The article claims that Earth will be incinerated, but we could just move Earth further from the Sun. The energy of escape velocity is just GMm/r. r is one AU, 150 gigameters. G is the gravitational constant, 67 piconewton square meters per square kilogram, M is the Sun's mass, 2.0 billion yottagrams. m is the Earth's, 6000 yottagrams. It works out to 5.3 billion yottajoules. The Sun emits 380 yottawatts, thus providing enough energy to move the Earth out of the Solar System entirely every five months. Moving it to a somewhat higher orbit, such as Jupiter's, would require somewhat less energy than that. And we have 500 million years, which most experts consider to be a significantly longer time than five months, so the problem is clearly soluble.
A possible problem is that Jupiter itself could destabilize Earth's new orbit. Possibly putting Earth into orbit around Jupiter as an additional moon would be a solution, but if not, I think we could solve that problem by removing Jupiter. If we drop it into the Sun, we can gain all of its orbital energy in the process.
> Only the part that illuminates the earth can do us any good.
Well, that's clearly the part that is the lowest-effort to access, but on the timeline involved for concern about the Earth's biosphere being incinerated by changes to the Sun's size and output, there is plenty of time to develop means of leveraging more than the easy part.
If we had the technology to move a planet, we would also have the technology to build a planet-sized space station, which would be a much more efficient use of resources. You could use spin gravity to make the entire mass inhabitable and useful, instead of almost all of the mass sitting in the core/mantle.
We already have the technology to move a planet; it's just orbiting rockets. (Ion thrusters are especially promising here because of the small amount of mass you lose from the planet in the process.) We just don't have the necessary industrial scale to supply enough rockets and energy. A planet-sized space station is almost certainly possible with carbon nanotube ropes, but those have not yet been demonstrated to work in practice.
However, smaller O'Neill-cylinder space stations are feasible even with just steel cables, and I look forward to a future where the vast majority of inhabited land area is in such contraptions. It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course.
> It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course.
I don't think there is a clear trend toward this goal at all.
Extrapolating current trends, we are fairly likely to peak in total population as a species long we become space-constrained on earth; more remote living space is pretty cheap in basically every industrialized country right now, and living in a conventional house in the boonies is like ten orders of magnitude easier than making anything extraterrestrial work (neither climate change nor even global nuclear war is enough to flip that).
Sure, people might like the concept of space colonization, but we're not seeing significant amounts of people living on boats in the Atlantic, so I would not expect to see people living on spaceships within the next centuries, either...
Be careful to note that I didn't say the majority of people would be living in space colonies, but that the majority of inhabited land area would be found in them.
Probably you're right that most people will choose to die on the same planet they're born on. Most people today choose to die in the same city they were born in, and most coconuts sprout, if at all, within a few meters of the tree they fell from.
That doesn't mean that coconuts' ability to float across the ocean is inconsequential to coconut species distribution. It only takes one coconut making landfall on a barren atoll to start a new coconut grove.
There are, in fact, a significant number of people who live on boats. There would be many more if the boats weren't dependent on docking to refuel.
It's a mistake to extrapolate from current trends when it comes to exponentially growing phenomena. In April of 02020 covid had killed less than 1000 people after six months. In 01770 two million years of human beings had managed to speed up their transportation from the speed of a marathon runner to the speed of a racehorse. You have to look at the underlying dynamics, and even then what you often learn is that the future is very uncertain.
I do absolutely agree that extrapolating population over more than a few decades is basically a cointoss, but I still thank that exponential growth is far from certain: Basically every industrialized nation has negative population growth when excluding immigrants right now, and this is very much a global trend.
I like your optimism and would love to see colonies in space, but I think it is overly tempting to consider settling space akin to European colonization of America, when it is more similar to settling on the high seas/Antarctica (right now)-- technically feasible for decades or even centuries, but not really happening simply because of lacking incentives (and the incentive structure looks sadly even worse for settling in space than either of those to me).
> I think we could solve that problem by removing Jupiter. If we drop it into the Sun, we can gain all of its orbital energy in the process.
How did you come up with dropping Jupiter into the sun being a net energy producing operation? You have to cancel out around 10^35 J of kinetic energy to drop it from its orbit, and that is real work. How do you get that 10^35 J back? (Ignoring that from your own math, that E35J is around 100,000 years of the sun's total energy output).
I don't know, but Jupiter has that kinetic energy now, and if you slow it down until it falls into the Sun, it won't have it anymore. The energy has to go somewhere.
Maybe you scoop up big balloons of gas, slingshot them to Mercury with a tether, catch them with another tether on the dark side of Mercury to decelerate them (thus generating electricity which you use to make some kind of fuel), and toss them Sunwards from there.
Or maybe you use an electromagnetic mass driver in the Asteroid Belt to launch an unbelievable number of small rocky masses to a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter back to the same mass driver again, but at a higher velocity, so they generate electric power when it catches them before launching them again. Each mass goes through this circuit tens of thousands of times.
Pulling an object "down" (ie towards the gravitational focus) doesn't lower the energy of its orbit, it just changes the eccentricity. To lower its orbit you have to slow it down.
