E.J. Öpik (right) demonstrating his `Rocking Camera' with which
he was able to determine the speed of meteors as they passed
through the Earth's atmosphere. He had a life-long interest in
the smaller bodies of the Solar System, and on his eighty fifth
birthday, in 1978, a new minor planet, Planet Öpik, was named
after him. Some family information is available in the memoir
for his brother, Armin Alexander Öpik. "In the current era of
the sun's and the earth's history, beginning about 500 million
years ago, the average global temperature has been about 72
degrees, aside from the brief ice-age interludes. When our ice
age ends a few million years from now, it will return to that
level. Thereafter, the sun will resume its warming trend,
raising the earth temperature at the rate of one degree per 100
million years at first and accelerating the warmup as time goes
on. A billion years or so from now the average temperature will
be 100 degrees - too hot for human life as we know it. Indeed,
life for any sort of orga