THE EARTH'S FUTURE.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXIX, Issue 12282, 8 July 1914, Page 1

THE EARTH'S FUTURE.

2,000,000 YEARS TO LIVE. A well-known French mathematcian, M. Verronet, recently made a most interesting communication to the French Academv of Sciences, in which he states that the earth has _ only another ,2,000,000-of years to live. At about tliat time life of all description on the globe, will, says M. Verronet, have ceased, owing to the intense cold brought, about by tho reduction of the power of the sun's rays. Tho idea, of course, that life on the earth will cease as the result of the gradual cooling of the sun, is no new one, .but it is the first time that a savant, has given the such a short period of future, life as 2,000,000 years. M. Verronet supposes, according to tho theory of Helmholz, that the sun is contracting and cooling, and is stantlv losing Jiis heat energy. _ The present' solar temperature is. calculated to be about H,l92deg. Fabr., and, by making certain hypothesis on tile condensation of the sun, Verronet finds, mathematically, tliat the mean temperature of the earth's surface is about 52deg. Falir., with 92degs. at the equator. " And these figures resulting from calculations based on the _sun correspond very nearly to actuality. Working backwards from tin's, 31. Verronet calculates that 2,000,000 years ago the ra'nge of the sun's rays was one and a-half times as powerful as it is now, and the quantity of heat shed on the earth was proportionately greater.. In the neighborhood of the poles, at SO dog. la ditude,_ the temperature of the surface of the earth must have been somewhere about 194deg. Fain - . Life, then, did not appear on the earth, according to M. Verronet, until after this time, and then began : at the poles, the coolest parts of the globe. Similarly. M. Verronet calculates tliat in 2,000.000 years from now the quantity of h-eat • shed on the earth will be* so diminished that our. planet mil be completely frozen over, the mean temperature at the surface_ being about zero. Life will then be impossible on the earth. It will mean the death of everything—preceded,: in his opinion, by a. term, during which man will have returned to barbarism. According to his then, .the' total duration of .life on. the earth is 4,000,000 years, and at the present moment we are at about the middle point of the curve which represents this terrestrial' life, As far-as Mars is 'concerned. he says further, calculations show that' it has been frozen for, a long time, and that there is no longer anv life on its surface. *