I've noticed how you regularly use five digit zero prefixed Y10K-compliant Long Now Years, but if things go well, you're going to need a lot more digits than that! ;)
Now it's been ten thousand years, man has cried a billion tears
For what, he never knew, now man's reign is through
But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight
So very far away, maybe it's only yesterday
Our dominant culture's "year zero" (aka the Common Era) is based on an estimated date of birth of a messiah of the currently-dominating religion. That calendar has also seen a major revision in October 1582.
Long before and after that religion became dominant, many people have used different calendar systems - and many still do. Rome was founded in 753 BCE, and the Western Roman Empire fell around 476 CE. That's over 1200 years.
It's more likely that another "year zero" event will happen in less than 8000 years. If the history survives that, we will probably just call the current era "Gregorian" or so.
It is only in the last century or two that humanity has reached the technological and economic level that a single standard global year numbering made any sense-before that, year numbering systems were highly culture-specific. And it just happened by accident that Western European-derived cultures were globally ascendant at that point in history, so that culture’s calendar became the de facto global standard. And if history turned out a bit differently, it easily could have been another calendar instead - e.g. the Islamic chronology (AH).
But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now.
I think the most likely way it might change would be (a) if humanity collapsed back to a premodern civilisation, and later recovered; or (b) some new culture/religion became globally dominant which demanded the calendar be changed.
Personally, I’m sceptical (a) is going to happen in the next few thousand years. I think the most likely scenarios are (i) technological modernity survives, (ii) humanity goes extinct completely, (iii) a more moderate collapse in which things get very messy but don’t go all the way back to the premodern era. I think all three are more likely than the kind of complete and extended collapse then eventual recovery which would be most likely to reboot the calendar into a new and different global standard.
I don’t think odds of (b) are high-it would require not just a new dominant culture, but also one which felt very strongly about wiping out all traces of the old calendar. Suppose 1000 years from now, 99% of humans are devout Muslims-I personally think that’s rather unlikely to happen, but anything is possible-would that trigger the current year numbering to be replaced by the Islamic one? I’m sceptical-all Muslim majority countries currently heavily use the Gregorian calendar for business use, computer systems, etc, and they don’t have a theological issue with that, so I’m sceptical they’d feel the need to change even if Islam became the globally dominant culture. And this isn’t a new thing in history-many historical Islamic empires continued the use of pre-Islamic calendars in parallel with the Islamic, especially since the Islamic calendar, being purely lunar, was less than ideal for agricultural use.
> But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now.
We have two global standards, both from the Western Christian tradition. The Gregorian calendar, and Unix time. Order of magnitude, they're probably baked into the same number of processes.
What's Christian about Unix time? I don't recall ever reading that either Thompson or Ritchie was theist at all, much less Christian. And the division of the solar day into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds is not Christian but, mostly, Sumerian: both pagan and Eastern.
The Gregorian calendar is essentially non-Christian in origin. Yes, it is named for Pope Gregory, but he just tinkered with the leap year rule, other than that it is essentially the same as the Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar
Now, the common AD/CE year numbering is obviously Christian in motivation, but that’s technically distinct from the Gregorian calendar-the Julian calendar historically used other year numbering systems too (ab urbe condita, anno Diocletiani aka anno martyrum, anno mundi), and the Gregorian calendar itself doesn’t care what numbers you assign to years beyond modulo 400 - you could replace 2025 with 2425 or 12025 and it would still work fine. But that’s the thing, Unix time doesn’t care whether 1970 is called 1970 or 1570 or 2370 or 11970, only how distant you are from it - so it isn’t really tied to our Christianity-inspired year numbering, only to 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z as an instant
I think CE + 10,000 - called “Holocene Era” (HE), also sometimes expanded Human Era or Historical Era - is a good proposal - high compatibility with CE (you can just pretend 2025 is missing the leading digit), makes all dates from recorded human history positive. Okay, is ambiguous in that 2025 CE might get confused with 2025 HE (= -7975 CE = 7976 BCE), but in practice that’s unlikely since that’s prehistorical and essentially nothing (outside astronomy) from that long ago can be dated to a year’s accuracy anyway
>The copyright on the official BSD Daemon images is owned by Marshall Kirk McKusick, a very early BSD developer who worked with Bill Joy. McKusick has freely licensed the mascot for individual "personal use within the bounds of good taste (an example of bad taste was a picture of the BSD Daemon blowtorching a Solaris logo)."[ Any use requires both a copyright notice and attribution.
Blowtorching a Solaris logo sounds like it's in good taste to me! Just not blowing it without a torch.
I see another possibility, on topic with TFA. We start colonising other worlds, and will need to coordinate timekeeping between them. Time dilation will also kick in (GPS already has to compensate).
If humans were to colonise Mars, I suspect they might adopt a hybrid calendar, combining the Martian day with the Earth year
I think for humans on Mars, the local day-night cycle would likely be much more important than local seasonal cycles. Plus for a long time they’d be dependent on Earth (financially, politically, etc), and Earth years are a natural unit of Earth-centric planning, plus they’d see themselves as part of Earth-centric human history. And maybe eventually they’ll wean themselves off their dependence on Earth, but that would likely take centuries, by which time such a hybrid calendar may have become deeply embedded in Martian culture, and the use of the Earth year might endure long after the original motivations for it ceased to apply
So I could see our current Earth-centric year numbering system being maintained as humans spread out through our solar system. And if eventually we spread to other star systems, we might take that with us too
> The article claims that Earth will be incinerated, but we could just move Earth further from the Sun.
