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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..."
If only to watch and point and laugh.
You really do have to wonder exactly why people do so much research into this.
Is there something they aren't telling us??
I was hoping for a spinning pulsar :)
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
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?
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
first anonymous post
We will blow ourselves up LONG before that ever happens.
I'm not worried about this. It will in most likelihood have died by then. Yet, my estimates may be wrong too...
He added that, although the Earth is safe from destruction, life here still faces some formidable challenges in the far future. The new calculations suggest that the surface of the Earth will become too hot to sustain human life for a few million years about 5.7 billion years from now.
This is about 200 million years later than previously thought - an extra period of grace that humans could use to develop technologies for living on a hotter Earth, such as building communities deep underground. Alternatively, the human race could move to another planet for a while.
[snip]
hard to imagine that after 5.7 billion years we'll still be worried about something as banal as the expanding sun. No, by then we'll have figured out a way to transmute our living soul into pure electronic energy and we will roam the cosmos, imortal and all-powerful.
Or we'll die out. How long did the dinosaurs live?
On the other hand, we may still be working the bugs out of the missile defense shield. Damn those decoys!
Sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
There goes my end of the world party! What am I going to do! Caterer is going to hit me with a huge cancellation fee!
--------------
David O.
Pointless research - the human species will have all transcended their current forms to become 4 dimensional toasters with great hair.
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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
At the end of a lecture young student puts up his hand:
"Professor, earlier you commented that eventually the sun will collapse and life on earth as we know it will cease..."
"Yes," responds the professor, "but not for billions of years."
The young student exhales a sigh of releif. "Thank goodness, for a moment there I thought you had said millions."
will be most relieved. Myself, I plan to watch the earth age and die around me, thanks to advanced medical tech from some out of town friends.....
"God is dead!" ----Nietzsche "Nietzsche is dead!" ----God
Don't worry Bill Gates will be awakened from his cryogenic freeze to save the planet (I mean his monopoly). The only down side is that 1/10 of the rocets he builds will crash.
Sean
Astronomer Patrick Moore said: "In the end, no one really knows what is going to happen. But my message would be 'don't panic'."
Those of us who have already seen the galaxy on 30 Altairian dollars a day agree...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Damn! I guess we'll just have to wait for dubya to turn into the antichrist and have ourselves an old fashioned armageddon...
Shift happens. Fire it up.
Would somebody please translate that gabbled story in to real English? I think a forth grader could write up a better description than that!
This matters why? I mean, sure, they have to update the textbooks, but why is this worth researching, let alone newsworthy? Can this problem help us solve other problems that need to be solved?
Any astrophysicists mind?
-- Dan
Now, i dont want to start a war or anything, but earth is the only planet that we know that sustains life, could this be divine intervention? thoughts worth thinking about in my opinon. i hope this gets a good mod.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
as long as it lasts long enough for me to make first post!
riiight.
You can make your slogan "Earth: As Close As You Can Get To The Action, With Your Feet Still On The Ground!" Or maybe even "Earth: Now The Closest Planet To The Sun!"
Seriously though, 7.7 Billion years from now is a LONG TIME AWAY. I highly doubt that any life form higher than an insect will exist then in a form that we would recognize today. And while possibly providing insight into what planets orbiting other white dwarves we should look to for signs of past life (once we get equipment that can resolve their existance, much less probe their surface), I don't think this is anything anyone needs to worry about today.
Of course, assuming further checks prove that the Earth will survive past the death of our own sun, perhaps we should leave a legacy to the rest of the Universe by planting the sum knowledge of mankind somewhere safe below the surface (assuming we could sheild it from geologic destruction) and send out satellites to the furthest reaches of the galaxy proclaiming the gift to all Life, everywhere. Just be sure to pack this with some T-Shirts that read, "I went to Earth, and all I got was this lousy Data Crystal."
I love space/universe shows on Discovery and the like, watch it all any chance I get. But I don't know as much as the next guy because I didn't have any 'formal' space nerd training.
Why do I write? Read the quote below.
For decades, astronomy textbooks have insisted that the Earth will be engulfed in an inferno billions of years from now as the sun burns up its nuclear fuel and swells to become a gigantic red star.
You mean this is actually in the texts? I understand why someone would want to check and make sure that the earth isn't going to be burnt up in a nuclear inferno when they leave for work. Hell, check to see if we should celebrate New Years.
But when you are sitting there doing all that astronomical math, and you notice the number is higher than 10,000, why don't you just quit?
