• Question: When and why will the world end?

    Asked by 599cmtm33 to Aileen, Caroline, Christopher, Rehemat, Stephanie, Stephen on 6 Mar 2018. This question was also asked by 395cmtm32.
    • Photo: Christopher Nankervis

      Christopher Nankervis answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      Life on earth will carry on for a long time, so it’s important that we take extra care now to make the future a more comfortable place for us all to live in (and our children too).

    • Photo: Aileen Baird

      Aileen Baird answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      When you think about the world ending, you have to think on a time scale that is so different than any of the other experiments I do! I’m afraid I don’t know much about when our planet will explode and not exist any more, but it will be a long long time away. Humans (and other animals/plants on the Earth) will probably die out some time before the world itself ends.

    • Photo: Stephanie Mann

      Stephanie Mann answered on 7 Mar 2018:

      I think people will die out looong before the world will end. But when will people die off? It depends on how well we look after our delicate environment and look after each other!

    • Photo: Stephen Twomlow

      Stephen Twomlow answered on 7 Mar 2018:

      Two possibilities for the end of the world
      1. When sun runs out of energy and dies – nothing for us to worry about for a few million years
      2. when governments and people stop listening to each other and somebody presses the button – then the world will end as we currently know it

    • Photo: Caroline Hickman

      Caroline Hickman answered on 7 Mar 2018:

      Thats an amazing question, and I have absolutely no idea what the answer is. The other scientists have given brilliant answers below to this. I do know that the end of the world is a subject that makes people very anxious.
      What I would add – as a social scientist/psychologist – is that because as humans we like to believe that we are in control (and of course the reality is that we are not at all), we act as if we are in control and that leads us to sometimes make very very stupid choices. If we were wiser we would be thinking about the future health of our planet and not make decisions that did not benefit people and animals and plants for many future generations. But I’m afraid that most people only think a few years ahead, and this means that human greed and anxiety lead us to make poor choices. And the people making these choices today will not be alive to see the full consequences of these poor choices in a few years time. But their children will be the one’s facing this.
      So – thats why to me its so important for children and young people today to have their voices heard about things that will be affecting them much more than the adults in the future. Thats what my research is trying to make happen.

    • Photo: Rehemat Bhatia

      Rehemat Bhatia answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      probably a long time away. these timescales, as the others have mentioned, are super slow. not sure what would cause it though!

Comments