The article isn’t trying to make science-fiction predictions, it’s simply explaining how things are expected to go according to the workings of the Universe. The article also isn’t suggesting humans will go to Europa to survive, only that life could theoretically develop and persist there.
We can’t even let our fellow humans live. Hatred and division is growing, and we’re ever more worshipping and giving power to destructive, selfish, science-denying, power-hungry maniacs with access to world-destroying technology. And you think there’s any chance we’ll all agree and unite to move the whole planet? It would be nonsensical for the article to even hint at entertainment that scenario in any serious capacity, and it would have been rightly dismissed by most people if it did.
The thing people should rightly dismiss is the idea that human engineering is a minor enough consideration in predictions of the far future that it can be ignored as a sort of rounding error. The humans have already destroyed much of Earth's ozone layer, then restored it through exactly the kind of global agreement you're dismissing as unachievable. Now they've doubled the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, a change which would melt away the icecaps and raise sea levels dramatically over a few centuries if it weren't reversed. They don't have anything approaching world-destroying technology, but in a few decades they will.
Undoubtedly, if there are still humans after a few hundred million years, they will disagree about exactly what orbit Earth should be in, but that doesn't mean it will stay in the same orbit until after its oceans boil dry.
> The thing people should rightly dismiss is the idea that human engineering is a minor enough consideration in predictions of the far future that it can be ignored as a sort of rounding error.
Which is not my argument. At all. You’re talking about if we can, I’m talking about if we will. The article—again, rightly—explains what we predict is going to happen according to the information we have. It’s trying to be a scientific-minded article, not a science-fiction article. By your token, anyone could make up any technology to contradict the article, which is not a productive discussion.
> the kind of global agreement you're dismissing as unachievable.
I disagree it’s the same kind of agreement. The difference in magnitude and investment is gargantuan to the point it’s another category altogether. Like a group deciding where they’ll go out to dinner VS deciding which country they’ll all move to. Both require mutual agreement for the same group to advance, but that’s where the similarities end.
> Undoubtedly, if there are still humans after a few hundred million years
Which is a big if. You can’t in good faith flout “just move Earth further from the Sun” as if it was something routine without considering all the very real and very big obstacles which are in our way right now, billions of years before your proposed scenario.
The crux of my point is merely that your criticism of the article is unwarranted. Sure, phantasise about any any possible approaches to the problem you can think of, but acting like the article somehow failed to consider those options is what I’m disagreeing with.
I'm not making up any technology. Conservation of energy, solar power, artificial satellites, and Newtonian gravitation are not the same kind of "science fiction" as faster-than-light drives, little green men, or inevitable human extinction. What we should predict, according to the information we have right now, is that humans will be able to decide whether or not the Earth gets incinerated, unless they die off first.
Yes, moving the Earth is a larger project than replacing CFCs. But the humans harness progressively larger amounts of power per capita over time, historically at the rate of about 1.2% per year. At that rate, a Dyson swarm will capture effectively all of the Sun's 48-petawatt output in six or seven hundred years, though I expect the rate to accelerate. That's over a billion times larger than the power required to move Earth to anywhere. If you were to distribute the Sun's power evenly to the world's current population, only 7 people (per generation) would need to pool their shares to achieve it. So the magnitude of investment is extremely manageable.
I'm not interested in the real and very big obstacles that are in your way right now. I'm interested in which of those obstacles will remain 400 million years from now. It seems irresponsible to speculate that humanity will remain collectively suicidal for such long spans of time—if nothing else, you'd expect the collectively-suicidal subpopulations to become scarcer over time.
If we still need to live around Sol when the sun goes red giant, we will have deserved to be selected out of existence.
It would be a shame to abandon her entirely, but don’t count on nostalgia to last for billions of years. We will have empires of people who never lived in Sol who think Good Riddance.
I love this article. Especially the part where, about 2 billion years after the last traces of even unicellular life on the planet has become extinct, the length of a calendar day will have to be officially adjusted, since it will then be 48 hours.
The idea of keeping bureaucracy alive much longer than our planet is human optimism at its best. Death and taxes, come Hell, high water, and the literal evaporation of Earth's oceans due to surface temperatures exceeding 1130 C.
During last year's total eclipse I learned that in the future, and not so far away, there will never be total eclipses again because the moon's orbit is slowly getting further away from our planet. Folks, enjoy those total eclipses while you can and write poetry and make films so the future humans can enjoy with a sad wonder what they could never experience.
The sun going red giant seems both easier to reason about and much more assured than trying to reason about global metabolic processes that have repeatedly changed on much shorter time frames, including in the last few hundred years at our own hand. Hell if there's one thing i'd put money on it's in life's ability to exploit hitherto-unknown chemistries to alter global metabolism. But physics, especially anything involving the energy output of the sun, is much harder to hand-wave away like that.
Not that I don't find that article interesting, of course. And I wouldn't underestimate our ability to (continue) to terraform the earth, intentionally sure, but much more certainly unintentionally.
Yea, although true timescales are at least 10x shorter. In 500m years Earth oceans will boil out completely, talk about global warming. Humans will die way sooner, though.
I understand that in 500m years luminosity will increase by 5%. By then we should be able to survive that modest increase. Where did you get 500m years?
