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Earth's Period of Habitability Is Nearly Over
xp65 writes "Scientists at this year's XXVIIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil agree that we do not yet know how ubiquitous or how fragile life is, but that: 'The Earth's period of habitability is nearly over on a cosmological timescale. In a half to one billion years the Sun will start to be too luminous and warm for water to exist in liquid form on Earth, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect in less than 2 billion years.' Other surprising claims from this conference: that the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size."
500 million years give or take a few hundred thousand to develop warp drive capability. Either we'll figure it out or we'll blow ourselves up.. I doubt it'll be the sun that kills off life on this planet.
as this may lead to the devastation of the planet, we must invest in a way to protect ourselves from the sun (and you thought GLOBAL WARMING was bad, this shit here is SOLAR WARMING), so I anxiously await Al Gore's appearance on the scene since there's plenty of government spending and fear mongering to be done here!
What climate model projects that the Earth will be _uninhabitable_ within a few hundred years?
- 65 Million years ago, we were mice.
- We have 500 Million years left (worse case).
Conclusion : your time is _almost_ over.
Brilliant !
Forget about millions of people dying of hunger and disease today,
let's worry about what's gonna happen five hundred _million_ years from now !
First things first !
P.S.: oh, don't let the "greenhouse efect" hint miss you... Global-warmers are up to anything these days...
"that the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size."
Homo sapiens may not be the ideal kind of advanced life form either. Otherwise it wouldn't destroy its own habitat on a global scale, nor cause avoidable mass extinction of other species. The good news? We don't really need to start worrying about the sun quitting on us. We'll be long gone before that, and I don't mean on another planet. I mean gone in a dinosaurial kind of way...
I'm confused... how can 2012 be attributed to Christian myth even by the most loose of interpretations?
According to christian doomsday lore, several things which need to happen have not, including the mark of the beast, the universal persecution of the christian faith, the single currency system... the anti-christ...
And even then, the rapture is supposed to occur seven years before the destruction of this world... basically under christian theology, the rapture happens, then seven years of absolute devestation occurs.
Where in the world did you get the idea that the Christian faith even hints at something near 2012?
FanFictionRecs.net
There could be life somewhere else... but how would it be better? It's like saying life conditions in a particular continent are better than on another continent, so life is more in danger/ is better off there
Australia vs Antarctica, you do the math.
How do we know the dna mutations occuring (which according to the articles may have influenced life, endangered it)... didnt actually foster the right mutations for life as we know it... we dont have a recipy for life, let alone ideal life.
Lets see, the kangaroo, the ostrich or the platypus seem pretty specialized, which means there were probably TONS of mutations that didn't make it. Basic Darwinism. We may not have a recipe for life, but if you throw the same ingredients together in various proportions (flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, water, egg, oil and chocolate chips) you will eventually get some damned good cookies. The recipies that don't get eaten are in danger (endangered) of being thrown out.
I'll go even further and say that supposing we had an orange dwarf which according to the article lasts 10 or 20 times more... we may never be encouraged to leave our solar system... sometimes, knowing we're doomed if we dont do anything about it is actually a motivator to save our necks by working more. So the fact that we are doomed - in a long term - will force us to find other habitable places.
This one I actually agree with, it is like lighting a long term fire under our collective asses. Judging by Humans' propensity towards procrastination, by the time it is hot enough to make us move, they may be some very tan asses.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
They aren't saying we've "only" got 500,000 years they are saying that we've only got 500,000,000 years. Given that mankind in its present form have only been around for 100-50,000 years and that we've only had civilisations for around 10,000 years then even 500,000 years is a mind bogglingly staggering amount of time.
Sure we could do propulsion systems, space drives, kill ourselves directly, die from a meteor strike or new virus. What these people are saying is that in 500,000,000 years or more that the earth as it currently stands won't be a great place to live. This doesn't mean panic. It doesn't mean say "who are they to say we aren't going to have technology to fix this problem" its a piece of science that helps us understand more about our planet and solar system and the potential for life elsewhere in the universe.
Half a billion years ago was the Cambrian explosion when life really got going on this planet. So the odds on humans existing in our present form is pretty much zero given the amount of evolution that has happened in the previous 500 million years.
Clever technology is one thing, but half a billion years is another. Evolution works wonders on those sorts of timescales.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
They talk about drawrf stars being better because of the lower amount of high energy EM coming off them (as well as they're longer life). But I wonder if they've stopped to consider that perhaps high energies were required to kick start life as we know it. If the early earth had just been an ocean of soup sitting under a benign, dull, low power star radiating mostly in the IR part of the spectrum its possible that chemically nothing very exciting would have ever happened.
Don't worry, the Earth will remain inhabitable even in the most dark of the global warming scenarios.
Just not by humans.
If true, our existence is quite incredible. Life on earth is thought to have taken between 2 and 3 billion years to evolve to the current biosphere extant today. Obviously, that means it took the process of evolution all this time to design creatures as complex as humans, as well as the other sophisticated life on this planet.
More than likely, humans will develop technology that will allow humans (or more likely, human creations) to spread beyond this star to the broader universe beyond. Yet, had evolution been a mere billion years too slow, or had random accidents meant that intelligent life was never evolved, then this would have never happened.
This is something coming up from devil's mind which keep changing every decade...I don't bother with these kind of news as one day everyone have to die.
the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size
Since life evolved to suit the conditions, this statement is silly. The Sun and the Earth are perfect for life as it is found in the Sun/Earth system.