Leave the math for later generations.
Get your Unix fortune now!
As much as a procrastinator as I am, its always reassuring to know I have even MORE time to put things off.
Now a team of astrophysicists at Sussex University in England has uncovered a significant flaw in the standard view of how the sun will evolve, with dramatic consequences for the fate of our planet.
.
I've problem trusting the research results from University major in sussing out sex
Btw, anyone would tell me why Englishmen had to build University around sex?
(yes, it's a joke, take it easy)
wonder if this will happen before MS is actually punished for their monopolistic behavior??
This early post is dedicated to osm!
JON KATZ: PORTRAIT OF A PSYCHOPATH by osm
"mickey and mallory know the difference between right and wrong. they just don't give a damn." - steven wright, natural born killers.
jon katz. champion of the outcast teen. what has made him so sympathetic to the cause of the columbine killers? why has this event seemingly resonated so deeply within him? is jon just sympathetic to the life of the modern teen? or is there something more? something insidious?
these are the questions i've been asking myself as i've read katz's obsessive columbine writings. these were the questions i was asking myself as i sat mesmerized by my natalie portman poster. like a torrent of sudden rain, my spirit guides bombarded me with the heinous images of jon's life. i was so disturbed i could barely bring myself to write this.
jon was born and raised in a small, southwestern town. his father, carlito, was a mexican immigrant who worked for the department of transportation, building highways. his mother, juno, was a gypsy who earned money by performing card readings. the family made a comfortable living and jon was a happy, outgoing child, who even contributed to the family income by cleaning dog excrement from the neighborhood sidewalks.
carlito was a hard-worker. in fact, he worked too hard. one particularly hot, sunny day, he was overcome with heat exhaustion. the incident had changed carlito forever. the charming, jovial, caring carlito became a vile, egomaniacal, misogynist. carlito soon lost his job and spent the rest of his days lounging around the house.
the first incident of abuse happened when jon was but 6 years old. juno had lured a siamese cat into the house. she let the cat roam around until it was time for her to prepare it for the family's dinner. jon had just come home from a long day of sidewalk cleaning. carlito was laying on the couch with a 40 ounce schlitz. the putrid stench of dog manure flooded the house as jon closed the door. carlito was roused from his wrestling match. infuriated, he jumped off the couch, grabbing juno's cat by the tail. carlito stormed over to jon, who had backed himself into a corner. jon could do nothing but cry as carlito severely beat him with the screeching cat.
the more jon cried, the more carlito beat him. after fifteen minutes of abuse, carlito plunged his hand into the stomach of the dead animal and gutted it right there in front of jon. he ate the entrails and forced his stunned son to wear the pelt as a hat for the rest of the week.
the beatings continued for a few more years, at a lesser severity. until just after jon's 10th birthday. jon invited his friend ron over to spend the night. carlito would usually hide in the bedroom whenever anyone visited, so it was always a good way for jon to escape the beatings. the boys had had fun roaming the neighborhood that evening, making castles with the dog excrement they found and then pretending to be giant monsters, from a japanese science fiction movie, going on a rampage and smashing the castles. the boys played hard that night and went to bed early.
but the boys could not sleep. instead, they decided to play doctor and various other games. the laughter awakened carlito. he stormed into the bedroom and flipped on the light. there, he beheld his son on all fours with his little friend mounting him from behind. the boys were playing "dog." carlito lost control. he threw ron out of the house, sending him walking home and picked jon up by the feet.
carlito stormed outside, carrying his naked son by the feet. he rampaged throughout the neighborhood stopping any time he ran across a dog. carlito would beat hapless animal to death, using his son as a club. once again, he would plunge his hand into the dead animal, remove its organs and devour them. he then collected the pelt.
after carlito had slaughtered twenty dogs, he tied together all of the pelts into a make-shift body-suit for jon. exhausted, and with jon bruised, bloodied and crying, carlito stumbled home. carlito wrapped jon in the gruesome clothing he had made and threw him into bed. he left the room momentarily, only to return with an empty 40-ounce. he stuck the open end into jon's rectum. jon cried himself to sleep.
jon grew sullen and withdrew from his classmates. his grades slipped into oblivion. the teachers knew what the problem was, but dared not speak up. jon would sit in class, staring blankly out the window. nothing seemed to interest him. he never did his assignments. he began to arrive at school wearing ozzy osbourne and motley crue t-shirts. the faculty continued to ignore him. jon had become lost in a nether-world and none could pull him out.
