What might Earth look like 50,000 years from now? What changes will shape the planet in the distant future?

While predicting Earth's future may seem as uncertain as forecasting the weather, we can still make some educated guesses based on billions of years of history. Geological processes like evolution, extinction, plate tectonics, and climate change will continue to shape the planet. Though we may not be able to predict specifics for 50,000 years, we can rely on these continuous processes to inform our outlook for Earth's future.

Earth's movements—rotating on its axis and orbiting the sun—carry certain consequences for life on the planet. Earth not only rotates but also wobbles, a motion known as precession, which shifts its axis in a 26,000-year cycle. Right now, the North Pole points toward Polaris, the North Star, but in 13,000 years, Vega will take its place. After two full precession cycles—50,000 years from now—the sky will look much as it does today.

Earth's orbit and axial tilt experience significant variations over long cycles. In a 97,000-year cycle, Earth's orbit goes from nearly circular to elliptical, and the tilt of its axis fluctuates between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees. These movements can drastically affect the planet's climate, leading to ice ages when conditions align just right. Ice ages typically last 100,000 years, with warmer interglacial periods lasting about 10,000 years. While Earth is currently in an interglacial period, the next ice age could peak in about 80,000 years, meaning in 50,000 years, Earth may be much colder, with ice sheets advancing toward regions like New York City.

What are the implications of global warming? We'll explore that in more detail shortly.

What's Ahead for Earth's Future: From Wetlands to Ice, and Even Volcanoes?

How does the warming of our planet influence the possibility of an ice age in the future? In the long run, it has little impact. However, in the short term, global warming could drastically alter our world. By the year 2200, carbon dioxide levels will reach their highest point in over 650,000 years [source: Thompson and Than]. This increase in carbon dioxide will trap solar energy, preventing it from escaping into space and causing the planet's temperatures to rise. Even small increases in temperature will melt glaciers, cause sea levels to rise, and lead to coastal flooding. The oceans will become warmer and more acidic, contributing to the collapse of coral reefs. A significant number of marine species will face extinction, alongside a quarter of the world's plant and animal species on land.

This will be a crucial moment for our planet, and things might seem like they can't get worse. However, Earth's 4-billion-year history has shown that catastrophic events can occur, given enough time. In about 50,000 years, a monumental disaster is likely to change the planet forever. It could come in the form of an asteroid or comet impact, an event that could end life as we know it. Such impacts happen approximately every million years, so there's still a favorable chance that we won't experience one in the next 50,000 years. A more probable disaster, however, would come from the planet itself. The tectonic activity that causes continental drift also triggers supervolcano eruptions, which can release enough ash and smoke to block sunlight for 10 to 15 years. Geologists believe that these eruptions happen once every 50,000 years, making this scenario more likely [source: Ravilious].

In the aftermath of a catastrophic event such as a supervolcano eruption, an already weakened Earth would face a mass extinction comparable to the ones found in the fossil record. The most well-known is the mass extinction that eliminated the dinosaurs at the close of the Cretaceous period. However, the loss of the dinosaurs was nothing compared to the extinction that occurred at the end of the Permian period, around 251 million years ago. When the dust settled, 95 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land vertebrates had perished [source: Discovery Earth]. And what caused this massive die-off? You guessed it – a supervolcano, specifically the eruption of the Siberian Traps, which had a drastic impact on the global climate.

So, what are the odds that Homo sapiens will still be here to witness Earth in 50,000 years? Considering that our species has only been around for 100,000 years and the longest lasting human civilization lasted a mere 3,000 years, it seems improbable that we will remain the dominant species far into the future.

And yet, humans continue to evolve. Some scientists believe that in the past 10,000 years, human evolution has occurred 100 times faster than at any other point in history [source: Ward]. So perhaps there's a good chance that we will adapt to Earth's future environment. A fascinating segment on MSNBC, titled "Before and After Humans," imagines what our species might look like in the next 1 to 4 million years. One thing is clear: if we are still around, we will not resemble or act like the humans of today.