Slashdot Mirror
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."
Just when we were about to figure out free energy!
And to think, we were only 10-20 years away from Cold Fusion....
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
Yeah fuck this shit, I'm out of here!
Depending on who you believe, the Earth will be inhabitable for a billion more years or so, or a couple hundred years.
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.
Just think--an end to war, violence, depravity, poverty, oppression. Everyone will TRULY become equal then. Who knew the sun could be so... so... progressive?
I guess we should party til the last days then since we have so little left
I'd better start with my bucket list.
So Linux on the desktop will really never happen! Pity.
-- Cheers!
. . . and to summarize TFA - Prof. Man Cuntz says, "Wear lots of sunscreen"
Well, so much for the real-estate market bouncing back. I mean heck, who wants to buy property that doesn't have sufficient air conditioning?? :)
Bark less. Wag more.
This is exactly the conclusion of this article of Scientific American, May 2009.
"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...
If you believe your local religious nutball, it will be sooner than that. 2012 (for those confused in their religiosity, mixing Mayan and Christian myth), 2 years (if you're one of those bozos who believe the Iranian president is the new Mahadi), by the end of this year (if you believe the wingnuts who think Obama is the anti-christ and national healthcare the end of civilization), or several times in the past decade (if you're one to jump into your bunker everytime the Jehovah's Witnesses call the end of the world).
Get your Apacalypse here! Step right up! One to a customer! Step right up!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Cosmic Rays are electromagnetic radiation, they have no charge.
Untrue. Cosmic rays are mostly high energy protons.
Cosmic Rays are high energy particles, not electromagnetic radiation. They're mostly protons.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
troll, I'll take your bait. The IPCC doesn't advise paying more taxes, but using our resources better : more insulation, more energy-efficiency ... which leads to : you needing to buy less energy. see for example : http://www.naima.org/pages/about/releases/2001/ase.html
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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
Wooosh.*
*Not the sound of the atmosphere evaporating.
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.
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.
The question is how does it take for terraforming a planet?
Big Job. Takes decades.
Yep, me too. So long, and thanks for all the fish ...
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
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.
Lets put it this way, by that time, technology has advanced a lot. And we probably have colonized rest of the planet system.
You can put a huge mirror slightly closer to sun than lagrange point (to compensate by gravity the idea of having huge solar sail) Then target that somewhere where extra solar radiation would be useful, outside of earth. Perhaps even, targeting small portion if to its shadow on earth, so that the darkness wouldn't come to its shadow in day light, but simply day being less bright. Anyway There are thousands of different ways of doing that thing. Only thing that could prevent us surviving this would be some other catastrophe for instance a nuclear war, that takes all the options of making such things impossible. By the time its a problem IF modern human civilization is still around then we can pretty much block it, and probably with better method than could be imagine from current technology. With modern technology we COULD make a sun screen should we pool earths resources to that project so that it would be finished within 100 years.
©God
Cosmic rays include many kinds of charged particles -- protons, electrons, alpha particles etc -- streaming out from the sun (and arriving from other places). Electromagnetic radiation is also known as sunlight, and is, as you said, not deflected by magnetic fields.
From TFA:
Maybe nobody has visited us because, from interstellar distances, Earth doesn't look like a place that could harbour life?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Do you think this gives them enough time to get it out???
You can fool some of the people all of the time
I've been laughing my ass off about a friend telling me he bought a house in Italy. Italy! That idiot! In less than half a million years Africa will be all over Italy!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just when we were about to figure out free energy!
G(T,p) = U + pV â' TS
A(T,V) = U â' TS
What else is there to figure out?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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!
I could - if needed - get myself a Prius. Would that slow down the sun from getting too warm?
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
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.
World Ends Tomorrow: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit (old journalism joke)
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
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!
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
In our case it won't be pressures, but lack of them. If my ex-wife had been norn a hundred years earlier, she would not have survived childbirth, as she only weighed two pounds. My girlfriend's vagina is so tight that there's no way she could give birth naturally, but she's a mother, having given birth by C-section.