none but timmy. timmy's family had recently moved into town from california. jon felt him come in the room and turned from the window to behold his first real crush. timmy was tall, muscular, tanned and blonde. it was instant love for jon. but he dared not express his true feelings. he became best friends with timmy. they did everything together. jon's emotions were tearing him apart.
jon couldn't stand it and his father had taught him well. jon invited timmy to go searching for peyote. the two wandered deep into the desert, the hot sun beating down on them. the intense heat slowly began to affect jon. he turned pale. he began to shake uncontrollably. then timmy made a fatal mistake.
timmy put his hand on jon's shoulder and asked him if he was ok. jon became enraged. he picked up a rock and hit timmy in the head with it, knocking him unconscious. jon plunged his shaking fist into timmy's stomach and removed his organs, eating them on the spot. jon then removed the skin from the withered corpse and carried back to his car.
jon kept the skin in his room, making passionate love with it at night. snuggling with it in the morning. he would whisper sweet nothings into its ear and run his fingers through its golden head of hair. jon was in a state of bliss. until carlito detected the scent of rotting flesh. jon was given another gruesome beating.
jon fell in and out of love several times throughout highschool. each of the unfortunate objects of his affections would suffer the same fate and, once they mysteriously vanished from school, jon would return to his withdrawn state. only one teacher had the courage to try to help jon his senior year of highschool.
jon had signed up for a computer class that year. his computer teacher recognized jon was troubled and took special care with him. jon soon developed a deep love for his teacher. but jon was ashamed. he couldn't quite grasp the complicated concepts that were part of the course: basic wordstar usage, lotus 123 and flipping the power switch. jon felt like a fool in front of his new love. he could not deal with his feelings.
jon began to amass a deadly arsenal in his bedroom. he collected all manner of guns, rifles and bombs. he drew a detailed map of the school and devised a plan for decimating the entire building and everyone in it. jon dreamt of becoming a notorious mass-murderer, no longer ignored. no longer a powerless worm in the eyes of his beloved mr. donacelli.
the night before "senior day." jon decided to celebrate by getting drunk. tomorrow his glorious plan would come to fruition. jon got drunk off of a gallon of cheap vodka. utterly incoherent, he climbed onto the roof of his house with the remains of his bottle and a fat cigar. he danced, naked, on the rooftop and yelled at the top of his lungs, "i'm gay, touch my balls!"
jon's father woke from his alcoholic coma, not knowing that the neighbors had called the police. he ran outside and found jon on the roof. carlito climbed the side of the house and grabbed his son by the hair, throwing him onto the ground below. carlito spotted a lizard in the grass near jon. he jumped down, caught the lizard and began to severely beat jon. the police arrived within minutes.
the police immediately took carlito into custody. they searched the house and found jon's arsenal, which they confiscated, thinking it belonged to carlito. carlito was subsequently convicted of assault and conspiracy. jon would never be beaten again.
april 20, 1999. jon sat in front of his television watching with fascination as the columbine tragedy unfolded before his eyes. wistfully, jon thought back to his days in highschool. he knew these two young men were heros. they pulled it off. an accomplishment he had only dreamt of. jon took out his pen and paper and began work on his next slashdot article.
...and i was going to get on the other ship with the middle management and the telephone repairmen...
I guess the game was wrong. Okay, time for a re-write of what happens.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
"Earth, what a tan!"
{this below a picture of George Hamilton}
I like this picture or this one.
Get your Unix fortune now!
All of this sounds very exciting and interesting but i was thinking about intergalactic wireless networks and /. is my caffeine now.
hyperspace travel. I do not know whats going to happen to this world tomorrow - if we humans dont blow up ourselves in the next one hundred years - then we might contemplate something billions of years away but still it would be nice to have old Earth when its time for my incarnation. Doh 4am and out of coffee -
"This is about 200 million years later than previously thought - an extra period of grace that humans could use to develop technologies for living on a hotter Earth, such as building communities deep underground. Alternatively, the human race could move to another planet for a while."
if they think that the human race will still be around that far into the future, i have some sad news. us crazy advanced primates are completely insignificant in the evolutionary timeline. chances are we get blasted off the face of the planet by disastor (like the dinasarus?) or do it ourselves. more likely still is that we are replaced by something better adapted.
i hardly think the race will be around lonk enough to need that extra 200 million years. it's kind of a shame though; the teasers for Final Fantasy MXXI were looking promising.
