Lifeboat Foundation

From the archives.

Our Earth and Sun continue to have a delicate relationship. Credit: Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center.

Complex life here on earth will hit a habitability wall in only 500 million years; not in an almost languorous 1.75 billion years, as reported in a recent global media flap.

The flap — spurred by a paper in the journal Astrobiology — failed to cover earth’s future carbon dioxide (CO₂) “compensation limit,” says James Kasting, a prominent planetary scientist at Penn State University, whose own models were used by the paper’s authors.