Slashdot Mirror
The Far Future of Our Solar System
An anonymous reader writes "Sure, the Universe is expanding, the galaxies are accelerating away from one another, and it's looking more and more like they'll never re-collapse. The timeline of the far future looks pretty grim on large scales. But what's to come of our Solar System: of the Earth, our Moon and our Sun? This tour of the far future of the Solar System, scaling the timescales to the Big Bang being '1 Universe year' ago, puts it all in perspective."
Somebody turns off the simulator?
Aye, his blog is pretty damn excellent.
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/
Unfortunately after a billion years or so there'll be no humans left to see it, hopefully at some point we'll have moved some of our eggs elsewhere, perhaps with generation ships if Einstein was right and there's no other possibilities...
If only for the fact it sounds delicious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I need a unicorn chaser!
(But that was pretty awesome.)
"half-assed, hipster-inspired "web design"."
LOL
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I think I complained about the current layout when it came out. But that won't stop me from complaining about the shitty new beta.
Try "?nobeta=1"
I am sure we will go the way of the neanderthals and the denisovans and the whole bunch of bipeds in our region of the evolutionary tree. I suspect that there may be other beings that use their brains for more than just moving around in earths future. Perhaps we may be able to upload and download our consciousness and employ various new senses.
How long do you seriously think that that bypass will last?
We've all seen these kind of redesigns before. Even when it's blatantly obvious that it's going to be a disaster, most of the backers don't have the guts to admit that they're wrong, and then they refuse to cut their losses. The switchover happens, the users are driven away, and it's exceedingly rare to ever switch back to the system that worked.
My expectation is that the Slashdot beta site will go live at some point. The so-called "classic" site will no longer be available. That toggle will become irrelevant.
At least I can say I did my part and spoke out against this ruinous idea, before it happened, rather than just closing my eyes and using a query string parameter to temporarily pretend to make the real problem go away.
If neoteny provides any clues "homo animus" or the anime man may be our likely future.
humans a few million years down the line will be looking like eurasian anime characters
with cuteness not intelligence the most dominating feature although as they say looks
can be deceiving.
The human race will be okay...for now.
Funny thing is, the new beta is neither "half-assed" nor "hipster-inspired," and that's the worst part - that somebody obviously put a lot of effort into that horribly-designed, utterly unnavigable, visually confusing kludge of shit. The misprioritization of the beta design is Ballmer-esque in scale, as all of the things that made Slashdot good (strong sense of community, lack of censorship, elegant simplicity) are deliberately being phased out and in their place being put paid shills and inline ads; topped off with a UI so horrible that, unlike every other damn site on the 'net, cannot be avoided or made better by script-blocking.
Wanting to be another ZDnet or whatever just might have worked if Slashdot had that big corporate visibility from the get-go, but the only way to go from here is pissing off the small but fierce fanbase which made Slashdot great, without all the big corporate visibility required to maintain a site like ZDnet. Good going, Slashdot, you've fucked yourself. But you will be vindicated -- when your baby finally tanks, and you are laid off or reassigned to writing paid-shill articles and product-placements full-time and comments have been abolished entirely, you can sit in your skid-marked office chair with a smug grin and mutter to yourselves,
" Heh heh heh, good riddance Ethanol-fueled...you'll never troll me again! "
I made an edit a while back in reference to the "4 billion year mark", because it was inaccurate, even via the cite it provides:
"Median point by which the Andromeda Galaxy will have collided with the Milky Way, which will thereafter merge to form a galaxy dubbed "Milkomeda".[46] The Solar System is expected to be relatively unaffected by this collision.[47] "
If you actually look at the citation (originally, the previous one had something to do with collisions of clouds and particles) at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-collide.html, it DOES NOT SAY that it will be "relatively unaffected". To Quote:
"Although the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter. However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much farther from the galactic core than it is today. To make matters more complicated, M31's small companion, the Triangulum galaxy, M33, will join in the collision and perhaps later merge with the M31/Milky Way pair. There is a small chance that M33 will hit the Milky Way first."
While the sum contents of mass *may* be the same within our solar system, everything will be jumbled pretty good to where it won't even kind of look the same.
Take this timeline with a grain of salt. It is pretty apparent the moderators do little in terms of verification
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
humans a few million years down the line will be looking like eurasian anime characters with cuteness not intelligence the most dominating feature
That or the Eloi from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.
Let's make some different, very likely, assumptions. Today's nascent cloning technology is unlikely to even slightly resemble that of the future; today's human (and pet) genome, with all of its flaws, is unlikely to resemble that of the future; We'll no longer be farming animals for food, perhaps not even vegetables; AI will be here, as will robotics without AI (service class machinery); planets orbiting stars will not be the only viable human environment; technology in general will be almost unrecognizable in its power and efficacy; a system of more than enough for everyone will replace a labor based economy; overall, just with those few changes, no prediction based on today's extant situation is likely to come even close. Life spans may be quite extended. And that's not even counting the unpredictable changes -- for instance, in 1900, even later, no one had any idea what silicon electronics would do for us. Near term major change tech includes ultracaps, fusion (20 years out, no doubt at all, lol), driverless vehicles, significantly better building materials, the erosion of superstition and the rise of generations focused on objective reality instead of imaginary friends.