--
no caps for the wicked
i miss them :( :( :(
(linux is dead)
A few million extra years a few billion years from now. This is great news!
...
...
pizza here yet?
...there were only cockroaches and Dick Clark.
-- anthony
Who's gonna care in 100 years? My *god* people, get some priorities!
P.S. You people make me sick!
The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred three months ago, and now we're involved in a WAR and you people have the gall to be discussing the fact that the calculations that the sun would expand to a red giant and engulf the earth are wrong???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
The bodies of the thousands of innocent civilians who died (and will die) in these unprecedented events could give a good god damn about the fact that the calculations that the sun would expand to a red giant and engulf the earth are wrong, your childish Lego models, your nerf toy guns and whining about the lack of a "fun" workplace, your Everquest/Diablo/D&D fixation, the latest Cowboy Bebop rerun, or any of the other ways you are "getting on with your life" (here's a hint: watching Cowboy Bebop in your jammies and eating a bowl of Shreddies is *not* "getting on with your life"). The souls of the victims are watching in horror as you people squander your finite, precious time on this earth playing video games!
You people disgust me!
Wow, someone must have been very nice this past year.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.
YB5 has quietly passed us by, which is nice.
GCM d+ s+:+ a- c++ U? P! L E-- W++ NM+ V PS- PE+ Y+ PGP- t 5+ X?+ R+++$ tv+ b+ DI++++ D---- G e
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
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.
Previous studies have reached the same conclusion,? bi bcode=1993ApJ...418..457S&db_key=AST&high=3b8eaa35 e207349
a paper published in 1993 had the same results,showing that the Earth would not be engulfed by the Sun at any time in the future.
Sackmann, Boothroyd and Kraemer coupled the stellar evolution calculations with a simple model to predict the climate of the Earth to estimate
that a 'moist greenhouse' will occur 1.2 Gyr from now. See the original paper at NASA ADS:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query
u think my webserver will crash by then?
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Scientists have discovered that Evolution is a sham and have decided to support Creationism.
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)
0 001 11 1
I hope my Peril sensitive Sens-O-Matic 9000's are working that day.
--
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
Two-hundred million years... I wonder if our Commander of Mexican Foods will get around to fixing the Page-lengthening post bug before then! Oh, and: suck an egg from the anus of a chicken, Klerk.
Regards,
A. Nonimus Coward
After 7 billion years, there will be absolutely nothing left to evolve, irregardless of whether evolution is a reality or not.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This is a relief for me because I was planning to live forever by replacing my body parts with pig organs. The big hole in my plans was that the Earth was going to be eaten by the sun. Woohoo!
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
M$ would have perfected their product. Stable OS, 100% monopoly of the planet and moon...
on the other hand, if they havent... 5.7 BILLION year seems a loooonnnngggg time, I can't wait.
I work with a bunch of geeks. And that's okay. They do their thing and I do mine. Most of the time I'm happy for them, that they get joy and happiness out of playing with electronics. Admittedly I disagree with a lot of their thoughts about life. People used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe, then it was the sun, but now we all know that the computer is the focal point of the universe, projecting its cathode ray goodness on our souls. You can't eat, sleep, breathe, live or run a business without one, or so we're told.
But if there's one thing I have no tolerance for, it's the geek phenomenon known as slashdot.org, the sorriest case for content on the web I've ever seen pawned off and gleefully accepted by the masses.
When I look at magazines, newspapers, or any other source of information, I judge them on three items: usefulness/uniqueness of content, quality of that content, and the depth of coverage regarding that content.
Slashdot has none of these things. And yet people try to convince me that the people who run that website are working hard at it.
Say what?
That's right - when Andover.net filed its IPO, making the editors of Slashdot instant wannabe millionaires, someone in the office said "Those guys put in a lot of hard work, and they deserve the success."
Now, I write code for a living, and I work hard at it, so I have a good idea of how slashdot operates. I guarantee you that the entire website is little more than leftover code from college projects and other unrelated work. At the very best, it is ill-conceived and poorly developed, which explains in part why the interface is so miserably awful, and the site is unbelievably slow.
Let's theorize what goes on in the average day of the slashdot editors:
10:42 AM - get out of bed.
10:45 AM - first Dr Pepper of the day.
10:46 AM - unglue keyboard from desk, check stock market.
10:56 AM - find a few interesting tech stories on the web. This is easy, since users send them to us all the time.
11:04 AM - post said stories to slashdot, disregarding spelling and journalistic impartiality.
