Myth Debunked: Will the Earth remain habitable until the sun becomes a red giant – Times of Malta

Even though the sun is far from becoming a red giant, having spent approximately half of its core hydrogen over the course of the past 4.6 billion years, our parent star is far from being static.

While the sun will indeed not become a red giant until around five billion years from today, it will still increase in luminosity by about 10 per cent over the course of the next billion years alone. While this might seem like a small increase, it will indeed mean that temperatures on our planet will slowly but inexorably soar, eventually triggering global ocean evaporation and water loss.

This means that even though we have evidence that life has been present on the Earth’s surface for 3.7 billion years, it seems that life – at least as we know it – ‘only’ has around one billion more years to flourish on our planet.