Our experience on Earth is probably repeated endlessly in the cosmos. Life develops on planets but it is ultimately destroyed by the light of a slowly brightening star. It is a cruel fact of nature that life-giving stars always go bad.Has anyone ever worked that last sentence into a country song?
This is from Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World, which I just finished. There's something calming in these scientific prophesies of doom. The news isn't good, but things like the sun turning into a red giant are so far in the future we never expected to be around for them. Our children's children won't either. Of course there are threats now, some self-created. But the thing is, the goal is to just squeeze as many good years out of this world we have as we can.
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A particular favourite book of mine in a similar vein is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. Of course it's not nearly so far reaching as this one sounds to be but, then again, there is world enough and time for more races to follow ours, beings who will find their own truths. It always makes me smile when I see someone panicking because they've just learned the sun will become a red giant in a few billion more years.
I haven't read The World Without Us yet, but I've heard about it and it sounds like something I'd enjoy. Dougal Dixon's After Man tickled me. I'd like to think that when we're gone life will continue, here on Earth and/or elsewhere. But it's one of those things that is, by definition, out of our hands and outside our experience. We'll never know one way or the other.
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