We are at the point of self-selecting, and we are evolving to be taller. There is no environmental reason for that. In just six thousand years we have evolved to take pleasure in a cat's purr. Evolution continues.
Free Martian Whores!
The purpose of this whole post was to tell us about your girlfriends vagina, wasn't it?
I read an article about capturing an asteroid into Earth's orbit and using it to slowly adjust the Earth's orbit so that it stays in the habitable zone of the sun.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
>By the time the earth is uninhabitable, we will have terraformed Mars and Europa.
I don't think so somehow. I'd give us all 100 years tops:
* 2030 - Major/Vast global wars over resources
* 2035 - All the infrastructure that we take for granted today will be but a dream.... referred to as the golden years. Mad Max 1.
* 2045 - Mad Max 2 (lets not talk about Mad Max 3) lifestyle. Nomadic, barbaric and feudal fiefdoms circled around the last few remaining energy resources.
* 2100 - humans loose ability to read/write
* 2200 - I, for one, welcome out xyz overlords...
Its already too late as no effort is being made to find alternative resources... one days we'll just wake up with, "ZMG!!11oneone... no fuel!"
Humanity as a whole is less interesting in scientific endeavour and natural selection is no longer at work as we actively encourage our stupid/lazy/selfish behaviour via socialism and x-factor (pop star type show).
With the Sun getting too hot, we won't need cold fusion. We will just need to shade the tropics with highly inefficient PV cells.
And the employment situation will be improved with all the post-hurricane repair workers required... Future Earth, you can thank me for this contribution to your survival by building a statue in my honor. It should be made of gilded marble and be large enough to be seen from space. You're welcome.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
What else is there to figure out?
How to make unicode work on slashdot...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Aren't there some much more nearby potential problems that will face the Sun-Earth system by itself (i.e. without meteors from space, etc.), like the Ice Age? Currently, we have passed the interglacial optimum (which happened three to five thousand years ago) and statistically, we are heading toward a Big Winter (popref GRR Martin - "The Winter is Coming" :) ). Technically, we are currently in an Ice Age.
-- Sig down
Source: PopulationConnection.org
You can something positive about this without feeling guilty or giving up having children of your own:
Source: Wikipedia
That means if most people limit themselves to just 2 children the global population will stabilize if not slightly shrink. You can also help by telling other people these facts so when it comes time to plan their families they can make a decision that will contribute to a better world for their children.
* 2100 - humans loose ability to read/write
Mod +5 Ironic
'The Earth's period of habitability is nearly over on a cosmological timescale...
Last call.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
My girlfriend's vagina is so tight that there's no way she could give birth naturally,
That will all change after she goes through puberty.
and we still haven't found a method to either safely store it away or make it less hazardous.
Even though it's been said 1e6 times before on /. and I'm sure someone will say it elsewhere, bullshit.
You realize that nuclear power is the opposite of clean energy? It creates highly dangerous/toxic waste that's dangerous for thousands
Please stop spreading this dangerous misinformation. Do you even know how much waste you're talking about? Imagine a cylinder 10mm in diameter. A 5mm slice of that cylinder will supply your energy needs for a year. The rest of the world stores the byproducts safely on site, and there's no reason we can't do the same. Future reactor designs will burn the fuel more completely resulting in less (and safer) remaining waste.
Burning coal (the only practical alternative to nuclear) releases far more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power ever has or will. And don't even get me started on the mercury poisoning of lakes, etc.
I'm in the same mindset as you.
Up here in Canada, the Green Party used to have a wiki for their policy that intended to foster debate. On one of their pages, they decried fission. I posted a comment (not an edit, a comment), asking, basically that if the looming problem is global warming, and the waste products of nuclear fission are manageable, how is replacing coal plants with nuclear plants a bad thing. My comment was deleted.
Kinda stunning.
There are elements of the Green movement that are irrational, all you have to say is "we must/mustn't do X because it's good/bad for the environment", I consider myself a Green, and I find this behaviour abhorrent. While GP paints with too broad a stroke, imo, the colour is just right.
