afterlight.A BILLION YEARS OF EARTH
SOL SYSTEM / PLANET 03

Our world. Long after us.

YEARS FROM NOW
September 2026PAUSED
Human population
8.30billion

UN projection · 2026

Solar energy
+0.0%

Relative to today · modeled trend

OceansLiquid
BiosphereFlourishing
Earth’s age~4.54 billion years
Controls ↓
Today+1 billion years
DRAG TO ORBIT · SCROLL TO ZOOM

Earth today · real-world surface imagery

NONLINEAR TIME SCALE · DRAG TO TRAVEL
A 2-minute journey
A NOTE ON ACCURACY

Deep time.
Honest uncertainty.

This is an interactive, research-informed visualization—not a numerical Earth-system forecast. We can model the Sun much more confidently than the future of humanity.

01 / PEOPLE

The human counter has a horizon.

2026, 2030 and 2050 use projections from UN World Population Prospects 2024. Later anchors are rounded: ~10.3 billion around 2085 and ~10.2 billion in 2100. Values between anchors are interpolated, not annual UN data. Beyond 2100, population is unknown.

UN population data ↗UN long-term projection ↗
02 / THE SUN

Brighter, slowly.

Solar input rises by roughly 10% over the next billion years. The counter shows a rounded linear approximation, not exact stellar evolution. The Sun’s red-giant phase is about five billion years away.

Haqq-Misra & Wolf, 2026 ↗NASA: the lives of stars ↗
03 / THE LIVING WORLD

Two lenses, not two certainties.

Ozaki & Reinhard (2021) estimate an oxygen-rich atmosphere lifetime of 1.08 ± 0.14 billion years. Haqq-Misra & Wolf (2026) find possible vegetation persistence to ~1.8 billion years under other assumptions. The scenario switch illustrates this uncertainty; its colors are not computed oxygen or species measurements. City lights fade beyond the forecast horizon to avoid inventing future settlements.

Oxygen-rich atmosphere, 2021 ↗Vegetative biosphere, 2026 ↗
04 / THE SURFACE

Continents move. The map is uncertain.

Future continental arrangements are debated. The moving surface is a visual illustration, not a plate-tectonics reconstruction. Ocean area, ice cover, desert colors and haze are illustrative, not calibrated climate projections. Liquid oceans remain at the one-billion-year endpoint; extensive ocean loss is not certain by then.

NASA GISS: future supercontinents ↗Farnsworth et al., 2023 ↗Wolf & Toon, 2015 ↗
05 / THE FINALE

The explosion is cinematic fiction.

Earth is not predicted to become a molten ball and break apart in a billion years. The optional finale starts after the scientific timeline stops. It is an artistic sequence, with no physical time or temperature assigned.

Made with light & a little perspective.

Built with Three.js. Earth textures: three.js examples; diffuse and city lights credited to Sean Ward in the original example. Star positions and breakup fragments are artistic, not a star catalog or impact model.

Three.js / MIT ↗Full texture credits ↗