Life Might Thrive on the Surface of Earth for an Extra Billion Years

Scientists project that life on Earth will continue on for billions of years.

Scientists think that life emerged on planet Earth about 4 billion years ago.

The study's authors speculate that life on Earth could persist for 2.8 billion years if the planet remains habitable, based on the timing of supernova explosions and subsequent radiation exposure, studying 100 million supernovae explosions, and how often they erupted within 50 light-years of Earth over the last 3.5 billion years.

The researchers found that roughly once every 250 million years, Earth is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation from a nearby supernova explosion.

However, these explosions are also balanced by periods of quiescence, which are times when no supernovae explode close enough to Earth to cause mass extinctions.

The researchers found that these periods of quiescence have been getting longer over time, and they project that the next one will last for 440 million years.

This means that life on Earth could have a lot more time to evolve and flourish than previously thought.

So far, only one known supernova explosion has been destructive enough to cause a global-scale mass extinction event: The Ordovician–Silurian extinction event, which occurred about 440 million years ago.

If the researchers' projections are correct, we may not have to worry about another supernova-induced mass extinction for quite some time.