11:08 AM - start playing Quake 3 (or whatever the game of the moment is).
3:15 AM - go to sleep.
If I'm wrong about anything, it's that they get up even later than that. And I couldn't figure out what time that order the pizza for dinner. But they have pepperoni on them.
Content - The content of slashdot is, admittedly, targeted towards geeks. But apparently not very smart ones. Regardless of the target audience, the content is never challenging - it never pushes the reader to think. Have we become a society where the last place you really exercise your brain is in grammar school? The average news article on slashdot is little more than a snippet from some tech rag about a new product that everyone loves, usually with an editorial comment tossed in telling everyone how they should feel about it.
I can get that same crap anywhere else. The TV tells me what to think, newspapers and magazines back them up, and slashdot does the same exact thing and is somehow worshipped as a haven for free thinking.
Quality - Why not try out that spellchecker? One word for you slashdot folks: dictionary. Try one on for size. Work on your spelling and grammar, and once those improve I'll attack the quality of your writing.
Consider this - Jon Katz is the best writer on slashdot. If you're familiar with his work, then you might appreciate that, or you might realize how lousy the writing must be if that's the case.
Katz has written some decent articles for slashdot (In particular, his Hellmouth series). But he's too wrapped up in the medium to see what he writes about. He's too busy dropping buzzwords that define his writing more than his actual content.
But the truly amazing thing about him is - almost everyone who reads slashdot hates Katz. They loathe him. The self-proclaimed geeks who read slashdot don't want to be challenged by his writing. There are people who attack every article he writes, regardless of the content.
Depth - unless its the updated release schedule for the new linux kernel or a new game, you're not going to get much repeat coverage on slashdot. And you're not likely to extract much from an article unless you already knew a certain amount of information about the topic. Once again, the exception might be Katz, who writes multi-part articles, but mostly that's because he's a hopeless wheezebag.
The thing that really scares me is that all sorts of little slashdots are popping up all over the web, popular sources of sludge pawned off on the accepting readers, and we readily accept is all as verse. Is this what 200 years of the Industrial Revolution primed us for? 50 years of television? Or was it something else? In my short lifetime I've watched the quality of information sources decline to a point where coverage is simplistic enough that it could be fictionalized and no one would notice the difference. While people ignore the WTO or slaughters in Burundi, Angola, Cambodia, anywhere else to devote coverage to wonder drugs, the newest Internet craze, the Hollywood minute, or any other sort of "News you can use."
And now, in a time when information should be even more readily available, so much of it is crap that finding the gems is rarely worth the shit you need to shovel. The sort of crap you find at slashdot instead of insightful knowledge about this increasingly impersonal, computerized world that we all blithely accept and even embrace.
And that is why slashdot sucks. That website isn't encouraging any free thought, any independent thinking, and certainly not any dissenting viewpoints on the information age. And we all accept it, even 'credible' websites like Wired frequently link to slashdot as their source of expert information and news updates.
If you're not directly connected to the information you want, you're not likely to find anything of depth nowadays. And if you have that sort of connection, then why do you need the web in the first place?
As if cars, skyscrapers, television, mini malls, supermarkets, drugs, war, and McRainForest (brought to you by the Big Mac!) weren't enough, now we have to venture out on the web with millions of other people, and not once challenge out horizons or open our minds.
And here I was thinking no matter what my date field would never need to be bigger than enough to hold 5.8 Billion Years.....
Watch them blame us poor programmers when all hell breaks lose......
Wanted : A Signature.
You're not really a programmer just somebody who thinks he can program. If you're so smart then why dont you create your own site! Too lazy? or too incompetent? The latter seems appropriate.
I don't really believe that life on earth will last that long.. so why don't we just wait and see:)
Actually.. everything will be gone when I die.. even time. Talking about after that time is totally irrelevant for me. I would care if i could.. but i won't be able to.
I'm a bit amazed at peoples lack of vision concerning this. What happened to building starships, colonising new worlds, building Dyson spheres, wormholes... all that stuff.. and that should just in the next few thousand years.
If the human race hasn't been annihilated by the myriad dangers of space, or by itself, by the time this happens, I'd be pretty disapointed if it hadn't spread all over the galaxy. i'd expect us to be able to *make* planets and stars by then.
it's one or the other, either we are destroyed eons before the sun dies, or we've colonised the universe / evolved into something far greater, and so it's just a trivial event.
It's a bit depressing to read that so many people just think we're going to go the way of the dinosaurs, and it's a just a matter of time. I'm sure we should be trying to survive a little harder than that.
