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The End Not As Near As We Thought
HiyaPower writes: "According to recent calculations cited by this article in TheAge, the calculations that the sun would expand to a red giant and engulf the earth are wrong. It will expand, but due to the loss of solar
mass over time due to the conversion of mass into energy, the earth will spiral enough further away thus avoiding the fate of Venus and Mercury. Personally I find this a great relief, I had some long term plans that I had been putting off..."
I thought the Long Now Foundation's 10,000-year clock was an optimistic project. Why would anyone, especially learned men of the Royal Society, postulate that human life will exist in its present climate-dependent position even a million years from now?
We have gone from living at the mercy of the elements to building living environments in space in the span of only a few millennia, with the bulk of the technology being developed only in the last century. And now we stand poised to rewrite our own genome. Does anyone expect that, if mankind still exists five billion years hence, that it will be limited to this puny ball of rock, entirely dependent on this one yellow dwarf? Or that we will even resemble our current selves, either physically or intellectually?
Mankind may indeed pass through many cycles of near-extinction before the next million years pass. Look at our current speculative fiction. Scarcely anyone attempts to write about the future beyond a few thousand years, because we know it is beyond imagination.
Perhaps it would be best to say of stories such as this, that the Sun is still expected to continue, without substantial changes, for any conceivable lifespan of the human race as we now know it. Beyond that, we're whistling in the solar wind, for only God can know.
Or we'll die out. How long did the dinosaurs live?
Well, the dinosaurs as a family lasted for over a hundred million years, but individual species didn't last anything like as long. Ten million years is a very respectable age for a species, though some become extince much earlier and others last much longer. Given our presence at the top of every food chain on the planet, we're in a rather vulnerable position because we could easily wipe out our food sources. I won't go down the doom route, but I'll simply say that it's _far_ from a foregone conclusion that humans will be around even a million years.
And there are no competitor species waiting around to take our place as articulate and intelligent tool users--apparently we outcompeted the nearest competitors in our niche. That's to be expected, and nothing unusual, but it does mean that worrying about piddling things like novae is a little silly.
Why? If the population increases to more than the environment can handle, then the "leftovers" will simply die off. You are correct that the Earth can only sustain a limited number of people, and that in order to keep growing at our current rate, we will have to find new homes. If you had actually read the population predictions, you would see that the population will stabalize and then decrease by the end of the next century. What do you expect will happen?
while(true) {
grow(people);
while(count(people) > count(food))
kill(people);
}
Maybe your morals are just too great to allow those innocent people to die (or really, to never be born) because of lack of resources and space. Before we focus on building the massive spaceships you request, let's take notice that the population *already* exceeds the resources in many parts of the world.
I'm not an astrophysicist by any means, but beyond the general idea of "increase the breadth of human knowledge and understanding", there's the reality that we are totally and utterly dependant on that big ball of flaming hydrogen and helium 67 million miles away. Any ability to improve our modeling of that warmish ball of gas may result in some insight on how to eventually control it and thus control our own fates.
This is obviously assuming that we manage to not kill ourselves off beforehand, which remains questionable.
Long term is heat death of the universe, but if humanity survives those few quadrillion years then I think we'll have "succeeded".
Consider a large iceberg. Say, 90% of it lies underwater, 10% of it above water. This is because it is (in my example) 11% less dense than water. But it still has the same weight as the amount of water taken up by the submerged portion of the ice berg. Find any physics text book, or perform the experiment mentioned in one of the other posts, put an ice cube in a glass of water, fill it to the brim and note the water level doesnt change when it melts.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Warmer seas melt polar ice, polar ice firmly entrenched on land doe not melt, and only is pushed off by new ice formation. Also, warmer seas give off more water vapor, and lead to higher rates of evaporation, more than compensating for the expantion rate, since this leads to higher precipitation it then leads to greater ice formation near the polar caps, causing giant ice sheets to cover the land, and to some extent even the ocean.
'Global warming' is merely a misinterpertation of the global tempererature shift required to enter a global ice age. Ice ages move slowly, and I would guess that this one will take another 1000 years to get up to speed with oceans warming enough to cause enough ice formation for continental ice sheets to form.
Your arguments remind me of the people who said the last tree would be cut down in 2001. Well it's 2002 now and I can see thousands of trees just from where I live alone.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
It seems that the general consensus seems to be that we will either move to another planet/system, or that we will figure out something to change our orbit. But it just makes me wonder if we'll even last that long. Sure, we'll discover more ways to defend ourselves from various astrological disasters, but what about US? What's stopping us from destroying ourselves? With the advances not only in science, but military. We're discovering more ways to kill other people, and people seem more inclined to use those ways for their own benefit. I think we just need to look at what we're doing to each other on earth BEFORE we can do something as a whole.
And you say "look at the resistance to taking any action against far more immediate threats"? And you list GLOBAL WARMING?? So, improving the survivability of humans against bad weather, of crops against climate change, of distribution systems (including CAPITALISM and FREE TRADE, my friend), all of which are going on all the time due to spending bazillions of investor and taxpayer dollars, do not rate as "any action" against global warming?
You also list DEPLETION OF FOSSIL FUEL RESERVES. I guess you haven't noticed the fact that these are generally under the control of a PRICE SYSTEM that takes into account such depletion as it happens, when it happens, and communicates that depletion rapidly over the entire planet's population, requiring no special translation into anyone's "native language"? That's taking ACTION, my friend, whether it fits into your narrow little worldview of what constitutes ACTION. (Which I guess probably is only "pass a buncha laws regulating daily human behavior", eh?)
And OVERPOPULATION? Are you NUTS? The biggest problem with Western Civ today may well be the fact that it is DECLINING IN POPULATION. That's right, what happens when people become educated, wealthy, free, and respectful of laws and property rights, is they STOP INCREASING THEIR POPULATION. Every time.
That's why people like YOU are the biggest threat to humanity's survivability. You refuse to accept the fact that people are, everywhere, ACTING on their own initiative to insure THEIR and their offspring's survival, and since you don't particularly like their actions and hate the steps they take (e.g., drive their children around in SUVs, which are SAFER and do jack-squat to the environment compared to any other vehicle worth driving), YOU are the sort of person who will use FORCE to IMPOSE YOUR WILL on them, REDUCING their practical ability to SURVIVE whatever comes down the pike.
I'd rather let those "guys on radio talk shows" you claim "flatly deny we should do anything involving any sort of personal or national sacrifice" rule than someone like YOU. At least they let EACH of us decide WHAT we will sacrifice, WHEN we will sacrifice, HOW we will sacrifice it, based on what WE each think is best for humanity as WE see it, compared to someone like YOU, who insists everyone march to YOUR silly little tune.