Posted by
timothy
on from the strange-premonition dept.
ScottMan writes: "I found this link over at ABC News about some new pictures HST took. It shows a dying star, much like our own sun. Kind of interesting to see what our solar system might look like in another 5 billion years or so."
Wow... 5 billion years till Sun crashes? Now THAT's a benchmark to be beaten!
--
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Our legacy, and an argument against encryption.
by
devapoj
·
· Score: 5
4.9 billion years hence, assuming that only cockroaches and lawyers for the MPAA exist, what kind of legacy are we leaving for the inhabitants of a new star with new life, billions of light years away. With a plethora of PCs running their version of seti@home, what chance do they have of picking up our civilisation.
Practically none when you think about it.
By that time, encryption will be so advanced it'd take a billion years to develop the hardware and probably another billion to crack the zillion-bit encryption code used to ensure we all have to pay lots of samolens for our classic "Simpsons". Laws will be passed to shield monitors and television sets to prevent old-fashioned analogue interception of what is considered the property of the movie studios. In other words, if aliens do pick up anythign, it would be so unintelligible that it makes no difference from the randomness of background noise in space.
Even today, with power levels going down and down, smaller sattelite dishes and (relatively) simple compression, we are slowly but surely destroying any chance of aliens detecting us. A decade ago, it would be conceivable for someone to constuct from scratch the apparatus to decode a television signal. Now, how would we get past the stage of constructing a viewing card?
I know it's off topic, but it's the closest topic I've seen for a long time to put forward this line of thought:-)
Just some random thoughts off the top of my head before I go to bed tonight... Please don't take it seriously.
--
Karma makes sense. It makes a lot more sense if you add reincarnation.
Re:Our legacy, and an argument against encryption.
by
radja
·
· Score: 3
if the martians ever intercept terran tv-signals, they better not save it to disk. MPAA will sue them for copyright infringement. under US law. because US law is Universal (or was that Warner?).
//rdj
--
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Well, it may not have come to English from Swedish - though a lot of olde english words are old viking toungue -, but "sol" is the Swedish word for "sun".
C'mon people, we know it won't die. The Network Is The Computer. All that high-powered hardware and nifty Java code will outlive everything else in the universe.
Or do you mean that other Sun? (grin) --
-- Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Is the question really interesting at all? It apparently took a mere 10 million years for a land-based mammal to evolve into whales. In five billion years, humans might even have evolved into energy-based creatures like in Babylon 5. For certain, they will not lokka bit like the humans of today - who don't even look like the humans of a trifle 10,000 years ago.
Re:How long will mankind last?
by
Steve+B
·
· Score: 3
Now it evidently doesn't make sense to take for x the total lifespan of humanity, because men are not uniformly distributed along it. So we take for x the total number of human beings that will have lived in the entire duration of humanity. We would like to know what x is. We don't have a clue. However, one thing we do know is how many people have lived so far, or, which is roughly the same thing, your (or my) "rank number" in the list of all human beings (in order of birth). This number, y, is of the order of 8*10^10 (80 billion that is). Further, since you (or I) have no reason of being one given human being than another, y is uniformly distributed between 0 and x. Consequently, we can apply the result I just gave, and conclude that x has one chance out of two of being between y=8*10^10 and 2y=1.5*10^11.
The obvious fallacy is that Og the caveman, Euclid, Charlemagne, or Isaac Newton could, in principle, have done the same calculation (with the values of y and birthrate appropriate to their times) and gotten radically different expected dates for Doomsday. Thus, either the assumption of uniformity is wrong or the calculation is fundamentally broken.
/.
-- /.
If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Come on! I'm an American! I don't even care what the earth looks like 5 years from now. All I know is that it's my kid's problem, and they better fix it so they can put me in a good nursing home. I need to go now, there's a bucket of used car oil out front and it isn't dumping itself in the gutter.
Sure, planetary nebulae are pretty and impressive, but that's not what humanity should be worried about, at least as far as our sun goes. Current theories of stellar evolution point out that already, the Sol should have a sizable core of He "ash" that isn't yet hot enough to fuse into higher elements. As this He core grows, the pressure will build under the force of gravity, causing both the core temperature to rise and the sun to shrink. Solar luminosity could increase by a factor of 10% over the next 100 million years.
