From the New York Times Editorial Page:
We know, when we stop to think about it, that the Earth is in fact a planet of rock and water, with an existence quite separate from our own. But we don’t believe it in our bones. Perhaps the best proof is the discovery of a planet orbiting a star called V 391 Pegasi, some 4,500 light years from us.
That planet appears to have survived the transformation of its sun into a red giant. That is the very fate predicted for our own Sun some five billion years from now, when it will swell to a size that engulfs the orbits of Mercury and Venus. But to suggest that Earth might survive the Sun’s senescence is to say something about this lump of rock we live on, not our species. And yet we have trouble reading it that way.
Most of us have come to terms with the notion that the Sun will swell catastrophically — some day. Five billion years is roughly 25,000 times longer than Homo sapiens have lived.
Still, once upon a time, even to talk about that distant catastrophe was to assume that it would somehow be a human event. You may remember learning about Earth’s eventual fate with a sinking feeling.
The grimmer realization of recent decades — a time of looming man-made cataclysms — is that we do not live in geological or astronomical time. We live in ethical and cultural time, that is, human time. The sensible questions are how to live that time to the fullest and how to stave off a premature ending.
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