I am assuming you mean uranium mining. It's about as bad as coal mining, and the area that needs the most improvement. It's basically just a grind and sift method, separating the trace amounts of uranium from the massive amount of rock and sand. A process that should automate pretty well. It will take some doing (initial time money and energy) to get a clean mining operation designed and implemented. With that said if simply presenting a problem is enough to stop you in your tracks then you won't get very far. A problem is simply an opportunity for invention, and invention is what turns the crank of progress.
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.
Nuclear Fission is the energy of right now. Problem is too many DIPSHITS are in the way of plentiful cheap energy.
With a few small localized exceptions, there have been no laws preventing building nuclear plants. We stopped building nuclear power plants because they weren't cheap. Little to do with the dipshits (ok, some lawsuits); mainly to do with the bean-counters. Coal is just cheaper.
Now, maybe if we institute a carbon tax on fossil fuels and level the playing field, nuclear power might look more attractive. But then your kvetching should be aimed at those opposing said taxes, not greenies.
I'm an environmentalist who is not opposed to nuclear power, though I like some of the CANDU-derived systems better than fuel-rod systems.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Do you even know how much waste you're talking about? Imagine a cylinder 10mm in diameter. A 5mm slice of that cylinder will supply your energy needs for a year.
Do *you* even know how much waste *you* are talking about? The US alone has accumulated over 60,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from fission reactors. Your figure of a 5mm by 10mm cylinder per year of waste is ridiculous.
Yes, of course coal releases more radioactive material into the atmosphere. Since we have to store the nuclear waste, *none* of it ends up in the atmosphere.
Now I'm not saying coal is good, or that nuclear isn't necessarily worth it...but if you want to advocate nuclear power, then stop damaging its credibility with arguments like these.
I don't understand why you seem to think having radioactivity released into the atmosphere is preferable to having it stored safely at a power plant.
As for waste, a large coal power plant (under full load) requires about 10,000 tons of coal per day. This doesn't include the energy needed to transport the coal to the plant (via a big ass train).
And that nuclear "waste" that we've got 60,000 metric tons of? Were it legal to actually build breeder reactors, we could use it to generate more power, and be left with hardly any radioactive waste in the end.
What pressure does homo sapiens to evolve, given that our technological abilities largely shield us from the pressures of our environment?
Our technology itself. Hopefully. If we haven't figured out cybernetic immortality in a half a billion years, I'll be... well, dead, but disappointed.
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.
Nuclear energy is not clean.
The main reason nuclear energy hasn't been clean is that the ones we have had up to now have by and large been optimized for one single primary concern: producing weapons-grade fissionable materials. Manufacturing energy has been a welcome by-product of that and the waste an accepted cost.
If we were to instead design nuclear plants optimized for green energy production we could make them almost arbitrarily clean. We would use efficient breeder reactors that burn up almost all their fuel, and we'd sequester any remaining waste for proper disposal rather than spew the radioactive waste into the air for all to enjoy like our coal plants are doing today.
sigs are hazardous to your health
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.
Just like being environmentally conscious and opposed to GM crops. Absolute madness. Herbicide-resistant GM crops are fantastic for the local environment - they need much less herbicide use than either conventionally- or organically-grown crops to produce a decent yield, which means more green weeds, more flowers; more bees, butterflies and birds.
I used to work on the UK GM crop split-field trials, where half the field was conventionally-treated conventional crop, and half was herbicide-resistant crop treated with less herbicide (as designed). The GM side was always green, buzzing with insects, and had noticeably more bird-life; the conventional side was bare earth until the crop came through, then stayed much less verdant. The farmers loved the GM crop, as it needed less work (fewer sprayings) and less costly herbicide.
The 'environmental' protesters would always ruin the conventional half of the field. They saw the brown, ugly side and thought 'well that must be the evil GM side'. Of course, once half the split-field trial was trashed, the whole trial was wasted. The experiment didn't provide any useful data, and we in the UK are still spraying our fields with herbicide.