As you said, luminosity increases. It isn't a matter of survival, it's a physics problem. If a planet absorbs more energy from its star than it's capable of radiating away, it will rise in temperature forever until and unless energy output increases above energy input.
And when you consider that by this point energy input is on a permanent increase, there's really not much you can do apart from moving the whole damn planet out of the way.
It's kind of pointless to speculate what kind of technology we'll have in 500m years (or indeed if there is a 'we' left in the system). The time scale is so enormous that there's simply no way to predict anything at all involving humans or human-derivatives.
The planet (without literally unimaginable intervention) will heat up and become uninhabitable sometime around 500m years from now.
> If a planet absorbs more energy from its star than it's capable of radiating away, it will rise in temperature forever until and unless energy output increases above energy input.
That’s a really misleading way to describe what going on. The amount of energy radiated into space is a function of temperature, so increasing incoming radiation also increases outgoing radiation. 5% increase in luminosity is roughly 3.5C increase in earths average surface temperatures ignoring other effects.
However, you get a feedback loop as water vapor is a greenhouse gas which makes things hard to model. Here’s a study suggesting the tipping point is on 1 billion years https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216142310.h... but it’s not suggesting the oceans literally boil but rather a transition point where there’s a lot more water in the atmosphere.
Chunks of other planets, we have always been pretty good at creating explosives previous generations couldn't even fathom so such destructive disposition may get to be a positive thing for once.
I guess you’re thinking of something that orbits earth? If you build something that orbits the sun at the same rate as us then it could just be flat and circular.
Maybe someone smarter than me can calculate the optimal parameters to get the smallest shade that orbits the sun. If we are looking to only block out a percentage of the sun then it doesn’t even need to be fully opaque, maybe a giant dream catcher would be fine.
That means you're heavily restricted in where you can put it. It has to be either right next to earth, in which case it's hard to keep away from Earth, or at L1, which is not stable. There's no other place you can put something where it will stay directly between us and the sun.
The interest in speculating, to me at least, is the impact of intelligent life still existing. It puts an upper bound on the life span on single planet species.
...it also pushes the lower bound lower :( really it just means we can extrapolate less from the historical record than had we not evolved, although I suppose that's a rather silly statement to make given that it was "non-intelligent" life that produced us in the only sample we have.
Now I'm actually morbidly curious: do you think humans could even come close to sterilizing this planet if we wanted to? I mean maybe we could burn away the atmosphere if we set off enough nukes (probably more than humanity's ready-to-use-stockpile, I think?), but the biomass that's inside the ocean (...would that even remain without an atmosphere or would it boil off? regardless...) and crust is simply massive. I strongly suspect that life would keep on going.
Why though? Because they have little to no ability to understand the consequences of their actions?
ot: have you ever looked into what the proper nomenclature is for dog breeds? None! They have subspecies based on vibes. Species is a human construct, one that doesn't even serve us in our second most familiar of categories. It seems difficult to double down based on a "science" of naming things.
Life matters. A lot. The whole Universe is this big mechanical device that obeys to the law of causality: every change in nature is produced by some cause. For billions of years, this was all there was. Then suddenly Life happened, turning causation on it's head: Life's actions have what Aristotle called a "final cause", that never existed before. Life has at least the goal of survival, and maybe more, yet to be discovered. And this changes the nature of the Universe for the Universe now has will.
As for humans, my comment was not meant to disparage them. They are far from perfect, basically apes, and right now they are the best hope we have for Life to survive the Sun. But humans are only a transient form that Life can take. There was Life before humans, let's hope there the will be Life after them. They are no more than a cog, albeit one that may someday reveal itself to be useful.
Well, over a sufficient timeline, humans will just be a common ancestor species of a series of new, distinct species. That's how it goes.
It's a bit disappointing to think that billions of years of evolution would result in only hardy bacteria or algae surviving to represent life. I think the continuation of consciousness is a more interesting goal... whether it happens in our carbon-based biology or in some other way is a secondary concern.
Yes, but there's no universal law that Life must persist.
It's totally possible that Life just dies. Like due to increased solar heat or a random comet.
Dinosaurs (and other saurs) wandered Earth for hundreds of millions of years, humans are just a blip on the radar. But dinosaurs wouldn't be able to predict Sun's death and do something about it.
The one we have right now is a stochastic - a good one, but it’s not the SCiFi AI, not even close. So I am not sure how an LLM without an operator makes any sense or if it counts as “something” in this context.
The hypothetical technological singularity is expressed as the superorganism of technology, systems, and people (for now) changing until something like not quite AGI and partial self-replication become attainable and iterate further. For better or worse, something is happening orthogonal to the hype.
I would expect "I'm from Earth" to get about as much respect as "I'm from Olduvai Gorge". Well, isn't that nice for you, basically, but that's it. It's not a hard guess, we already don't reward people just because they were born near the origin of humanity.
It'll be a while, though. There will certainly still be a long period of time where Earth is the most powerful by sheer inertia, no matter how fast space civilization develops.
How much interesting stuff is there to learn about Olduvai Gorge though?
I expect Earth will be viewed as we view Athens now. There's a lot of important history which happened there, and schoolchildren spend a lot of time studying it, but the center of the action has moved elsewhere.
