• Question: how do you know when the world is going to end?

    Asked by sodiumpolyacrylate to Mike, Suze, Will on 23 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Mike Dodd

      Mike Dodd answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      I don’t think anyone will really know when the world is going to end. If there was an asteroid on it’s way, then we would have some idea. But otherwise the earth will be around for another billion years. Whether humans will still be around is debatable.

    • Photo: Suze Kundu

      Suze Kundu answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      Hello lovely!

      You don’t really know when the world is going to end, although if it is going to end by something that we can monitor, we might be able to have a bit of an early warning. I was thinking of volcanoes, earthquakes, meteor impacts, but really, if it’s going to happen on such a scale, I don’t think that we’ll know about it really.

      At the end of the day though, if we’re going, we’ll all go together, so enjoy the time that we have here now, and don’t worry about any of that scary apocalyptic stuff 😉

      I was thinking about you all day yesterday! I was at the Science Museum doing demonstrations about chemistry in every day life, and we managed to get a newborn baby’s nappy to hold half a liter of water inside it without leaking. Anyway, the polymer was most likely to be sodium polyacrylate, so you were on my mind all day!

Comments

  • Photo: sodiumpolyacrylate

    sodiumpolyacrylate commented on :

    oh because other scientist have said that in about 5 billion years later the sun will no longer be there because of the big giant and all the planets would be sucked into the centre of the sun

    • Photo: Suze

      Suze commented on :

      That’s the natural death of a star like our Sun, which is a yellow dwarf star. It will expand, and then lose some of its gas, and the remains will cool down, but human life may have been wiped out by something else long before that, or we might have evolved into monsters, or moved to a different, more habitable planet by then.

  • Photo: Mike

    Mike commented on :

    Sorry SPA, you’re right, the sun still has another 5 billion years, I was selling it short. The the red giant that will become the sun, will get to about 250 times it’s current size and will engulf the inner plants.