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

I wouldn't put too much hope in this

[nzhavok]

after all what are the chances your going to survive the asteroid impacts, catastrophic earthquakes, global warming, ozone depletion and the global flooding after the melting of the polar ice caps?

Solar Output

[Detritus]

I've read a number of articles that say that life on Earth will be destroyed in a few billion years by increased radiation from the Sun. The Sun's output is slowly increasing as it ages. At some point, the Earth will go into thermal runaway.

20 Ways the World Could End

[jsse]

Actually Discover has an article pointing out 20 Ways the World Could End - long before Sun expanding to get us all. Just telling me sun is a whimpy boy doesn't really relief me at all. :)

(btw, I think 17 is about the present world. :)

7.7 Billion years

[Mr. Spleen]

I think it's safe to say that humans won't be around long enough for us to worry about this problem. The rate of evolution of species will make us into something else looooooong before then. Even if we are around, we will certainly have the technology to provide light and keep the Earth's geothermal reaction going long enough to move the entire planet to orbit another star. Hell, we may even be able to refuel the sun and keep it going for another 13 billion years. Humans have only been around for 100,000 years, and we've come a long way, but it's only just the beginning of our exponential curve upwards. Just hope we don't kill ourselves off first.

Mr. Spleen

So where to go?

[jezreel]

As shown in several movies and recent popul.-charts, humankind will *have* to move to another planet/place due to overpopulation. I wonder where the nearest places are? Do we even have enough ressources to build appropriate spaceships, like, real big and to fire them up? (intentionally not talking 'bout money, there will be enough in case of emergency)

I bet we'll waste the last drop of oil driving to McDonalds to get one of these new SpaceBurgers(tm)

Re:So where to go?

[Anonymous Coward]

at some point, we'll realize that we have to make our population like 1% of what it is now, so we'll randomly select one out of every 100 people, or pick the 99%-ile for intelligence, perhaps, and only those will be allowed to live. the others will be given the option of uploading themselves into a virtual software world before their bodies are turned into baby food. This virtual world will be a lot like this one, unless you want to be creative and put effort into developing your own personal world. Most of us will exist in RAM somewhere, backed up reduntantly on disk, of course, long before we have to worry about whether the sun will expand enough to engulf us.

The question is: do you stay out here in the 'real world,' or go into the the world that seems real in every way that this one seems real. You have a bit more security in this one, but hey, Jeri Ryan (7 of 9) is never going to be your girlfriend in this one, and you can't put Bill Gates on the rack in this one either. The virtual world could model this one perfectly, in all important respects, and perhaps you even get to be God or Q, but somebody will have to run the machine. You could still even communicate with outsiders via Internet, the Internet world being exactly the same whether you're carbon- or silicon-based. Sometimes I read /. postings that seem like they were written by bots whose language module only goes through 4th-grade level, and I wonder if some people haven't transitioned to virtual worlds, unbeknownst to the rest of us. If any /. users are already in virtual worlds, do respond. What's your particular world like? Are you a Q? Details.

And then again, perhaps I'm just too tired and should stop reading /. till all hours of the morning.

Re:So where to go?

[Luyseyal]

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.

Indeed, distribution is the main problem. We sit here and pay farmers to raise crops and let them dry up and die. Admittedly, many of these crops are not approved for human consumption since they contain alterations we consider safe for Food[tm] (i.e., cattle, sheep, etc.) but not for people (silly FDA vs Dept of Agriculture games). But the point still holds... distribution is the main problem, for political and economic reasons. Some countries hate us and don't want our food; others cannot afford the shipping costs. It'll work itself out eventually.

That population study in Nature is really good and holds with gut feelings a lot of us have had for years. If we can keep from some World Dictatorship, affluence will help the third world catch up and their populations will drop accordingly.

randomness,
-l

Not now, but when?

[labradore]

Okay, so we probably don't have to start preparing for the expansion of the Sun anytime soon but this brings to mind an interesting question: when do we have to start worrying? In other words, how long will it take to move an entire population off of the Earth? What would we take with us? Would we take lots of minerals? Lots of other species? Would we rather try to alter the Earth's orbit? How long would it take for us to do that safely? How do you move an entire planet? If you abandon the Earth, what information do you record about it to take with you? It seems to me that this is such a large undertaking that if we have to move with anything like todays technology we would want to start at least 50 thousand years before the eminant catastrophy. It seems to me that it would be the single largest undertaking in history.

On the other hand, if we plan on lasting that long I suppose it would be a good idea to colonize wherever possible. Mars and Venus seem like obvious candidates. Mars seems like a no-brainer but Venus would be the real challenge. Could we alter its orbit and the greenhouse effects in its atmosphere?

I think it is interesting that we expect that our own species will not last that long. I don't have any evidence for our longevity, but consider that we are the only species that we know of in Earth's history that is intelligent and uses tools to survive. We are the only species that we know of that significantly changes our own environment to suit us and we're the only species that can reach beyond our planet. It would seem already that we are a statistical anomoly.

Re:At least we'll have time to prepare

[eclectro]

There's an interesting short story by Isaac Asimov called The Last Question that deals with some of these very topics.

We don't have 7.5 billion years

[pyramid termite]

Nothing to worry about, 7.5 billion years is LOT of time, even with todays technology you could probably colonize whole damn galaxy by then,

The problem is, that's not the time limit we have to deal with - we have to start the process before we run out of readily available resources and before we destroy our civilization (or an asteroid or whatever does it for us). If civilization is destroyed, the survivors will have a lot harder time bootstrapping themselves back up to our level because much of the easily mined resources may have already been used up and what's left takes a certain level of technology to get. If they need the technology to get the resources, but need the resources to get the technology, they're checkmated.

An optimistic guess is that we have a few hundred years to get our act together and get off the planet. A pessimistic guess would be that it's already too late. I think we've got 50 to 100 years, but that's a short time to learn to live in space and get a critical mass of self-reproducing culture and techology up there. We should have done more than we have. We need to start soon. There may be only one chance and this may be it.

Yellowstone, aka "The Happiest Deathtrap on Earth"

[Chris Burke]

I don't know about having a wide-area effect, not having read up on the issue but noticing that unlike most volcanos Yellowstone seems to let out a lot of pressure on a regular basis. But anyway...

Despite being one of the most beautiful and spectacular exhibits of geology on earth, Yellowstone certainly is a scary place to visit. Just prior to when I was there, part of a parking lot had collapsed into the hell of boiling mud just underneath. It made me kinda nervous, since one normally doesn't think of the possibility that the ground will suddenly open up beneath you and send you to a horrible burning death.