Instead of "How often do men think about ancient Rome?", people will ask: "How often do men think about ancient Earth?"
> I would expect "I'm from Earth" to get about as much respect as "I'm from Olduvai Gorge".
Maybe that's because we don't have cultural traditions that identifiably connect us to that. (We probably do, but they're so deeply ingrained that we can't even identify them as "culture").
People of Italian extraction have a certain affinity for Italians, German-descendants for Germans, etc- Unless we just totally forget about Earth-That-Was I think it's reasonable to think we'd find it interesting in 1000 years.
We're talking about a much longer period of time than 1000 years. Like, 4.5 billion years. Or at least 500 million.
People who speak Indo-European languages such as English, Hindi, and Portuguese descend from migrants from the Caspian steppe. Do they have strong Caspian steppe affinities? And that's only been about 4000 years.
We're much better at recording history nowadays though.
People seem to find the Yamnaya culture interesting, we just know rather little about it.
Nowadays we have ubiquitous, effortless recording and copying capabilities. The struggle for historians will be to sort through all the data in order to identify a coherent narrative.
In the setting of the Traveller rpg, which has many thousands of years of time since people came from Earth. Earth is a bit of a backwater, the people on Earth have a bit of a superiority complex, but no one else cares. Its just some random planet many jumps away from the core, why would anyone care?
I mean, in 10 million years we will have colonized the Milky Way. Seems likely that a historical society in 200 million years will be vacuuming out heavy elements from the sun to keep it chugging along.
Yes. By then humanity will either be extinct or living in Dyson swarms around at least one other star or around a black holes. Even for Dyson swarm levels of technology black holes enable many new capabilities because they are an infinite heat sink that actually get COLDER as you drop matter into them.
lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years let alone a couple billion? Given our pathological inability to solve even the most basic and obvious existential risks, I give odds of seeing the end of humanity in my lifetime at around 50%.
I mean we still put forever chemicals in our food containers.
There’s a segment of the population that aggressively opposes efforts to save humanity from global warming (the earth abides but humanity is quite fragile).
We’ve had at least six known near misses in nuclear annihilation.
We’ve been utterly unable to stamp out obvious misinformation, lies and utter bullshit in public discourse (so we can’t even talk about the real problems with anything approaching consensus on facts)
The good news is we really don’t have to worry about the timeframes where the death of our star would cause problems.
> I give odds of seeing the end of humanity in my lifetime at around 50%.
This is not well-reasoned.
Climate change, even in its most hysterical worst case scenarios, could make large areas of the planet uninhabitable, and cause massive migrations, wars, and famines. But it won't kill everyone.
Forever chemicals, even if you believe they're responsible for reduced fertility, haven't sterilized humans. We're not in the Handmaid's Tale yet, and if we were, it's pretty clear there would be resulting cultural shifts to address fertility.
Nuclear annihilation is not possible with current arsenal levels. You would need millions of high yield detonations to accumulate lethal levels of radiation planet wide. Nobody has that many nukes. There's enough to make large areas uninhabitable, but it won't kill everyone. Nuclear winter could cause famines, but isolated groups can use existing technology for indoor farming.
There are some things that could kill us off entirely (asteroid), but none of the things you mentioned are going to do it.
>lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years let alone a couple billion?
I probably won't be around in 100 years, but I'd place the odds of human extinction in that time frame at approximately 0. 1 billion is right out though. If there are descendants, they almost certainly won't be homo sapiens.
> lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years let alone a couple billion? Given our pathological inability to solve even the most basic and obvious existential risks, I give odds of seeing the end of humanity in my lifetime at around 50%.
... Yes? Do you really, seriously think that eight billion people can so easily disappear within a couple of generations and there won't be anyone left for the population to start growing again?
We will have seeded the life there. And earth will be obliterated. And the emergent intelligent beings will wonder if life can exist somewhere else in the universe. They’ll specifically look for moons around large gas giants orbiting a red giant sun.
One interesting thing to keep in mind here is that life could even survive on Earth itself when the Sun dies.
If the red giant phase of the Sun (before its collapse) were to be just not quite hot enough to do more than scorch the surface of the earth and maybe heat the crust down only partially, microbial life would survive in deep fissures. Studies (link below) have shown that a whole ecosystem of life exists in wet cracks down to a depth of up to maybe 10 kilometers. Assuming the red giant phase of the sun only manages to cook the earth's surface, it's possible that the heat radiates down into the crust by a few hundred meters, or maybe a kilometer.
After all, though rock as a dense object in your hand isn't a good thermal insulator, the porous, cracked substrate of our crust is indeed wonderful at insulating (second link). If it weren't we'd have long since cooked from the enormous heat beneath us. The same process works in the opposite direction.
Thus IF, if the sun expands just enough to only scorch our world, once the sun collapses again and our planet enters its deep freeze, the microbes that survived far beneath its surface could live their strange existence indefinitely, close to magmatic heat sources in the delicately balanced equilibrium zones between these and the frozen world above.
Yes, the core of the earth will also eventually cool too, but the combination of residual heat from formation, compressive friction heat and radioactive decay is enough to keep that from happening for at least tens of billions of years.
It's a fascinating scenario to consider: the extreme limits of how tenacious life could stay alive on our world long after everything we consider sustaining is dead and gone.
