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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??
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
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!
Pointless research - the human species will have all transcended their current forms to become 4 dimensional toasters with great hair.
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."
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!"
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."
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?
Well, as a budding astrophysicist (undergrad physics/astronomy major at UofA), planetary/stellar evolution is quite an important area of research (in fact, a whole branch of astronomy focuses on this. It's even a separate degree program at some schools--planetary science). Also, forgetting to account for the radiation of energy and the resultant decrease in mass seems to be a fairly major oversight, in violation of some of the most basic concepts of orbital motion, such as the fact that the downward force due to gravity (and, hence, responsible for the behavior of orbits) is proportional to the mass of the central object and inversely proportional to the radius squared. Decrease the mass, and the force decreases, resulting in a change in the dynamics of Earth's movement, and increasing the perihelion and aphelion.
This is worth researching because Earth and its fate is somewhat important to us, for reasons that should be obvious. This will help us model the evolution of the solar system up to the white-dwarf stage, one which will be reached by most main-sequence stars (we think).
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.
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.
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.