That’s the conclusion of new research from Toho University in Japan, supported by NASA’s planetary modelling.
The team used sophisticated simulations to track how Earth’s atmosphere will evolve, revealing a stark and sobering truth: around one billion years from now, the air we breathe will vanish.
The trigger is the Sun.
As it ages, it will grow hotter and more luminous, subtly but steadily disrupting Earth’s climate systems.
More water will evaporate, cloud cover will shift and surface temperatures will climb. This rising heat will weaken the carbon cycle, the process plants rely on to turn sunlight into oxygen.
With plant life in decline, oxygen production will falter.
Over time, oxygen levels will plummet, eventually returning the atmosphere to something like its early state — rich in methane, poor in life-sustaining air.
When that tipping point is reached, complex life will quietly disappear. Animals, birds, even insects will all vanish.
Only the hardiest microbes, like those that once thrived in the oxygen-free world of early Earth, may endure.
But that’s a billion years away.
The scientists say climate change remains the pressing challenge of our time but it’s a short-term crisis measured in centuries, not eons.
It threatens humanity, not the planet itself.
