Earth Will Be COOKED Out of the Habitable Zone

Earth won't stay in the habitable zone forever. One day the Sun will cook us out of it.

The habitable zone isn't fixed. As a star ages, it slowly brightens, and its band of liquid water creeps outward, abandoning the worlds closest in.

Our Sun is doing this now. Every billion years it grows about ten percent brighter. In about a billion years, that added heat will likely push Earth past the inner edge of the zone. The oceans will boil away, and the planet could tip into a runaway greenhouse, the fate that turned Venus into an oven. All of this long before the Sun ever becomes a red giant. Earth dies as a living world while the Sun still looks almost normal.

We rarely think of habitability as having an expiration date. But our place in the Goldilocks zone is borrowed time, and the clock is the steady brightening of our own star.

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