On a large enough scale of the solar system, if you zoom out just right, planets and stars can resemble interactions you can see on a molecular level inside a human body. Most of the time, it is normal organic operation. Every so often though, something goes wrong and you can see a new virus or cancer form on previously healthy cells. Smith had a point. From that perspective life on a planet doesnt look much different.
>> the sun will enter the final phase of its life. Its core of hydrogen fusion will expand and, in doing so, inflate the outer atmosphere of the star into gross proportions. It will swell and become a red giant star that will engulf Mercury and Venus and incinerate Earth.
Does anybody know what is the timescale we are talking about here? From start of inflation of Sun's outer atmosphere to engulfing of earth?
At first I thought this was crazy, but we actually don't know if there will be a passing star when the Milky Way collides with Andromeda which will happen before Sol transitions into a Red Giant.
Without the sun the only source of energy would be starlight. Planets don't _generate_ energy of their own, they only radiate away energy. So without the sun everything will simply freeze to near absolute zero, once it radiates away all heat energy.
Tidal forces on a moon in orbit around a large body generate heat. This doesn't need the sun. Certain orbits will generate more heat and orbits aren't permanent, but technically it is possible post sun to have a source of energy
Right, there's kinetic energy in a system, and potential energy. For example the total energy that can be released from a moon in orbit is it's 1) kinetic energy of motion plus 2) potential energy, available thru the gravitational fields. If something with rotational energy shrinks it's rotational speed necessarily speeds up (energy conservation), and that can cause friction, resulting in heat. Any energy that isn't radiated away gets converted to heat ultimately yes. (this all omits nuclear reactions too!)
The article claims that Earth will be incinerated, but we could just move Earth further from the Sun. The energy of escape velocity is just GMm/r. r is one AU, 150 gigameters. G is the gravitational constant, 67 piconewton square meters per square kilogram, M is the Sun's mass, 2.0 billion yottagrams. m is the Earth's, 6000 yottagrams. It works out to 5.3 billion yottajoules. The Sun emits 380 yottawatts, thus providing enough energy to move the Earth out of the Solar System entirely every five months. Moving it to a somewhat higher orbit, such as Jupiter's, would require somewhat less energy than that. And we have 500 million years, which most experts consider to be a significantly longer time than five months, so the problem is clearly soluble.
A possible problem is that Jupiter itself could destabilize Earth's new orbit. Possibly putting Earth into orbit around Jupiter as an additional moon would be a solution, but if not, I think we could solve that problem by removing Jupiter. If we drop it into the Sun, we can gain all of its orbital energy in the process.
A more practical way to lift the orbit is probably to "capture an asteroid of suitable size and set it on a series of fly-bys, shuttling between near the Earth and near Jupiter" https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-theoretically-possible-to-...
>>The Sun emits 380 yottawatts
Only the part that illuminates the earth can do us any good.
> Only the part that illuminates the earth can do us any good.
Well, that's clearly the part that is the lowest-effort to access, but on the timeline involved for concern about the Earth's biosphere being incinerated by changes to the Sun's size and output, there is plenty of time to develop means of leveraging more than the easy part.
If we had the technology to move a planet, we would also have the technology to build a planet-sized space station, which would be a much more efficient use of resources. You could use spin gravity to make the entire mass inhabitable and useful, instead of almost all of the mass sitting in the core/mantle.
We already have the technology to move a planet; it's just orbiting rockets. (Ion thrusters are especially promising here because of the small amount of mass you lose from the planet in the process.) We just don't have the necessary industrial scale to supply enough rockets and energy. A planet-sized space station is almost certainly possible with carbon nanotube ropes, but those have not yet been demonstrated to work in practice.
However, smaller O'Neill-cylinder space stations are feasible even with just steel cables, and I look forward to a future where the vast majority of inhabited land area is in such contraptions. It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course.
> It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course.
I don't think there is a clear trend toward this goal at all.
Extrapolating current trends, we are fairly likely to peak in total population as a species long we become space-constrained on earth; more remote living space is pretty cheap in basically every industrialized country right now, and living in a conventional house in the boonies is like ten orders of magnitude easier than making anything extraterrestrial work (neither climate change nor even global nuclear war is enough to flip that).
Sure, people might like the concept of space colonization, but we're not seeing significant amounts of people living on boats in the Atlantic, so I would not expect to see people living on spaceships within the next centuries, either...
Be careful to note that I didn't say the majority of people would be living in space colonies, but that the majority of inhabited land area would be found in them.
Probably you're right that most people will choose to die on the same planet they're born on. Most people today choose to die in the same city they were born in, and most coconuts sprout, if at all, within a few meters of the tree they fell from.
That doesn't mean that coconuts' ability to float across the ocean is inconsequential to coconut species distribution. It only takes one coconut making landfall on a barren atoll to start a new coconut grove.
There are, in fact, a significant number of people who live on boats. There would be many more if the boats weren't dependent on docking to refuel.
It's a mistake to extrapolate from current trends when it comes to exponentially growing phenomena. In April of 02020 covid had killed less than 1000 people after six months. In 01770 two million years of human beings had managed to speed up their transportation from the speed of a marathon runner to the speed of a racehorse. You have to look at the underlying dynamics, and even then what you often learn is that the future is very uncertain.