If this doesn't sound like much, recall that climatologists predict dire consequences of a 1-2 degree greenhouse effect. A 10% increase in solar output would cause much worse heating. However, we humans wouldn't even last that long. The seas regulate greenhouse gasses by locking up carbonates in seabed sediment; increase the temperature (a little) and the rate of deposition increases. Unfortunately, increase solar output by about 5% and this process runs away. Result: no more oxygen in our atmosphere. Or carbon dioxide, for that matter, so the forests won't help then. By the time Sol gets to +10% luminosity, we're talking about oceans at a rolling boil. The atmosphere fills up with water vapour, solar radiation spits this into oxygen and hydrogen (unfortunately the oxygen at this point is too late to do any good) and the hydrogen escapes to space. Poof -- 200 million years and the Earth is as dry as Venus, and possibly as acidic.
Now how's Mars sound?
--
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Luckily Moore's Law applies to suncreen as well as CPU power with SPF rating doubling every 18 months or so.
By the year 10870 we should have sunscreen capable of SPF 2.6 * e^16, or enough to protect 1/3 of the population of Kentucky from the nasty rash that would develop as our star explodes.
Thank god the dark cold world of the future will contain the pale, personable, people from Kentucky.
-- Intergalactics - A pretty cool strategy game in a java applet
Actually, the sun will be around for a long time.
by
meckardt
·
· Score: 4
The subject of this article is the binary star that Hubble saw in the process of leaving the main sequence as its hydrogen runs out. But when this happens to a star, it is not the end of its life.
A star with the mass of the Sun blows off a lot of its material as it goes nova, but eventually the remenants (certainly less than 1/2 the original mass) turn into a white dwarf star. While this type of star isn't undergoing a lot of fusion at its core any more, it takes quite a while for the remaining energy to radiate into space. But eventually, the white dwarf will cool off. You might call the result a black dwarf... but its still there.
This month's (October 2000) Astronomy Magazine (http://www.astronomy.com/) has an article speculating about this very thing: what happens to stars (actually, what happens to the ENTIRE UNIVERSE) after the nuclear fuel runs out. What I got out of this article is that all those burned out stars are going to be around for a very, VERY long time... on the order of 10^40 (10,000 trillion trillion trillion) years. That is how much time it is estimated it will take before proton decay will eventually evaporate everything (except perhaps some black holes).
So all those who were worried that the sun was only good for another 5 billion years, take heart! Except for the fact that none of us will live through its transformation, we would have plenty of time to enjoy our planet's primary.
I was wondering how they can tell the difference between a new star, and this star (these stars??). The article says it is behaving in the same manner, so how can they tell?
Spectroscopy would be one way. If the star pair is rich in helium or heavy elements and the surrounding nebula isn't, that would indicate that the stars have been burning for quite some time.
Environment is another way. If the star pair is inside a star-forming nebula, then there's a decent chance that it's young. No nebula, and it's probably old.
Structure is another. If it's confirmed that one of the pair is a white dwarf, then it's most likely an old binary system (alternative is a protostar that captured a white dwarf). White dwarf stars are what you get when a star the size of the sun exhausts its fuel (after the red giant stages).
I have no idea which technique of the above, if any, was used for the star pair in question. The article didn't go into much detail.
Slashdot Mirror
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
4.9 billion years hence, assuming that only cockroaches and lawyers for the MPAA exist, what kind of legacy are we leaving for the inhabitants of a new star with new life, billions of light years away. With a plethora of PCs running their version of seti@home, what chance do they have of picking up our civilisation.
:-)
Practically none when you think about it.
By that time, encryption will be so advanced it'd take a billion years to develop the hardware and probably another billion to crack the zillion-bit encryption code used to ensure we all have to pay lots of samolens for our classic "Simpsons". Laws will be passed to shield monitors and television sets to prevent old-fashioned analogue interception of what is considered the property of the movie studios. In other words, if aliens do pick up anythign, it would be so unintelligible that it makes no difference from the randomness of background noise in space.
Even today, with power levels going down and down, smaller sattelite dishes and (relatively) simple compression, we are slowly but surely destroying any chance of aliens detecting us. A decade ago, it would be conceivable for someone to constuct from scratch the apparatus to decode a television signal. Now, how would we get past the stage of constructing a viewing card?
I know it's off topic, but it's the closest topic I've seen for a long time to put forward this line of thought
Just some random thoughts off the top of my head before I go to bed tonight... Please don't take it seriously.
Karma makes sense. It makes a lot more sense if you add reincarnation.
Well, it may not have come to English from Swedish - though a lot of olde english words are old viking toungue -, but "sol" is the Swedish word for "sun".
So now you know.
C'mon people, we know it won't die. The Network Is The Computer. All that high-powered hardware and nifty Java code will outlive everything else in the universe.
