And there isn’t as much time left as we thought.
The reason I know this is because I was sitting with my dad during the festive period that has just departed, watching one of those Brian Cox In’t Universe Bloody Great? documentaries on BBC 4.
Professor Dreamboat chucked on his parka and trendy hobnailed boots to go climbing up a ginormous glacier out in the middle of the Gobi desert (or wherever it was – travel instructions were sadly not included), whilst discussing the end of the world as predicted by the world’s top scientists.
Okay, now admittedly we’d heard it all before. Round about five billion years from today, our nice bright dependable sort of sun is going to run out of fuel for nuclear reactions. This will force it to expand – and keep on expanding, until it becomes so large that it gets described as a ‘red giant’. The earth, meanwhile, has either been frazzled to a crisp in the rapidly rising temperatures of the expansion phase, or been swallowed up by the freakishly swollen sun. Or possibly both. No-one is quite sure, though they all agree the planet will be pretty well buggered by that point.
Professor Swoonbucket, on the other hand, said all this would happen ONE billion years in the future. He did! I heard him.
So I’m sitting there, spurting out fountains of sherry over the cat’s cushion, shrieking: “WTF? WTF? Run for the hills!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
My dad takes another swig of the amontillado, puts his glass back down by the sofa and observes: “There’s fuck-all you can do about it, so stop making such a racket.”
“But don’t you find it all slightly depressing?”
“Why are you so worried about it? It’s not going to bother you. You’ll be long dead by then.”
“What about the people who are living on the planet when it happens?”
“That’s their problem.”
Onscreen, the tousled-haired guru of lurve grins fit to bust, like it’s the greatest development to benefit humanity since sliced bread (fits better in a toaster, I’ll give it that).
Why either of them think the prospect should be remotely cheering is completely beyond me. You’re talking to the woman who was specially perched up on her grandad’s shoulders to take a good, long look at comet Kouhoutek in the frosty far-away autumn skies of 1973, because it wouldn’t be coming back to the earth for another 75, 000 years.
If that knowledge seemed unbearably poignant to a six-year-old girl, why would I have changed my attitude so substantially between then and now? What would prompt such a philosophical U-turn – finding out the world’s best scientists got their sums wrong?
Even though I realized it would be impossible, I still wanted to be there when Kouhoutek returned. The earth it visited would be inconceivably different to the world of 1973. That frightened me, to be honest. Yet I remained curious.
And now I can’t help wondering what the end of the world is really going to be like, when it finally happens. Yes, it’s incredibly sad, yes, I KNOW it’s not my bloody problem – but I STILL wish I could hitch a ride with Dr Who in the Tardis so I can see it for myself, whether or not anybody plays Toxic by Britney Spears as a soundtrack over the top of it.
Incidentally, in their recent study Never In A Million Years: A History Of Hopeless Predictions, Ivor Baddiel (any relation of David?) and Jonny Zucker point out that the above dire prediction might not even happen when it comes to the crunch. Back in 2007, boffins at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy discovered that a planet quite like Earth had somehow managed to survive when its sun went into its red giant phase. They hypothesized that V391 Pegasi b had been pushed into a new orbit twice as far away from its sun as the previous one.
Baddiel and Zucker then go on to speculate that any intelligent lifeforms on the planet would have celebrated their good fortune long into the night, ‘which, with their new position in the galaxy, now lasts twice as long’.
Er, I believe you’ll find it’s their year that now lasts twice as long. That’s the period it takes their planet to make one entire orbit round their sun. The day is the amount of time it takes their planet to whirl right round once on its own axis.
Scientists, derrrr …
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