Scientists Just Predicted the Exact Date Life on Earth Will End

Here’s a fun little thought to ruin your sense of cosmic security: scientists have now predicted the approximate expiration date for complex life on Earth—and it’s about a billion years from now. That’s when the oxygen runs out. Literally.

A team of researchers at Toho University in Japan, using NASA planetary models and a supercomputer that ran 400,000 simulations, discovered that our planet’s breathable atmosphere will collapse long before Earth itself is physically destroyed. The findings were published in Nature Geoscience, in a paper cheerily titled “The future lifespan of Earth’s oxygenated atmosphere.”

Basically, the sun is aging, and with that comes more heat. As it burns brighter, Earth’s surface will warm, water will evaporate, and the carbon cycle that supports photosynthesis will start to break down. Plants die, oxygen production stops, and we slowly revert to a high-methane, low-oxygen hellscape that looks more like ancient Earth than anything remotely livable.

This Is When All Life on Earth Will End

“For many years, the lifespan of Earth’s biosphere has been discussed based on the steady brightening of the Sun,” said Kazumi Ozaki, the study’s lead author. He explained that earlier estimates gave life around 2 billion years. But newer models, which focus specifically on the atmospheric changes, cut that timeline in half.

“If true,” he wrote, “one can expect atmospheric O₂ levels will also eventually decrease in the distant future.” Now we know when—and it’s not the distant future by space standards. It’s a hard stop at around 1 billion years.

Sure, microbial life might still hang on in weird anaerobic corners of the planet. But anything that needs oxygen—including us, plants, and basically every animal? Gone. Suffocated by solar inevitability.

The takeaway shouldn’t be “panic.” But it does serve as a stark reminder: Earth’s habitability has an expiration date. And we’re well into the second half.

Right now, Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. If we’ve only got 5.5 billion years in total before it’s fully lights out, we’re already 82% through the lifespan of our planet. Which means this is the part of the movie where you should probably stop doomscrolling and go outside. You know…while there’s still oxygen.