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It will end with everyone talking on cell phones. People will not get off of their devices long enough to do anything essential to the survival of mankind. Crops will not be harvested, food will become unavailable; even the act of copulation will cease.
Earth is doomed, of course, when the sun enters the red giant phase billions of years from now as it draws near the end of its 10 billion year life. At that point, Earth will either be destroyed utterly - consumed in the outer layers of the blazing inferno - or, at best, reduced to a molten stone orbiting near the hellish crimson light of what was once our life-giving sun.
Before then, any number of asteroid impacts could wipe out humanity - though probably not all of life - as well as super volcano eruptions, and assorted other extinction level events.
Really, it's kind of impressive that we're here at all, when you think about how uncaring the greater universe can be.
Humanity will not end. 1000 years, an eternity for people and technology, is a cosmic eyeblink. There will be no asteroid impacts, super volcanoes, or natural cataclysms in the next 1000 years. A few 8.0 earthquakes. A few small meteor impacts, a few minor volcanic eruptions. Any thermonuclear exchange will be limited in scope and only eradicate a few tens of millions of people at most. Environmental degradation will extinguish thousands of species who can't evolve fast enough, but humans don't evolve any more--they adapt. A few tens of millions of people, at most, will starve because of climate change.
With 3-4% of the 8 billion minds on the planet engaged in technological development, revolutions in industry and technology will come at a mind-bending pace. We will "finally" colonize the rest of the solar system in the next 300 years. We will find a way to break the lightspeed barrier and spread to other stars in 500. By 3015 Earth will have a stable population of around 10 billion people. Most environmentally damaging industry will have been moved off-planet, and re-terraforming will be underway to restore what is left of the natural environment.
Life on Earth will end when the sun expands into a red giant and scours the inner system with heat and light, 5 billion years hence. By that time, humanity will not be recognizable to even our wildest imaginings.
Long before that, the Earth will become uninhabitable.
Solar luminosity increases at a rate of approximately 1% every 100 million years. That change is imperceptible even over tens of millions of years, but roughly a billion years from now the Earth will become warm enough to evaporate the oceans. The result will be greenhouse Earth - no oceans but perpetual humidity. Excellent for life - in the short term. But oceans drive the motion of plate tectonics and without the seas, the Earth's tectonic plates will stop moving.
And that's the problem.
Carbon is continually becoming sequestered in the Earth's crust, but is also continually released in the form of carbon dioxide by volcanoes primarily due to plate motion - the vast majority of volcanoes are located at plate boundaries. With no oceans, and thus no plate motion, and thus few volcanoes, little of the carbon locked up in the crust of the Earth will be released. The geological carbon cycle will grind to a virtual halt.
And that will be the end - unless, of course, the rising temperatures of Greenhouse Earth get us first.
Good thing we have most of a billion years before this becomes a problem...
Like a lot of others, I'd like to know what the OP meant by "the end of the world." Without knowing that, the only valid answer is that yes, it will be destroyed by the sun when it becomes a red giant in about 8 billion years.
All life will have long since been scoured from the surface of the planet; within about 1 to 1.5 billion years, multicellular life will be extinct, and only isolated pockets of single-cell life will remain in increasingly small micro-environments. Single-cell organisms would survive about another billion years, but would probably become extinct about 2.8 billion years from now. Not entirely sure what that all means for the Kardashian sisters, though.
For me, the world as we know it, will come to an end when Christ returns.
I certainly wish your silly Rapture would happen, taking all of you evangelicals and religious nuts away; and making room for us humanists that actually have an interest preserving this beautiful sphere and its living beings.
A supervolcano eruption might be able to end human life and so might an asteroid impact but the planet has survived them before. If humans are annihilated how the planet ends is irrelevant.
The Sun eventually expanding and engulfing the planet may destroy it but humans would probably have evolved into something non-human by then.
So the world ending is of no practical importance.
Long before that, the Earth will become uninhabitable.
Solar luminosity increases at a rate of approximately 1% every 100 million years. That change is imperceptible even over tens of millions of years, but roughly a billion years from now the Earth will become warm enough to evaporate the oceans. The result will be greenhouse Earth - no oceans but perpetual humidity. Excellent for life - in the short term. But oceans drive the motion of plate tectonics and without the seas, the Earth's tectonic plates will stop moving.
And that's the problem.
Carbon is continually becoming sequestered in the Earth's crust, but is also continually released in the form of carbon dioxide by volcanoes primarily due to plate motion - the vast majority of volcanoes are located at plate boundaries. With no oceans, and thus no plate motion, and thus few volcanoes, little of the carbon locked up in the crust of the Earth will be released. The geological carbon cycle will grind to a virtual halt.
And that will be the end - unless, of course, the rising temperatures of Greenhouse Earth get us first.
Good thing we have most of a billion years before this becomes a problem...
wow, that's quite an answer!
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