earth’s upper atmosphere and its inner core?
The real magnitude of this question comes from considering the entire planet as a single system. Modeling any component of this system is challenging enough. Put them all together, and the task becomes much more onerous. Yet, without exploring this question to its fullest, we would inevitably miss key pieces of the puzzle. This question is big in its complexity, and even bigger in its urgency for we human beings who contemplate it.
The Bottom Line
“What does the future hold for our planet?” is the Next Big Question because the