Greenpeace? Wankers.
Do *you* know the actual physical volume of "60,000 metric tons" of nuclear waste, offhand?
Plutonium: 19816 kg/m^3 http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Plutonium.htm
Uranium: density = 19.05 grams per cubic centimetre = 19,050 kg/m^3 http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_Weight_of_1_cubic_meter_of_uranium
60000 tons / 19 tons per cubic meter = ~ 3158 cubic meters, or approximately 1 to 3 olympic swimming pools, depending on depth. http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/JeffreyGilbert.shtml
This nuclear waste stuff redefines the meaning of the term "heavy" in heavy waste.
(...) The biggest objection to breeder reactors is that they produce or "breed" fissionable material under normal operating conditions. Ideally in a breeder reactor this material would then be used as fuel to produce more energy and less highly-radioactive waste, but objectors like to note that it could be extracted and used in weapons instead.
This is only really a problem because we have married ourselves to uranium and plutonium based reactor designs, again as a consequence of wanting to build nukes. The civilian offshoots of this technology are quite unpleasant as you say earlier. Had we had purely commercial motives from the start we would have developed thorium breeder reactors at an early point to largely avoid the whole nuclear proliferation issue.
sigs are hazardous to your health
Geobiologist Peter Ward claimed in his book The Medea Hypothesis . that the long term trend in CO2 is declining and there willbe too little for eukaroyote life in a few hundred million years. The early Earth probabaly had double-digit percentage C02 like its neighbors Mars and Venus. That declined to percent or two by the start of multicellular life a half billion years ago. Then It fell currently to three-hundreds of a percent until anthromophic burning looks it will double that. But the long term trend is decline. When CO2 falls below one hundredth of a percent it will be too little for photosynthesis, plant and animal life. The Earth will then revert to the bacteria planet it was for most of its history.
Where does the CO2 go? It dissolves in the ocean and turns into carbonate rock where its pretty well locked up, unless a volcano burns it back into gas. Sea creature skeletons add to this process. 99.98% of Earth's carbon is currently locked in limestone. The rest is in the biosphere and petroleum deposits.
Fair simple global environmental engineering could reverse the process. Just burn limestone to release CO2. Thats how people make lime for cement. But do this on a gloabl scale.
P.S. The Medea Hypothesis is a pun on the Gaia Hypothesis. Porfessor Ward suggests ecology is not stable and friendly to life. But it goes bserk and causes mass extinctions now and then. Read the rest of his book.
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!"
Just to expand upon the parent's point: Native Americans most certainly knew of the wheel and applied it where they felt it was useful, however for most tribes it simply wasn't useful. To make it more useful you'd have had to construct decent paths or roads, and the benefits of improved roads would have been of little help save for facilitating wheeled-transport use. It was not that inventing uses for the wheel was beyond them... but that the wheel's continued use requires a level of "buying into" the idea across the entire culture. Frankly, their choice to use canoes and horses was probably optimal for the purposes they wanted to achieve.
It should be made of gilded marble and be large enough to be seen from space. You're welcome.
Ok, we did that, but it melted and crumbled under the blazing heat. We live underground now. - The Future People.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Eventually fissile material will cease being fissile and yet still be dangerous. FBRs are a stop gap and it also allows us to make more out of a given sample of fissile material, but, it doesn't solve the waste problem, it just puts more stops before a given sample of material will become a problem.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard this week. Is your definition of a city 10x10 meters or something? Even so, with a city that small, you could just dig up all the polluted land and shove it in another barrel.
And why the hell would an "armored transport car" even a) transport nuclear waste and b) transport nuclear waste through a city!
And to top it off, if the American "documentaries" (with periodic action sequences, scary narrator and annoying background music) that I've accidentally been exposed to are any indicator, I'd say you're better off reading wikipedia or something. Hell, I'll even copy paste a section for you:
So in the future, please refrain from opposing/supporting something just based on what you've seen on some television show. It's called the boob tube for a reason and that reason is not because they have female breasts on it.