The Myans May Have Miscalculated

At the end of the third series of Doctor Who back when it was worth watching, the queen of sidekicks and subsequently wrinkled prostitute Billie Piper returned to earth from the end of the world and closed the episode with the seemingly obscure but surprisingly rememberable final line,
'We've only got 5billion years till the shops close'.

Turns out the glistening optimism of her whitened teeth was ambitious to say the least, researchers at the University of East Anglia revealing today that there is in fact a mere 1.75billion years until the sun expands, obliterating the poorest among whichever life form has fought its way up the evolutionary ladder by then.

The team used exoplanets to make the prediction, explaining that the poor bastards unlucky enough to be alive at the wrong moment will suffer total annihilation in an instant - let's hope for their sake that cockroaches pass down their thermonuclear abilities. Maybe it's worth looking into creating some kind of interspecies superbeings? It would certainly be interesting to fathom a lifeform with the capability of withstanding the heat of a trillion nuclear bombs but the logic of a chicken.

When asked what earth would be like after a geological event like this, Andrew Rushby explained:

The results, published in today's edition of Astrobiology, offer a lifeline to those who have a steak in whether or not life exists beyond earth as the release of the journal coincides with the discovery that there are just three parts per billion of methane on Mars, which everyone seems to have decided means that it's therefore less likely for life to exist there, as if life necessarily means a being with a head and arms and legs or indeed a force at all comprehendible to our egotistical, insignificant species. This is because, now we're able to calculate how long it will be before the sun destroys each planet, we can also calculate how likely it is that life does or will exist on  given planet before its inevitable demise.

It is therefore now expected that life could exist as little as 10 lightyears away but would take hundreds of thousands of years to get to with our technology so for the moment it seems, whether or not we shield it from our minds, that we still have a responsibility to take care of this planet, at least until we hand it over to the cockroach mutant ninja turtles.