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."
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.