At least we'll moving up from 3rd planet, all the way up to number one! Mother Earth will be so proud...
"I had some long term plans that I had been putting off..."
:-)
Surely you mean going to bring forward?
Oh...stop...yer killin me!!!
And aren't that all astronomers depressed?
Work every day with such an astronomic numbers of years, and knowing that they only are going to life 50 years more.
An example of this knowledge of limited life time is well known by phisic scientists.
Each generation thinks that they has discovered the unified theory, but it never happens.
Is like read The Bicentenary Man (the book not the movie!) you see throught the eyes of the robot how shot is the human life (shoft but wonderful).
How can you some body that is every day fighting with thinks like the Sun is going to expand in X billion of years, living with it and knowing that they never are going to see what they life every day trhought their dreams?
I have a Scientific Depression.
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.
If you, my minions, wish to prove yourselves loyal to ME, LINUS TORVALDS, you will smack the shit out of NZHAVOK and all the other leftist believers of psuedo-science.
I am your LORD, and you will do as I say.
I currently have 37,542 pornographic images ("pr0n") residing on my hard drive, for a grand total of 4.36 gigabytes! Just thought you'd like to know...
Is your son obsessed with "Lunix"? BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War. It is based on a program called "xenix", which was written by Microsoft for the US government.
These programs are used by hackers to break into other people's computer systems to steal credit card numbers. They may also be used to break into people's stereos to steal their music, using the "mp3" program. Torovoltos is a notorious hacker, responsible for writing many hacker programs, such as "telnet", which is used by hackers to connect to machines on the internet without using a telephone.
Your son may try to install "lunix" on your hard drive. If he is careful, you may not notice its presence, however, lunix is a capricious beast, and if handled incorrectly, your son may damage your computer, and even break it completely by deleting Windows, at which point you will have to have your computer repaired by a professional. If you see the word "LILO" during your windows startup (just after you turn the machine on), your son has installed lunix. In order to get rid of it, you will have to send your computer back to the manufacturer, and have them fit a new hard drive. Lunix is extremely dangerous software, and cannot be removed without destroying part of your hard disk surface.
What happened to the old calculations? Did some new information come to light or did they forget to carry the three last time?
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Because the Vogons are going to destroy this planet soon enough anyway.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
What happens if the computers they are using are running Windows XP?
The time could be off a couple of thous...
What do you think?
hard throbbing cock post.
Roadkill is yummy.
Does this really matter? We all know some ass is going to push The Button, or unleash a super-virus, or some damn thing within a few hundred years - it's plain luck we've lasted this long without a nuclear war.
I'm the stranger...posting to
I've already got my towel.
I'm so excited about this finding and what it really means! It's kind of like the end of daylight savings, where you get an extra hour to sleep. This is like it, but only better!!!!
Can Nuclear war kill 99% of population on earth?
The 60 million that survive can go ahead.
And if all humans are killed, life in oceans can survive, so it's important to that life when is the sun to kill all earth life.
And that life throught 7 billion years can evolve to be as intelligent as humans (or more).
IMHO we are too many worried about humans, when the future is going to be ruled by the sons of the sons of the sons... of actual bugs. (Not software bugs. That bugs what can do is killed us all).
More time to perfect Green Jello!
The northern polar ice cap is indeed a big ice cube and will act much as you say. The anarctic cap however is sitting on a continent. That ice is not part of the oceans displacement in any form. If the southern polar ice cap melts, the oceans will indeed rise. Runoff from places like Greenland will probably count some as well.
This expansion of the sun is such a needless bloat. I tried to tell God to use Linux instead but he just wouldn't listen.
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
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.
after all what are the chances your going to survive...
You are a flaming moron. If you cannot learn the difference between the words your and you're you have no right posting here. In fact, you have no right graduting from the 8th grade. Just because CmdrTaco is the poster boy for illiteracy and works for slashdot is no excuse.
You should be summarily ashamed. No go out and get an education and don't return until you do.
P.S. If you do not know the difference between to and too, you should also have them teach you that as well.
This post is for everyone who asks: "Why bother?" I've seen some other answers as well, but they did not really say anything. How about this:
This little piece of cosmos is the only one we have fairly accurate information about. We can measure the orbits of the planets, their masses, mass of the sun, etc. with a high degree of accuracy. This makes it usefull in verifying theories. Which in turn helps us understand what is going on in other parts of the universe (since we assume that we're nowhere special and everywhere is pretty much the same).
