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..."

Comments

"That's what I call taking the LONG view..."

[Tsar]

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.