Wealth only has meaning in an economy of scarcity. I strongly suspect that the latter is going away, which in turn will eliminate the former. It's just going to be a very rocky transition. For my part, I live far better than my parents did, expect to live longer, am healthier, and have far more cool stuff. And that's within a wealth-based economy. And the funny thing? My parents had considerably more money. :)
As for "scumbags", if people have enough resources, and the genome is cleaned up to eliminate stupidity, ugliness, weak critical thinking skills and greed, why would there be any?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If this is the case why are the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies approaching each other? Shouldn't the space between them be increasing rather than decreasing? Does this present any contradiction?
What's with the ice age it talks about? I thought the sun will gradually get warmer (before it bursts).
Table-ized A.I.
Each unit volume of space-time must have a constant amount of zero-point energy (this is already known today even though the amount itself is not).
Conservation of energy is probably the most basic law of physics (unfortunately most physicists are ignoring when it comes to expansion of universe).
So unless we assume there is constant energy input to universe from outside (highly unlikely!) expansion must stop someday!
Since dark energy driving the expansion, this reasoning implies amount of dark energy must be decreasing since the Big Bang.
(There are already observations underway to calculate amount of dark energy in the past actually which I believe will confirm my reasoning.)
Hasn't it been shown that only the least massive black holes will evaporate from Hawking radiation? The radiation emitted by larger ones is less than the mass/energy they absorb from the CMB, so they will continue growing...
Can somebody explain why this stuff matters? I mean speculation without a chance of experimental verification?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Isn't the Milky Way scheduled to collide with Andromeda at some point?
Not much 'future' after that, but someone will get to name a new galaxy I guess.
Thank you for adding your politically biased opinion to a scientifically inspired discussion. Your contribution is both worthwhile and appreciated.
Indeed. CmdrTaco must be rolling in his grave. ...What? He's still alive. They tell me. Well, of course he is. How could he be rolling in his grave if he was dead? The disturbing part is that he's in a grave. Someone really should get him out of there. What? He apparently refuses to come out until Slashdot ditches the beta.
The Milky Way, Andromeda along with 50+ other galaxies and dwarf galaxies are gravitationally bound. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
According to the time line
500,000[b] Earth will have likely been hit by a meteorite of roughly 1 km in diameter, assuming it cannot be averted.[15]
[b] This represents the time by which the event will most probably have happened. It may occur randomly at any time from the present.
[15] uses this as a reference http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html "existential risks"
Which states: There is a real but very small risk that we will be wiped out by the impact of an asteroid or comet
This is in turn referenced to morrison, D. et al. (1994). The Impact Hazard. In T. Gehrels (Ed.), Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
So 500,000 is just filler
--- just for that answer, I hit Trax3001BBS gold ---
"existential risks" itself http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html says were all doomed and then goes into a huge list. "In this paper we shall discuss risks of the sixth category, the one marked with an X. This is the category of global, terminal risks. I shall call these existential risks. Did I mention it's a very large list?
"Existential risks"... One can have so much fun with this link, that it's easy to get carried away.
It so serious, yet it asks the question " How likely is it that superintelligence will come before advanced nanotechnology?" all the thought going on and nobody thinks of Drake equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation, then putting a bit of thought into the results. - more than likely just the question is more sensational.
I could go on and on, "existential risks" is an incredible piece of work just asking to be ridiculed.
The laws of nature are almost completely understood in a few, very important senses. We know that our Universe is about 13.8 billion years old, despite having human experiences and observations that range from only a few fractions of a second to a handful of years. Our investigations of the laws of nature today allow us to look back into the distant history of the Universe, and understand what it was like 13.8 billion years ago, and how that gave rise to our Universe today.
We believe we know that stuff. Obviously we can't verify it experimentally.
though the time compression idea to make long timeframes a bit more comprehensible loses its usefulness with ludicrously long timeframes. By the author's own admission, at that point "the difference between “regular” years and Universe years isn’t so big". Chances are you won't find 10^140 much easier to grasp than 10^150.
I'd like to see a logarithmic representation all the way out, sort of a temporal version of Powers of Ten.
You are an embarrassment to your UID.
> how much you think is "invested" on mapping any potential space threats compared with, i.e. spying on ourselves
Which do you think is a more realistic threat, being obliterated by an asteroid or being attacked by other humans?
The sad thing isn't that this insult-laden diatribe wasn't marked "Insightful". The sad thing is that it really is "Insightful". The new design is _that_ bad.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.