How do we look for planets? One way is to put a spectrometer on a light comming from a distant star and measure the shift in wavelength due to orbiting mass. You need to ask yourself - how did we know THAT would work??? Any ideas?
What about the possibility of being fried by the sun, in its current state?
I remember watching on TLC, and reading subsequently, that the earth's magnetic field is degrading by half every 1600 years. Geophysics isn't my strong suit - Can anyone lend any supporting/debunking information?
As we all know, the earth will be demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. And we don't have to worry, since there will be loads of strange fun afterwards anyway.
I have been living my life knowing that all the evidance would incinerated.
Now earth will float around the universe forever as an icy tomb waiting to be dug up, until some alien race finds it and gets pissed enough at human beings to cut earth v3 out of dvd region 1 or somthing.
You think they could of told us this before we voted for Reagan.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
In two different physics classes, the profs made a point of saying that an explosion doesn't change the object's center of gravity. Even though the mass goes flying off helter skelter, the mass'es cg remains where it was or was headed. The equations are still solved as if the mass was compact.
Why would this scenario be any different?
What's even more curious is what happens to matter's ability to attract other matter when the matter is converted to photons? Does the ability to attract matter vanish when matter transmutes to photons?
Well, this is a sigh of relief for the folks over at kurzweil's website (kurzweilai.net) Knowing you are going to live for ever must be a huge burden.
How 'bout the difference between no and now? This elitist /. crap has gotten so old...
Red Dwarf.
Future Rimmer: "I'm from the future! I've come to warn you: in three million years, you'll be dead!"
Past Rimmer: "Huh, will I really?"
The coolest voice ever.
Why? because as ice they displace the same amount of space as they would if they were water. It is achimedes' principle. It is what keeps ships afloat, what makes submarines work.
You nearly have the right idea, but you are still wrong. Anobject that displaces an amount of water that is equal to the weight of the object, then it will be neutrally buoyant. It will neight float nor sink and will be at the mercy of whatever up and down drafts there are. An object that displaces an amount of water that weighs greater than the weight of the object, then that object will float. A copper penny will sink because it displaces very little water, but an aircraft carrier will float because it displaces and incredible amount of water.
The amount of space that is displaced is illelevent as it is the weight relationship of the object and the weight of the water that is displaced.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Now I can sleep at night
I once read a theory by a Brit scientist that by the year 3800, give or take a century or two, that the radiation from the sun will start to fry all life on earth. If this is true, then we need to get our butts in gear on development of interstellar spacecraft, and hope we can do it in the next 1500 years.
We will have squeezed every last resource from this planet long before then. If we can't figure out how to live off the earth and control our emotional/moral weaknesses in 7 billion years then I figure we should let the sun cook us. Hell, it only took 1 billion years for life to evolve naturally in the first place.
In a mere 3 billion years, the Andromeda galaxy will slam into the Milky way. Ouch, and possibly curtains for life on Earth.
>;k
I don't have any sources, but this is not a new theory in any way... astronomers and astrophysicists have a rather good understanding of angular momentum and its application, and have maintained for some time that the Earth would not be completely enveloped by the outer layers of our sun as it goes into a red-giant phase.
As others have pointed out, the natural life-cycle of the sun will sear all life from the surface of the Earth long before any potential engulfing happens (as if it was the engulfing that mattered; the outer layers of a red giant are extremely thin, much more tenuous than our atmosphere). We'll experience some kind of runaway greenhouse effect something like a billion years before the sun enters the red giant phase... and our galaxy will collide with Andromeda before the sun goes belly-up.
One of our hopes for preposterously-long-term survival, as researched (with a smile on his face and a glint in his eye) by Greg Laughlin (et al.), is for the Earth to be caught by a wandering type-M star and pulled out of the solar system.
But really now... we're talking billions of years, here. It's fun to think about, but calling it "news" (especially "breaking news") is a pretty harsh misnomer.
There are also some deadlines for any species that follow us. E.g., the earth has had fairly consistent temperatures even though the sun has been getting brighter because CO2 was getting locked up by life and other geological processes. So the amount of greenhouse gases have tended downward over time.
So far so good, but there's little CO2 left to remove from the atmosphere. As it continues to drop, we'll lose trees. No trees, no wood for construction projects. A bit latter, we'll lose even bushes and shrubs - the only form of plant life will be grasses.