I do absolutely agree that extrapolating population over more than a few decades is basically a cointoss, but I still thank that exponential growth is far from certain: Basically every industrialized nation has negative population growth when excluding immigrants right now, and this is very much a global trend.
I like your optimism and would love to see colonies in space, but I think it is overly tempting to consider settling space akin to European colonization of America, when it is more similar to settling on the high seas/Antarctica (right now)-- technically feasible for decades or even centuries, but not really happening simply because of lacking incentives (and the incentive structure looks sadly even worse for settling in space than either of those to me).
> I think we could solve that problem by removing Jupiter. If we drop it into the Sun, we can gain all of its orbital energy in the process.
How did you come up with dropping Jupiter into the sun being a net energy producing operation? You have to cancel out around 10^35 J of kinetic energy to drop it from its orbit, and that is real work. How do you get that 10^35 J back? (Ignoring that from your own math, that E35J is around 100,000 years of the sun's total energy output).
I don't know, but Jupiter has that kinetic energy now, and if you slow it down until it falls into the Sun, it won't have it anymore. The energy has to go somewhere.
Maybe you scoop up big balloons of gas, slingshot them to Mercury with a tether, catch them with another tether on the dark side of Mercury to decelerate them (thus generating electricity which you use to make some kind of fuel), and toss them Sunwards from there.
Or maybe you use an electromagnetic mass driver in the Asteroid Belt to launch an unbelievable number of small rocky masses to a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter back to the same mass driver again, but at a higher velocity, so they generate electric power when it catches them before launching them again. Each mass goes through this circuit tens of thousands of times.
There are lots of possibilities.
You're not capturing usable energy, to slow it down, you're accelerating it the other way, consuming usable energy
That is not correct.
Care to elaborate? There might be some clever mechanism to slap regen brakes on Jupiter but that's gonna be hard without a road to slow down against
Already explained
You reach up and pull jupiter down while pulling yourself up?
Not an orbital mechanicist though.
Pulling an object "down" (ie towards the gravitational focus) doesn't lower the energy of its orbit, it just changes the eccentricity. To lower its orbit you have to slow it down.
I've noticed how you regularly use five digit zero prefixed Y10K-compliant Long Now Years, but if things go well, you're going to need a lot more digits than that! ;)
https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...
Zager & Evans - In the Year 2525
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQfxi8V5FA
Party like it's 99999!Our dominant culture's "year zero" (aka the Common Era) is based on an estimated date of birth of a messiah of the currently-dominating religion. That calendar has also seen a major revision in October 1582.
Long before and after that religion became dominant, many people have used different calendar systems - and many still do. Rome was founded in 753 BCE, and the Western Roman Empire fell around 476 CE. That's over 1200 years.
It's more likely that another "year zero" event will happen in less than 8000 years. If the history survives that, we will probably just call the current era "Gregorian" or so.
It is only in the last century or two that humanity has reached the technological and economic level that a single standard global year numbering made any sense-before that, year numbering systems were highly culture-specific. And it just happened by accident that Western European-derived cultures were globally ascendant at that point in history, so that culture’s calendar became the de facto global standard. And if history turned out a bit differently, it easily could have been another calendar instead - e.g. the Islamic chronology (AH).
But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now.
I think the most likely way it might change would be (a) if humanity collapsed back to a premodern civilisation, and later recovered; or (b) some new culture/religion became globally dominant which demanded the calendar be changed.
Personally, I’m sceptical (a) is going to happen in the next few thousand years. I think the most likely scenarios are (i) technological modernity survives, (ii) humanity goes extinct completely, (iii) a more moderate collapse in which things get very messy but don’t go all the way back to the premodern era. I think all three are more likely than the kind of complete and extended collapse then eventual recovery which would be most likely to reboot the calendar into a new and different global standard.
I don’t think odds of (b) are high-it would require not just a new dominant culture, but also one which felt very strongly about wiping out all traces of the old calendar. Suppose 1000 years from now, 99% of humans are devout Muslims-I personally think that’s rather unlikely to happen, but anything is possible-would that trigger the current year numbering to be replaced by the Islamic one? I’m sceptical-all Muslim majority countries currently heavily use the Gregorian calendar for business use, computer systems, etc, and they don’t have a theological issue with that, so I’m sceptical they’d feel the need to change even if Islam became the globally dominant culture. And this isn’t a new thing in history-many historical Islamic empires continued the use of pre-Islamic calendars in parallel with the Islamic, especially since the Islamic calendar, being purely lunar, was less than ideal for agricultural use.
> But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now.
We have two global standards, both from the Western Christian tradition. The Gregorian calendar, and Unix time. Order of magnitude, they're probably baked into the same number of processes.
What's Christian about Unix time? I don't recall ever reading that either Thompson or Ritchie was theist at all, much less Christian. And the division of the solar day into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds is not Christian but, mostly, Sumerian: both pagan and Eastern.
It's an offshoot of the Gregorian calendar, being offset from it by a whole number of years.
And Thompson and Ritchie grew up and worked in a majority-Christian country: their individual faith doesn't have much to do with it.
