Unlike their more massive counterparts, sunlike stars are thought to die gracefully by ejecting their outer gaseous layers in a nonexplosive process that takes about 10,000 years.
Whittled by a half million years of wind and rain, the haunting claystone hills and buttes of Badlands National Park rise above the surrounding sea of grasslands.
Moreover, even though humans have been upright for millions of years, our feet and back continue to struggle with bipedal posture and cannot easily withstand repeated strain imposed by oversize limbs.
We are doing such irreversible damage that long before a million years are up, we will have made this beautiful planet effectively uninhabitable – not just for us but for many other species.
This is the rock that came out of the ocean 25 million years ago, but the tide has left a line of trash all along the beach here, pretty much as far as your eye can see.
Scientists say spent nuclear rods are so hot, they can't even be moved for several decades until they cool down, and that then, they need to be buried at least 3,300 feet underground for a million years.
While inhospitable now, billions of years ago, the landscape of this dusty rock was similar to that of Earth, but somewhere along the way, it became a red wasteland.