95% of cockroaches vote Republican, so I'm not worried.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Religon making sense, doesn't that destroy the need for faith?
The rapture actually happened in 2005, it's just that no one was worthy of being taken at that time so we didn't realize there was anything out of the ordinary.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
the universal persecution of the christian faith
But this is totally going on! We can't even say "Merry Christmas" any more, it's all "Happy Holidays" and bullshit like that!
No, really, lots of people think this. I've met them.
... is a story about a very vivid mushroom trip that some guy named John once had.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Not sure how serious you intended to be, because that's not entirely out of the question.
It's called ergotism: A condition that rises from eating cereal grains contaminated with a fungus. Symptoms can include seizures ("demonic possession") and hallucinations ("divine inspiration").
One can easily imagine that, in an era before sophisticated food storage and preparation methods, such an affliction could be rather common... indeed there are many historical records of ergotism epidemics in the middle ages. Why not in pre-biblical times as well?
=Smidge=
Nuclear Fission is the energy of right now. Problem is too many DIPSHITS are in the way of plentiful cheap energy.
yes every fucking one of you tree huggers that are against Nuclear power are MOTHER FUCKING DIP SHITS that are causing the world to stick to polluting sources like Coal and Natural Gas.
Fucking assholes ruin my planet because your too stupid to see the answers.
I'm out of here!
Yes, long before the earthe becomes uninhabitable. I'll likley be gone before you; my life is more than half over. Half a billion years is a damned long time. Humans will be extinct long before that, evolved to become some other species. Only sixty fife million years ago the birds were dinasaurs and we were small mouselike creatures.
By the time the earth is uninhabitable, we will have terraformed Mars and Europa.
I find the speculation that "Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size" ludicrous. Life is here and we've yet to find any sign of it anywhere else. It doesn't have to be "ideal", obviously it's good enough.
By the time this happens we will have reached the other stars. So you can stop worrying about it.
Free Martian Whores!
Humans will be extinct long before that, evolved to become some other species.
Why do you say that? Species tend to evolve because the new form offers advantages/adaptions that enable them to better survive in the current environment. In the absence of this pressure there isn't much incentive to evolve. Sharks and crocodiles are two examples that come to mind -- they haven't changed much in the last hundred million years or so. You could go back to the time of the dinosaurs and they would still be recognizable.
What pressure does homo sapiens to evolve, given that our technological abilities largely shield us from the pressures of our environment?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
With only 10 billion left on the clock, maybe you'll learn to take a little time. Stop and smell the roses, while yet we have noses!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Most people are confused by what "faith" is. It's not as in "believe despite all evidence", it's more like your being faithful to your wife. It means being faithful to God, and worshiping him rather than Baal or money or other such trivialities.
If God has shown you that he is real, why would you need to take it on faith? Once you have seeen an elephant you don't have to take anybody's word that elephants exists.
Free Martian Whores!
You may be a troll and have hopeless grammar, but nevertheless as a "hippy treehugger" myself, I absolutely agree with you. Being a greenie and being OPPOSED to nuclear energy has always struck me as complete madness.
Save the planet, use clean nuclear energy!
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* 2100 - humans loose ability to read/write
Mod +5 Ironic
Man, nuclear energy is bad.
With the privatization of energy companies, nuclear energy is a disaster waiting to happen.
It's a matter of how the core-values of for-profit organisations manifest themselves in the market, which is essentially to maximize profits.
All companies attempting to maximize profits will reduce costs as much as possible. The only way a company is able to reduce their costs as much as possible when dealing with nuclear waste, is to overstep the line and then adjust their cost-cutting techniques so that it borders on that line.
Government regulation won't work, since governments core values are to maximize their own survival, and this is primarily faciliated by aligning themselves with profit-maximizing legislation for for-profit organizations.
You could argue that they don't have to walk the line, and can avoid mistakes, but considering what a wonderful service I'm getting from British Gas right now, I definitely do not want nuclear energy in their "competent" hands.
You can not recycle the fuel rods and other components. Also, Uran is as limited as oil.
Nuclear energy is not clean.
You could make the point that you need energy for making solar panels aswell, however that would be an unfair comparison (by amount and material).
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Were talking about hundreds of millions of years, what makes you think our current civilization will be stable on those time scales? Large scale disasters such as nuclear war or asteroid strikes that may be unlikely in the short term become very likely given enough time. Any kind of disaster or civilization collapse could lead to groups of humans becoming reproductively isolated, leading to speciation events. The idea that we will still be the same species in a hundred million years time seems pretty unlikely to me. Not impossible, but unlikely.
The US has accumulated that much waste because it is illegal in the US to reprocess that waste into more uranium pellets. Other countries with active nuclear programs recycle their waste, drastically reducing the volume and half-life of the net waste output.
Actually it's not. President Reagan rescinded President Carter's Presidential Order to forbid reprocessing.
The reason reprocessing isn't done in the United States is because, quite frankly, it isn't needed. We have plenty of raw uranium for the foreseeable future, an this lauded amount of Nuclear Waste (I'll just assume the parents declaration of 60,000 tons is correct) wouldn't even come close to filling a single football field (where it stacked in a square).
For going on 70 years of Nuclear Operations, a single football field of waste is pretty damn good compared to the tons of fly ash heaps we've got laying around.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"