India, Aug. 23 -- What does our collective future look like? Well, that depends on how far ahead you want to look.

The first-ever supercomputer-generated continental-shift models are out, and the projections they share are dramatic. But they also hold out new hope: they could help in our search for habitable planets beyond our solar system.

First, the troubles at home.

The Asia of the far future could be a boiling, uninhabitable wasteland, with temperatures between 45 and 55 degrees Celsius and weather conditions too extreme for most mammals, about 250 million years from now. Conditions on the rest of the planet would not be much better.

As all of Earth's landmasses merged into a supercontinent named Pangea Ultima (Pangea, also the na...