<img class="styles__noscript__2rw2y" src="https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/1cf57346-d257-491c-baf8-442df657a465.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0" srcset="https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/1cf57346-d257-491c-baf8-442df657a465.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0 400w, https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/1cf57346-d257-491c-baf8-442df657a465.jpg?v=ap&w=980&h=551&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0 800w" > A minor solar eruption on October 4, 2012. (NASA/SDO)

If you’re planning to live forever, you’ve got about 2 billion years to find a new planet to inhabit.

According to new research, it’s impossible for life on Earth to endure much longer than that. Earth exists, and has always existed, in what’s known as the habitable zone — the area around a star at which liquid water can flow. But as stars, like our sun, fuse hydrogen into helium, the amount of heat they emit increases over time, reports The Guardian, pushing the line of the habitable zone farther away from the star and scorching regions nearby.

In research published September 19 in the journal Astrobiology, a team led by Andrew Rushby from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom used models of stellar evolution to estimate how long Earth and other planets will stay in their habitable zones. They found that somewhere between 1.75 billion and 3.25 billion years from now, the sun will heat the Earth so much that oceans will evaporate and life will be wiped out, according to a University of East Anglia news release.

“We would see a catastrophic and terminal extinction event for all life,” Rushby said in the release. “Of course, conditions for humans and other complex life will become impossible much sooner — and this is being accelerated by anthropogenic climate change. Humans would be in trouble with even a small increase in temperature, and near the end only microbes in niche environments would be able to endure the heat.”

If humans are still around when the oceans get close to boiling, our best bet for a new home is Mars, according to Rushby, as the red planet remains in the habitable zone until the sun dies, about 6 billion years from now.

Humans may well have evolved into a new form by then, Rushby told The Guardian. Indeed, a primary aim of the study was not necessarily to plan a timeline for Earth, according to Discovery, but to study the rates of evolution of intelligent life.

Since discovery of the first exoplanet — a planet around another star — in 1995, thousands of potential exoplanets have been detected throughout the universe. Rushby and his team used their model to estimate habitable zone lifetimes of eight exoplanets. Knowing that it took about 75 percent of the Earth’s current 4.5-billion-year lifetime for humanity to evolve, scientists can extrapolate and imagine the possibilities of intelligent life elsewhere.

“The amount of habitable time on a planet is very important because it tells us about the potential for the evolution of complex life, which is likely to require a longer period of habitable conditions,” Rushby said. “Looking at habitability metrics is useful because it allows us to investigate the potential for other planets to host life, and understand the stage that life may be at elsewhere in the galaxy.”

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