Scientists Calculated When The Last Plants on Earth Will DieNEWS | 06 July 2026If potted plants always seem to die under your care, you can take solace in knowing that plantkind as a whole will probably survive for a very long time.
In fact, they might still be around when the Sun boils the oceans off the surface of Earth.
That's according to a new paper from two planetary scientists who used a series of models to estimate the maximum lifetime of Earth's vegetative biosphere – that is, its plant life.
Their simulated scenarios, detailed in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, suggest that the last plant on Earth might not wither and die until 1.87 billion years from now.
By then, the Sun will shine about 20 percent brighter, which will probably either bake or choke plant life out of existence.
That said, there could be an asterisk at the end of that sentence, which potentially allows plants (and other kinds of life) to persist beyond that point.
A NASA visualization of Earth's biosphere, measured using satellite data. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, The SeaWiFS Project and GeoEye, SVS)
Plants comprise about 80 percent of all biomass on the planet – so Earth would do well to keep providing them with abundant sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. But how long can it reasonably do so?
And how long before plants reach their limit?
To find out, astrobiologist Jacob Haqq-Misra and planetary climate scientist Eric Wolf from Blue Marble Space, a nonprofit research institute based in Seattle, ran a series of simulations.
The pair used a 3D model to calculate what would happen to Earth's climate over the next 2 billion years. It was designed to account for how much the Sun is predicted to brighten over that time, as well as changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) in the atmosphere.
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If you ignore the outlier that is human-induced CO 2 emissions, Earth's natural carbonate-silicate cycle sees CO 2 constantly removed from the atmosphere into the oceans, where it is gradually deposited onto the seafloor, converted into rock, and eventually released back into the atmosphere through volcanic eruptions and plate tectonics.
It's unclear how strongly this kind of weathering depends on the surface temperature – so the researchers simulated both strong and weak versions of the cycle.
In the strong weathering model, Earth's surface temperature remains relatively stable, but the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere steadily drops. Under this scenario, plants would be starved of carbon, killing off the vegetative biosphere around 1.84 billion years from now.
In the weak weathering model, however, CO 2 levels stay steady, but the temperature continues to climb. Eventually, the mean temperature on Earth hits about 65 degrees Celsius (150 degrees Fahrenheit), at which point no land plants could survive.
This scenario puts the maximum lifetime of plants on Earth at around 1.87 billion years in the future – longer than most previous studies have calculated.
Diagrams illustrating the maximum lifespan of Earth's vegetative biosphere under different scenarios. (Haqq-Misra & Wolf, JGR Atmos., 2026)
"It suggests the possibility that Earth's photosynthetic biosphere could remain viable in some form up to the point at which Earth begins to lose its water," the researchers write.
"If this is the case, then the maximum lifetime of Earth's vegetative biosphere is comparable to the lifetime of Earth's oceans."
However, there's a very intriguing caveat to the whole study: These simulations were conducted without accounting for any evolution in plant life or any potential technological advances made by humans (or another intelligent civilization that may arise in the distant future).
Either or both of these factors could extend how long plants survive on – or importantly, off – Earth.
"We can imagine a scenario in which plants evolve the ability to regulate their temperature and pressure, perhaps in response to changing climates," the researchers write.
"As the sun brightens, plants may favor an aerial environment and adapt accordingly, spreading to high‐altitude terrain and into the stratosphere and beyond. From Earth's upper atmosphere, life could continue to disperse to low‐gravity objects like comets and the Moon as well as into free‐floating space."
Possible technological interventions sound very sci-fi. Geoengineering methods, such as reflective aerosols in the upper atmosphere or sunshades in orbit, could cool Earth in the face of increasing sunlight, but the consequences of those risky strategies aren't fully understood.
Even more speculative ideas could include pushing Earth itself into a more distant orbit, or manipulating the mass of the Sun to keep it shining at a steady brightness and temperature.
Related: Plants Stopped Thriving When Earth Warmed 56 Million Years Ago
Of course it's impossible to know for sure what the future holds, but it's kind of comforting to think that Earth could still be green in more than a billion years' time.
"Life on Earth is resilient, and limits posed by thermal stress or CO 2 starvation may only reflect our observations of the biosphere today rather than hard limits on how the biosphere may evolve," the researchers conclude.
"We suggest that the default story for our planet's future is that life will survive at least as long as Earth."
The research was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.
This article was fact-checked by Michael Irving and edited by Clare Watson. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.Author: Michael Irving. Source