Over an even longer timeframe (250 MY?), we'll hit a "wet greenhouse" phase. Hot oceans release more water vapor, which initially produces clouds that reflect sunlight. But this only goes so far, eventually the "water vapor as greenhouse gas" effect will dominate the "water vapor as bright white clouds" effect and the oceans will boil. This eventually leads to a "dry greenhouse" like Venus.
I'm not sure whether I'm optimistic (I think our window is much wider than you), or pestimistic (if we fail as a species, our successors may not have enough time to evolve.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Human foresight doesn't extend beyond timescales longer than two or three human lifetimes. It's just human nature. Look at the resistance to taking any action against far more immediate threats (global warming, overpopulation, depletion of fossil fuel reserves, etc.). If the rise in temperature per year stays below a certain rate, people will drive SUVs around until the atmosphere reaches the boiling point of gasoline. People care about their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, but generations beyond that, they only care about in a sort of theoretical sense. Ever hear about that $10 that would be worth $9 million today if it were put in a bank in 1801 and left to accrue interest until now? And yet not one of my ancestors in 1801 seems to have cared about me having $9 million.
So I have to laugh when I see people suggesting that the human race will carry out these wild survival plans that require 200-300 million years for their execution. Nobody will act on a threat from the sun even when it's a million years off, because nobody seriously worries about what's going to happen to their descendants that far in the future. If the sun were even going to explode in a thousand years, you would still be hearing guys on radio talk shows flatly denying that we should do anything involving any sort of personal or national sacrifice.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
Well, at current rate we wont survive another 5000 years not mentioning millions or/and billions years from now... just look at last 5000 years, weapons went from rocks to nukes, medicine from voodoo dolls to the vaccines... population from some# to 7 billion...
....
We destroy everything we touch...
So for all I care we all be dead soon any way
Who controls the information, controls the world...
On close reading, the referenced article doesn't claim the mass loss is due to radiation of energy.
I expect the dominant mechanism would be mass lost via solar wind, eruptions, etc.; not E = mc^^2.
-- lars
je ne suis pas un fou
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.
The TV tells me what to think, newspapers and magazines back them up, and slashdot does the same exact thing and is somehow worshipped as a haven for free thinking.
Slashdot is certainly not perfect, but it's got one big advantage over TV, newspapers and magazines: most of its content comes from the readers. The ones who run this circus get a few sentences to try to tell us what to think (or what to think about), but then the readers take over. If Slashdot sucks, its our own fault. If we want it to be better, it's our own responsibility to make it so. You don't get that chance with TV, newspapers, or magazines. If they suck, you're stuck with it.
Used to be you could take your business elsewhere, but now they all song the same song.
"Entropy only exists in a closed system, that's with a border. The Earth's not a closed system, it's powered by the sun - so fuck the damned creationists - Doomsday, get my gun."
Who's down wit entropy?
Every last homie!
CNN has this quote under a picture near the bottom of the page:
;-)
The space rock 2001 YB5, identified by the arrow, could have wiped out France, according to a scientist in Britain.
Would the British really be all that upset about that?
... forgetting to account for the radiation of energy and the resultant decrease in mass seems to be a fairly major oversight ...
While we're at it, did they also overlook tides?
Just as the tidal friction of the moon on the earth is accellerating the moon (gradually moving its orbit outward while slowing the earth's rotation while friction-heating the earth's core and thrashing the oceans and atmosphere), the earth's tidal friction on the sun should be gradually moving the earth's orbit outward, at a cost to the sun's angular momentum.
This is because in both the earth/moon and sun/earth system the orbit and central body spin are in the same direction, with the central body spinning faster than the orbiting body's period. Tides raise "bumps" on the central body, which (thanks to damping from friction) are carried forward with the central body's spin and produce an accellerating force on the orbiting body.
In the sun/earth case the sun's tides on the earth also transfer some angular momentum from the earth's spin to its orbit, increasing the effect. That doesn't happen with the moon, because the moon has already used up its angular momentum and is tide-locked with the earth.
Nothing compared to the effect on Jupiter, of course. But as long as the earth's orbit isn't in a harmonic relationship with that of another major planet the effect should be nontrivial and the interactions with other planets should inetgrate out to zip.
So, was that taken into account, too? If not, the start of the bake cycle could be even further into the future.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Hey, you might be a panzy, but some of us can take it like real men. Jesus, some people just can't stop whining :)
kidding around as usual
-mike
... by the Scottish Sci-Fi writer Iain M. Banks has a great take on this.
In fact pretty much anything by him is to be recommended.
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --