The Earth seems to be a bit marginal, so it may not be certain for some time what will happen to it five billion years from now or so. We might end up one of those red-hot ember planets that circle their star almost darting into the flames, so to speak., or we might end up a trace of Lithium, slowly vanishing in a red giant's slow burn.

Mercury and Venus are expected to be swallowed up, Mars ought to survive, making a possible future refuge for humans should we survive so long as to see the Sun super-heat the Earth, which is infinitisimally probable. The Moons of Saturn and Jupiter might provide refuge for life which is likely to survive us, if only in microbial form.

All water will have vanished from the Earth's surface in about one billion years according to scientists. The water will be cracked into hydrogen and oxygen and gradually the hydrogen will leak into space from whence it came in some form or other. The oxygen ought to oxydize the surface making it red like Mars, although some of it will leak into space as well.

It's a sad ending, but at least we'll have our dignity. That and maybe a few gold plaques on the Moon and bits of space debris.

I think we should put a giant gold plaque on the Moon and another on Mars reading: "We came, we saw, we littered."

I have my name on a couple of disks on Mars and space probes. They add these to interest the public in space projects at the low cost of a few grams of payload (maybe a few thousand dollars worth, maybe less).

It's sort of an opportunity to personalize the space probes your tax dollars (if you are American, Canadian, or possibly European) paid for. Perhaps they will be all that is left of me and mine in a few thousand years, let alone a few billion. All that work on my genealogy, to be one of a few thousad or million distant cousins whose names survive us all. Seems kind of pointless in the very long run, but as John Maynard Keynes observed, "in the long run, we are all dead".

semiotix: "Oh, crap! The planetary survey report is due in ten minutes, but we stayed up all night drinking! What are we going to do?"
"Relax, I've got this."

REPORT ON THE NON-^EXISTENCE OF A PLANET IN SYSTEM BD+48 740

Non-existent planets are like un-birthdays. There are so many more of them, it makes sense to celebrate them rather than the other. 364 unbirthdays a year to one birthday (365 in leap years).

It is recommened that you celebrate with a very small cupcake rather than the whole hog birthday monstrosity though. You can severely limit the number of your unbirthdays if you celebrate them too hard. It's not the birthdays that get you. It's the unbirthdays.

This is Ceti Alpha V!