As our Sun ages, it is becoming more luminous, meaning that in the future Earth will receive more solar energy.
This increased energy will affect the surface of the planet, speeding up the weathering of silicate rocks such as basalt and granite.
When these rocks weather the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is pulled out of the atmosphere and through chemical reactions locked in carbonate minerals.
In theory, the Earth should start to cool down as carbon dioxide levels fall, but in around 2 billion years this effect will be negated by the ever-harshening glare of the Sun.
With falling carbon dioxide levels, less photosynthesis will occur and some types of plant may die out altogether. Less photosynthesis means less oxygen production, and gradually oxygen concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere will drop, creating a crisis for other forms of future life.
Hope I’m not reading too much into it but this seems to be aligned with what we find at AN7.66.
At some point, the world could be burned to a crisp when the sun becomes a red giant, too. I guess the formation of a new world be when a new star arises from the gas and dust that’s expelled. The Buddhist myth isn’t so far from what astrophysicists have surmised. The time involved might be longer.
The “Shiva Hypothesis” postulates that catastrophic events ( such as foreign body impacts) do occur at regular intervals based on the Sun’s motion within the Milky Way. Around every 30 million years or so.
Again, it’s just a a hypothesis.
I like how the suttas still manage to capture such events.
The earth’s geological history has always been tumultuous, climate included. Only 2.5 mya or so my house was under about a km of ice.
We’re in a goldilocks phase and need to keep things in perspective
So impermanent are conditions, so unstable, so unreliable. This is quite enough for you to become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed regarding all conditions.
To add to that, I live very close to one of the oldest mountain ranges on Earth, the St. Francois Range. They are 1.4 billion years old. In their prime, they were taller than the himalayas, which are only 40 million years old.
But today, over a billion years of erosion have worn the mountains to their granite cores, so they have gone from dwarfing Everest to a maximum elevation of only 1,772 feet.
It is still an amazingly beautiful area, and a great place to meditate on impermanence.
