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> five billion years 250 million, owing to the expansion of the sun and formation of a supercontinent. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01259-3 http

• MangoToupe 1y ago
  The sun going red giant seems both easier to reason about and much more assured than trying to reason about global metabolic processes that have repeatedly changed on much shorter time frames, including in the last few hundred years at our own hand. Hell if there's one thing i'd put money on it's in life's ability to exploit hitherto-unknown chemistries to alter global metabolism. But physics, especially anything involving the energy output of the sun, is much harder to hand-wave away like that. Not that I don't find that article interesting, of course. And I wouldn't underestimate our ability to (continue) to terraform the earth, intentionally sure, but much more certainly unintentionally. Eg https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031920116300103 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...