After 5 billion years, the sun becomes a red giant star, what is the process of destroying the earth? Do humans have time to escape?

From this time point, 5 billion years is still too far away. The history of human beings is only 6 million years, and civilization in the true sense is about 5,000 years old. Now many people worry about whether the earth can survive for hundreds of years under the destruction of human beings. Is it too far to think about what will happen 5 billion years from now?

burning sun

Any burning has an end, and so does the sun. The current sun is in its prime-major-main-sequence stage, and this stable period will continue for another 5 billion years. After 5 billion years, the hydrogen fuel of the sun will gradually burn out, the core will shrink, become more and more dense and hot, and the outer layer will expand rapidly. It will enter the "late years" of life - the era of red giant stars. At that time, the sun became larger and swallowed the orbits of Mercury and Venus one after another, and the earth could not escape, it would be swallowed up and disintegrated.

The energy of the sun comes from nuclear fusion in the core, and this energy is radiated outward in the form of gamma rays. However, in the radiative layer outside the inner core, the matter is so dense that photons can only travel a few microns before being absorbed by atoms in the radiative layer and then randomly emitted in other directions at lower energies.

However, before the earth is swallowed, it may have been baked into a barren land, and all life on the earth will also come to an end. Because the sun is undergoing thermonuclear reactions all the time, with the passage of time, the volume of the sun continues to expand, and it will become hotter and hotter than before, and the light and heat also transmitted to the earth will become stronger and stronger. As the temperature rises, the water on the Earth's surface will begin to evaporate at an accelerated rate, making it no longer suitable for life.

Why the sun is a red giant

The radiation layer is the culprit behind the sun becoming a red giant. It isolates the sun's troposphere and inner core, preventing the hydrogen fuel from the outer layer of the sun from entering the inner core to participate in fusion. As a result, after the sun has turned all the hydrogen in the core into helium, the sun will enter the red giant stage. And in the violent thermal pulsation, the sun blew the outer gas into space. Of course, this high-temperature gas is very unfriendly to humans. In the end, only a useless white dwarf is left.

In addition to the influence of external factors such as the sun, the lifespan of the earth will also be affected by human factors and other factors. For example, human beings wantonly deforestation, pollute water resources, discharge polluting gases, and even conduct nuclear tests, etc., will bring a heavy blow to the earth. For another example, if a comet or asteroid hits the earth, it may also cause the destruction of the earth. If so, the lifespan of the earth will not be 5 billion years.

Is it possible for humans to escape?

The slow death process of the sun will not be peaceful. In another 1 billion years, the sun will slowly expand and transform into a red giant star. The sun will become larger and larger, and the larger sun will gradually swallow Mercury, Venus, and finally the earth. .

With the current speed of human development, no one knows where we will go in the future and how strong we will be. One billion years later, human beings may have already become an advanced civilization in the Milky Way. There are countless colonized planets across the Milky Way. The planets inhabited by humans are also all over the Milky Way, and the earth is just the mother planet of human beings.

Even at that time, the earth could no longer survive due to the constant expansion of the star sun, and humans could abandon the earth and emigrate to other habitable planets in the solar system. If human beings do not want to give up the earth and want the earth to live, or they will transform the earth into a huge spaceship like in the movie "The Wandering Earth", push it out of the solar system, become a wandering planet, and go to the next suitable star system.

Therefore, we don’t have to worry about the threat to the earth and human beings from the constant expansion of the sun 1 billion years later. At that time, it is not a problem to deal with such small things with human technology.

However, there are also people who think that it is also a problem whether human beings can last beyond 1 billion years. If 1 billion years later, human beings will have disappeared long ago, and new intelligent life has been born on the earth, but new intelligent life has not yet developed. , in the face of the expansion of the sun, there will be no way to avoid the fate of the earth being swallowed up and disappear into the universe.