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."

Comments

Starts with a bang

[AdamColley]

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...

Re:Starts with a bang

[koan]

Over that time scale genetic drift alone would mean we wouldn't see them as human.

Re:Starts with a bang

[gmuslera]

There have been hominids for 5m years, proper humans for only 200k years, civilization for just 20k years, and in 100 years we invented a lot of things (from nukes to biological agents) that could end mankind any day, while going rampant sabotaging the earth ecosystem... and things keeps accelerating. What make you think that will be humans around in not in 1 billon nor 1 millon, but only 10k years in the future being very generous?

Yes, laying eggs somewhere else could improve the chances, self-sustaining space colonies is the way to try it more than generation ships, if any of them is ever possible. But that don't have a chance to happen with current culture where profit in the present is more important than having a future.

To put an example, an asteroid impacted earth 2 days ago that wasn't detected till that moment, how much you think is "invested" on mapping any potential space threats compared with, i.e. spying on ourselves, bailing out banks or even denying climate change? When the federal government had budget problems one of the first victims was the NASA program to detect space debris (a good example of a surveillance system that worth it), while the pentagon wasted 5.5billons the night before the shutdown (if we are talking about our survival, that was a waste), And always will be an "emergency" that will divert efforts and attention to something else, even if we have to create it. Unless we figure out a practical, safe way to travel (far) into the future (yes, we could done it doing a relativistic speed trip, or some suspended animation process could be developed, but nothing practical and for masses yet) we should not worry about what will happen in a millon years, is just too out of the reach of mankind.

Re:Starts with a bang

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space#What_space_is_the_universe_expanding_into.3F

It's kinda sorta expanding into itself . . .

If you smoke some weed, listen to an old "Yes" album from the 70's and do some whippets, you understand it all and it becomes really clear, but you forget again when the whippets wear off.

Hawking radiation

[Max Threshold]

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...

Re:Hawking radiation

[mark_osmd]

That's true right now, the 3K background is higher than the tiny temperature of the black holes. But the background temperature will get lower and lower as the universe expands, eventually it would get lower than the hawking temperature of even the largest black holes. At that point all black holes will be shrinking.