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Studies Say Earth Won't Die As Soon As Thought
sciencehabit writes "Take a deep breath—Earth is not going to die as soon as scientists believed. Two new modeling studies find that the gradually brightening sun won't vaporize our planet's water for at least another 1 billion to 1.5 billion years—hundreds of millions of years later than a slightly older model had forecast. The findings won't change your retirement plans but could imply that habitable, Earth-like alien worlds are more common than scientists thought."
I wish you'd told me this yesterday.
The older prediction had me worried.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Pretty sure I'll still be working at the point of vapourisation given the never ending increases in retirement age and lifespan.
Challenge accepted, bitches!
This is going to wreak havok with the GNU/Hurd development schedule.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Whew! I was worried.
It's an input to the Drake equation. That's worth looking at again. When Drake wrote it, most of the numbers were guesses, but we now know that exoplanets are not rare.
I suspect the reason we haven't heard from anybody is that the lifetime of high-power technological civilizations is only a few hundred to a thousand years. We're only about 200 years into industrial society, and we've already burned through most of the easy to get natural resources.
This is the sort of thing that gives ammunition to climate change deniers.
How can congress formulate national policies to deal with impending issues like this when the timeframes keep changing?
At least now they won't have to rush things. Another 100 million years or so of inaction shouldn't make much difference.
Studies say Earth won't die as soon as Thought
Judging from the way some people act on this planet, Thought died a long time ago. That's right, I said it!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
First the Mayans were wrong and now this? How hard can it be to predict the end of the world??? Geez...
Doesn't take large-scale long-term forecasts seriously. Is worried about Yellowstone caldera and global ice age, hopes we evolve into superbeings.
In all seriousness the physics involved in the forecast in the article are probably simpler than the physics involved in predicting Yellowstone's changes of eruption.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I find the work on how the universe was in the past or will be in the future fascinating, but would laugh at anybody trying to stake a serious claim on it being ultimately true.
Well, it's a good thing that no scientists resemble your straw man. The scientists come up with an educated guess and test it, refining it as they go. Newton's laws still work great for lots of things, despite Einsteins curved space-time being a more accurate (but still wrong) formulation of reality. The very foundation of science itself is the notion that everything we know is not the ultimate truth.
The real question is how long conditions within human tolerance limits would last. The Mayans were wrong about 2012 (provided people who interpreted their writings weren't duped by a bunch of Mayan 'pot'-heads), but we can't deny the climate changes that have been unfolding the past few centuries, even if we factor in the effects of human industry. Has anyone done a study on just what period of Earth's existence sustained biological life? Is that important in understanding the possibilities of colonizing other worlds?
If his model is based on where continents and oceans are now it could well fail to predict what might happen in a billion years time. If there's more ocean around the equator in the future it could drastically increase how much heat earth absorbs, similarly if another giant continent such as Pangea forms there could be a huge desert in the centre reflecting back heat. Of course that also means less plant life so possibly less CO2 being absorbed etc.
Its an interesting intellectual exercise but I think at best any of these models should be taken with a whole cellar of salt when predicting that far into the future.
In the next computer run with different variables.
There are other limiting factors eventually causing life to go extinct. One important is CO2 which is absorbed into the oceans and recirculated by volcanic activity driven by radioactivity. Radioactivity will cease in about 500 mio yrs, IIRC, which is when life will end due to scarcity of CO2.
No, read what I wrote again. More worried != worried, in the same way a isdn is faster than dialup, but neither are fast.
Just a few short decades ago, black holes weren't thought to exist and if they did, be rare things, now they are at the center of every galaxy playing a huge part in galactic formation. There is a lot of hand waving going on with dark matter and dark energy, which is code for "we don't know wtf is going on", so excuse my skepticism on the "simple physics" of it all.
No offense intended, my bad.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Thought will die in the next twenty years or so.
Earth will die in a billion years or so.
Earth won't die as soon as thought.
That's not news.
All this assumes that humans with hundreds of millions of years worth of technological development will not be able to figure out a way to reflect away excess sunlight.
A Princeton-led research group has discovered an isolated community of bacteria nearly two miles underground that derives all of its energy from the decay of radioactive rocks rather than from sunlight. According to members of the team, the finding suggests life might exist in similarly extreme conditions even on other worlds.
vapourising all the planet's water ... that's just taking the piss!
from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
In 600 million years
The Sun's increasing luminosity begins to disrupt the carbonate–silicate cycle; higher luminosity increases weathering of surface rocks, which traps carbon dioxide in the ground as carbonate. As water evaporates from the Earth's surface, rocks harden, causing plate tectonics to slow and eventually stop. Without volcanoes to recycle carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels begin to fall.[30] By this time, they will fall to the point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All plants that utilize C3 photosynthesis (~99 percent of present-day species) will die.[31]
in 800 Million years
Carbon dioxide levels fall to the point at which C4 photosynthesis is no longer possible.[31] Multicellular life dies out.[32]
I not that this would be rather inconvenient
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
We'd have a hard time destroying the earth past the point of all habitability. About the worst we could do is cause a nasty mass extinction and knock ourselves back to the stone age.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
CO2 is gradually being absorbed into limestone by biological processes. It has fallen from 90% 4 GY ago to 1% 1/2 GY ago to .03% just before the industrial age. Photosynthesis and multicellar life terminates at .01%.
Burning limestone, i.e. done in cement manufacture, would return ample CO2 to the atmosphere. Cement manufacture accounts for about 10% current CO production. I am asssuming that hydrocarbon energy combustion is a transient phenomena, unlikely to continue more than a few more centuries after most of the easiliy mined coal, petroleum and natural gas is exhausted. 99.9% of the Earths carbon is in limestone.
I was hoping it would be before my mortgage is paid off.
-- Jim Crigler In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. -- Whittaker Chambers
If I were you, I'd keep an eye on it.
Can we similarly tweak with Mars to make it more habitable, or will moving its orbit too close to Earth mess up Earth's orbit? What about a carefully-timed angled orbit such that it's never near Earth?
Fix up Venus too!
Table-ized A.I.