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The planet will last until the heat death of the universe or a very, very long time.
How long it will remain habitable for carbon based life forms is a lot shorter. How long it will remain habitable for a population of 6-10 billion Homo Industrialis is another question. My feeling is that the planet can carry a human population of 6-10 billion for another 100 years at the outside before the human generated pollutants concentrate enough to make the place uninhabitable at that population level. A planet wide nuclear war and winter would hasten the inevitable die back of humans to a sustainable level. The resulting die off of humans, even without a nuclear war, will likely drop the population to the 1 billion range and the planet, after the “natural” systems cleanse the atmosphere and waters of the contaminants, will be able to sustain a human population at that level for many millennia providing they develop a carbon free energy economy.
We humans are the only creatures capable of damaging the ecosystem sufficiently to render it uninhabitable for ourselves and many other creatures. As we have this capability I believe we have the responsibility to maintain that habitability. Unfortunately I do not see our economies or politicians ever having the wisdom or the strength to get off the exponential growth of population or economies to enforce this responsibility. I expect we will continue to over populate and over consume until we pass the point of short term as well as long term sustainability. Then “nature” will cut our numbers and consumption to a level below the sustainable.
This is a grim future but Homo Industrialis may through technology delay the population collapse but will not be able to prevent it. After all the planet is finite in size and resources thus has an inherent limit of the sustainable population levels.
So the question really is, why bother to protect the environment if the planet is destined for demise? I think it is about the quality of life for all species. Secondly, as GregW points out, "nature" will self-correct and through famine, disease, etc... reduce the population to sustainable levels. So.....if one does not care about contributing to the highest possible quality of life by keeping the air clean and the oceans, rivers and streams less polluted, then perhaps selfish motives for self presevation will be a motivating factor. Whether the planet dies next year or 10 billion years from now is irrelevant in the grand scheme. How much sustanance and joy can we ultimately extract from our lives on Earth today? That depends entirely on whether we have enough clean air, water and food each day.
There is scientific evidence that a star(like our sun) burns out. Before it burns out, it becomes a "red giant" which would incinerate this planet to dust. From dust it became and unto dust it will return...so I have heard.
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A red giant star is a star with a mass like our Sun that is in the last phase of its life. Hydrogen fusion reactions have become less efficient in the core region, and with gravitational collapse of the core, the fusion reactions now occur in a shell surrounding the core .This increases the luminosity of the star enormously ( up to 1000 times the Sun) and it expands. The outer layers then cool to only 3000 K or so and you get a red star, but its size is now equal to the orbit of Mercury or Venus...or even the Earth! After a few more millions of years, the star evolves into a white dwarf-planetary nebula system and then its all over for the star.
Even larger 'supergiants' can outshine the sun by over a million times. These are very massive stars seen just before their supernova stags. Betelgeuse, Antares and Arcturus are such stars. The above two images show a normal red supergiant star with most of its energy coming from a shell of hydrogen fusion activity just outside the dense core. The figure on the bottom shows an evolved red supergiant interior just before supernova.
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The premise is that the earth was "made" by some fabricating process in which "forever" was an option. If that was the intent of the premise, then this thread is purely theological, and needs to be addressed accordingly, and Mercury Cougar has already given the final answer.
I suspect, though, that the OP means to define 'earth' as the locus of human life. In that context, after again setting aside the theological, the question become one of evolution. Will Homo sapiens somehow circumvent the iron law that every species, given sufficient time, either becomes extinct without a living legacy, or evolves to adapt to changing circumstances as a quite different and more complex creature.
There is, in my opinion, absolutely zero chance that, as time goes on into eternity, there will be A) a planet spinning along with constant conditions that allow for liquid H2O, amid whatever tangle of mass and energy the universe becomes, or B) organisms living on it that in any way resemble those who are presently watching Sham Wow ads on cable TV.
Imagine a universe without Sham WoW adds. See there is some good in the ultimate demise of the planet.
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