The Earth’s Planned Maintenance Schedule – Part 1

Human beings of one sort or another have existed on this planet for a few million years.  But only in the last ten thousand years have we existed above the level of stone age hunter-gatherers.  And only for the last five hundred years have we begun to understand the rudiments of science at a level high enough to give us a glimpse of what surrounds us in the universe. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton began opening up the window to what the Earth is and how it interacts with the Sun and the Moon and how we are related to the other planets and just how far away the stars really are.

And because this knowledge is only a few hundred years old I guess I should forgive us for not having thought deeply enough about what our future looks like and what things should be on our list of stuff to think about.  For instance, only recently have planetary scientists started asking why are all the other planets completely unfit to sustain life?  And this may seem like a silly question but look at it by asking the inverse question, “How did Earth win the jackpot and have basically everything we need to make this place a paradise stuck in the middle of a series of hells.  We’ve got the right distance from the Sun.  We’ve got a molten iron core to produce a strong magnetic field to protect us from solar and cosmic radiation.  We’ve got a deep atmosphere.  We’ve got liquid water in abundance.  We’ve got all of the chemical elements available due to vulcanism.  And most importantly we’ve got life in absolute abundance.

Now look at the rest of the planets.  Mercury is ridiculously close to a titanic fusion reactor.  Venus and Mars are close to the habitable zone in terms of solar orbit.  But Venus is a greenhouse oven and Mars is a frozen lifeless ball with no atmosphere to speak of and no water.  As for the outer planets they’re not even close to being places where life could even start.  Jupiter is more like a failed star and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are frozen hells where liquid nitrogen takes the place of water.  A case could be made that some of the moons of Jupiter and the other gas giants may have subsurface oceans of liquid water underneath thick layers of ice.  And due to magnetic interaction with their primary world, they could be at temperatures and pressures where life is theoretically possible to exist.  Sure.  Why not?

But once we get a little smarter and a little more organized it’s going to be time to start thinking about what challenges will planet Earth be faced with in the distant future.  Now, I’m not specifically talking about the distant future, billions of years from now when the Sun runs out of hydrogen and starts becoming a red giant.  That’s too far in the future for even me to worry about.  But as a for instance, what happens if the magnetic poles switch off and then reverse direction?  That sounds kind of crazy but it does happen fairly regularly.  And sometimes the field just weakens significantly like the last one about 42,000 years ago.  If the field disappears soon, it would probably wreak havoc with all of our satellites that currently benefit from the Earth’s field protecting them from charged particles to a greater or lesser extent.

Now things like this have been postulated in science fiction stories but when we get around to growing up, we will have to spend a good amount of time figuring out how much time we have before the Earth starts reaching its middle age and stuff starts working less optimally.  I’ll think about some “for instances” in the next installment.