Back at Pop!Tech. we were down for a while because a Blaster virus snuck into the wireless network and they had to close it down and clean it out.

Right now we're listening to geological science professor Peter Ward, who is talking about how long the Earth might live. And for him, the key world is ... methane. The largest extinction ever seen on the Earth came because of methane gas (forget that dinosaur killing comet). Ward says that the layers of the Earth are riddled with methane, beside what we're putting into the atmosphere ourselves. (The leading producers of methane on Earth, are cows ... and rice fields.) Volcanization helps release this methane, and we're seeing more of that. Ward believes that the Earth has seen its best days, and in about 500 million years, the atmosphere will be so hot, and full of methane, that we'll be more like Venus. Plants will die, about 20 million years later, the oxygen will be gone. And so will we. (Well, we'll probably be long gone to a new solar sytem by then, or as Ward says, we might "bio-engineer our way out of it.")

Life on Earth will then consist of a bacterial world ("planet yogurt, so to speak")

Closer to this time frame, Ward says that a global ice age would be a great danger than a warming period. The trick will be maintaining an equilibrium. Ward, getting political for a moment, said the next presidential election will be very important, because what's happening to our atmosphere and environment is far more important than what's happening in Iraq. He said he feels very strongly that the next president needs to support the Kyoto accords, or 150 years from now, the Earth will be a very hot place. Ward said Kyoto is not a panacea for global warming, but "it will buy us time."

Also, what happens in India and China will have an enormous impact on the global warming effect.