End of Earth Countdown

Now, we all now from our Astronomy classes that the Sun will eventually blow up in size, become a Red Giant and swallow the earth. When will this happen? According to the this article ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-sun-will-eventually-engulf-earth-maybe) we still have 7.6 thousands of millions of years to go. Here’s a small Java counter to remind of that slightly depressing fact. [processing file=”http://pabamapa.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/endOfEarthCounter.jar” width=”500″ height=”125″] The pictures are taken from NASA. See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/6049973495/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/4923566097/ This was done using Processing. I have to admit one slight flaw in the counter. The first “7” in the years-part is in fact hard-coded into the program due to size-limitations of JAVA’s integer type. I PROMISE to correct this in time.