Or do you mean that other Sun? (grin)
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Is the question really interesting at all? It apparently took a mere 10 million years for a land-based mammal to evolve into whales. In five billion years, humans might even have evolved into energy-based creatures like in Babylon 5. For certain, they will not lokka bit like the humans of today - who don't even look like the humans of a trifle 10,000 years ago.
The obvious fallacy is that Og the caveman, Euclid, Charlemagne, or Isaac Newton could, in principle, have done the same calculation (with the values of y and birthrate appropriate to their times) and gotten radically different expected dates for Doomsday. Thus, either the assumption of uniformity is wrong or the calculation is fundamentally broken.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Come on! I'm an American! I don't even care what the earth looks like 5 years from now. All I know is that it's my kid's problem, and they better fix it so they can put me in a good nursing home. I need to go now, there's a bucket of used car oil out front and it isn't dumping itself in the gutter.
Sure, planetary nebulae are pretty and impressive, but that's not what humanity should be worried about, at least as far as our sun goes. Current theories of stellar evolution point out that already, the Sol should have a sizable core of He "ash" that isn't yet hot enough to fuse into higher elements. As this He core grows, the pressure will build under the force of gravity, causing both the core temperature to rise and the sun to shrink. Solar luminosity could increase by a factor of 10% over the next 100 million years.
If this doesn't sound like much, recall that climatologists predict dire consequences of a 1-2 degree greenhouse effect. A 10% increase in solar output would cause much worse heating. However, we humans wouldn't even last that long. The seas regulate greenhouse gasses by locking up carbonates in seabed sediment; increase the temperature (a little) and the rate of deposition increases. Unfortunately, increase solar output by about 5% and this process runs away. Result: no more oxygen in our atmosphere. Or carbon dioxide, for that matter, so the forests won't help then. By the time Sol gets to +10% luminosity, we're talking about oceans at a rolling boil. The atmosphere fills up with water vapour, solar radiation spits this into oxygen and hydrogen (unfortunately the oxygen at this point is too late to do any good) and the hydrogen escapes to space. Poof -- 200 million years and the Earth is as dry as Venus, and possibly as acidic.
Now how's Mars sound?
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Luckily Moore's Law applies to suncreen as well as CPU power with SPF rating doubling every 18 months or so.
By the year 10870 we should have sunscreen capable of SPF 2.6 * e^16, or enough to protect 1/3 of the population of Kentucky from the nasty rash that would develop as our star explodes.
Thank god the dark cold world of the future will contain the pale, personable, people from Kentucky.
Intergalactics - A pretty cool strategy game in a java applet
The subject of this article is the binary star that Hubble saw in the process of leaving the main sequence as its hydrogen runs out. But when this happens to a star, it is not the end of its life.
A star with the mass of the Sun blows off a lot of its material as it goes nova, but eventually the remenants (certainly less than 1/2 the original mass) turn into a white dwarf star. While this type of star isn't undergoing a lot of fusion at its core any more, it takes quite a while for the remaining energy to radiate into space. But eventually, the white dwarf will cool off. You might call the result a black dwarf... but its still there.
This month's (October 2000) Astronomy Magazine (http://www.astronomy.com/) has an article speculating about this very thing: what happens to stars (actually, what happens to the ENTIRE UNIVERSE) after the nuclear fuel runs out. What I got out of this article is that all those burned out stars are going to be around for a very, VERY long time... on the order of 10^40 (10,000 trillion trillion trillion) years. That is how much time it is estimated it will take before proton decay will eventually evaporate everything (except perhaps some black holes).
So all those who were worried that the sun was only good for another 5 billion years, take heart! Except for the fact that none of us will live through its transformation, we would have plenty of time to enjoy our planet's primary.
I was wondering how they can tell the difference between a new star, and this star (these stars??). The article says it is behaving in the same manner, so how can they tell?
Spectroscopy would be one way. If the star pair is rich in helium or heavy elements and the surrounding nebula isn't, that would indicate that the stars have been burning for quite some time.
Environment is another way. If the star pair is inside a star-forming nebula, then there's a decent chance that it's young. No nebula, and it's probably old.
Structure is another. If it's confirmed that one of the pair is a white dwarf, then it's most likely an old binary system (alternative is a protostar that captured a white dwarf). White dwarf stars are what you get when a star the size of the sun exhausts its fuel (after the red giant stages).
I have no idea which technique of the above, if any, was used for the star pair in question. The article didn't go into much detail.