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Please Rinse Your Used Planet Before Recycling

Lately I had been taking occasional solace from the fact that our planet seemed to be one of those disposable models. We have been making a royal mess of it, but at least (or so I had thought) in 5 billion years Earth would be incinerated in a thermonuclear explosion, courtesy of our Sun’s transition into a red giant. I thought of Earth as sort of a planetary Huggie, something that gets dirty and smells bad but ultimately gets thrown away, burning into nuclear ash and leaving a cleaner galaxy behind it.

But today, courtesy of the New York Times, I read:

About five billion years from now, astronomers say, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel and swell temporarily more than 100 times in diameter into a so-called red giant, swallowing Mercury and Venus and dooming life on Earth, but perhaps not Earth itself. Astronomers are announcing that they have discovered a planet that seems to have survived the puffing up of its home star, suggesting there is some hope that Earth could survive the aging and swelling of the Sun.

So it appears that Earth may instead be destined for some kind of galactic curbside recycling bin.

If so, I think it would make sense for us to leave the planet in some kind of reasonable shape after all. You wouldn’t recycle filthy, unwashed food containers out on the street, where they would attract flies. Would you? No, I thought not. Likewise, you shouldn’t leave a nasty, polluted planet lying around the solar system where it might attract… well, I’m not sure what. Anyway, my plea stands: let’s clean this place up so it’s ready for recycling. We can do this any time in the next 5 billion years or so.