The Gregorian calendar is essentially non-Christian in origin. Yes, it is named for Pope Gregory, but he just tinkered with the leap year rule, other than that it is essentially the same as the Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar
Now, the common AD/CE year numbering is obviously Christian in motivation, but that’s technically distinct from the Gregorian calendar-the Julian calendar historically used other year numbering systems too (ab urbe condita, anno Diocletiani aka anno martyrum, anno mundi), and the Gregorian calendar itself doesn’t care what numbers you assign to years beyond modulo 400 - you could replace 2025 with 2425 or 12025 and it would still work fine. But that’s the thing, Unix time doesn’t care whether 1970 is called 1970 or 1570 or 2370 or 11970, only how distant you are from it - so it isn’t really tied to our Christianity-inspired year numbering, only to 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z as an instant
I think CE + 10,000 - called “Holocene Era” (HE), also sometimes expanded Human Era or Historical Era - is a good proposal - high compatibility with CE (you can just pretend 2025 is missing the leading digit), makes all dates from recorded human history positive. Okay, is ambiguous in that 2025 CE might get confused with 2025 HE (= -7975 CE = 7976 BCE), but in practice that’s unlikely since that’s prehistorical and essentially nothing (outside astronomy) from that long ago can be dated to a year’s accuracy anyway
Unix time is explicitly anti-Christian!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon
>The copyright on the official BSD Daemon images is owned by Marshall Kirk McKusick, a very early BSD developer who worked with Bill Joy. McKusick has freely licensed the mascot for individual "personal use within the bounds of good taste (an example of bad taste was a picture of the BSD Daemon blowtorching a Solaris logo)."[ Any use requires both a copyright notice and attribution.
Blowtorching a Solaris logo sounds like it's in good taste to me! Just not blowing it without a torch.
I see another possibility, on topic with TFA. We start colonising other worlds, and will need to coordinate timekeeping between them. Time dilation will also kick in (GPS already has to compensate).
An Earth year is a year only on Earth.
If humans were to colonise Mars, I suspect they might adopt a hybrid calendar, combining the Martian day with the Earth year
I think for humans on Mars, the local day-night cycle would likely be much more important than local seasonal cycles. Plus for a long time they’d be dependent on Earth (financially, politically, etc), and Earth years are a natural unit of Earth-centric planning, plus they’d see themselves as part of Earth-centric human history. And maybe eventually they’ll wean themselves off their dependence on Earth, but that would likely take centuries, by which time such a hybrid calendar may have become deeply embedded in Martian culture, and the use of the Earth year might endure long after the original motivations for it ceased to apply
So I could see our current Earth-centric year numbering system being maintained as humans spread out through our solar system. And if eventually we spread to other star systems, we might take that with us too
It would be interesting to have two sets of precessing holidays and weekends to enjoy!
I think it'd be easier to colonise another moon/planet. You have a few 100k years go do it.
> The article claims that Earth will be incinerated, but we could just move Earth further from the Sun.
The article isn’t trying to make science-fiction predictions, it’s simply explaining how things are expected to go according to the workings of the Universe. The article also isn’t suggesting humans will go to Europa to survive, only that life could theoretically develop and persist there.
We can’t even let our fellow humans live. Hatred and division is growing, and we’re ever more worshipping and giving power to destructive, selfish, science-denying, power-hungry maniacs with access to world-destroying technology. And you think there’s any chance we’ll all agree and unite to move the whole planet? It would be nonsensical for the article to even hint at entertainment that scenario in any serious capacity, and it would have been rightly dismissed by most people if it did.
The thing people should rightly dismiss is the idea that human engineering is a minor enough consideration in predictions of the far future that it can be ignored as a sort of rounding error. The humans have already destroyed much of Earth's ozone layer, then restored it through exactly the kind of global agreement you're dismissing as unachievable. Now they've doubled the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, a change which would melt away the icecaps and raise sea levels dramatically over a few centuries if it weren't reversed. They don't have anything approaching world-destroying technology, but in a few decades they will.
Undoubtedly, if there are still humans after a few hundred million years, they will disagree about exactly what orbit Earth should be in, but that doesn't mean it will stay in the same orbit until after its oceans boil dry.
> The thing people should rightly dismiss is the idea that human engineering is a minor enough consideration in predictions of the far future that it can be ignored as a sort of rounding error.
Which is not my argument. At all. You’re talking about if we can, I’m talking about if we will. The article—again, rightly—explains what we predict is going to happen according to the information we have. It’s trying to be a scientific-minded article, not a science-fiction article. By your token, anyone could make up any technology to contradict the article, which is not a productive discussion.
> the kind of global agreement you're dismissing as unachievable.
I disagree it’s the same kind of agreement. The difference in magnitude and investment is gargantuan to the point it’s another category altogether. Like a group deciding where they’ll go out to dinner VS deciding which country they’ll all move to. Both require mutual agreement for the same group to advance, but that’s where the similarities end.
> Undoubtedly, if there are still humans after a few hundred million years
Which is a big if. You can’t in good faith flout “just move Earth further from the Sun” as if it was something routine without considering all the very real and very big obstacles which are in our way right now, billions of years before your proposed scenario.
The crux of my point is merely that your criticism of the article is unwarranted. Sure, phantasise about any any possible approaches to the problem you can think of, but acting like the article somehow failed to consider those options is what I’m disagreeing with.
I'm not making up any technology. Conservation of energy, solar power, artificial satellites, and Newtonian gravitation are not the same kind of "science fiction" as faster-than-light drives, little green men, or inevitable human extinction. What we should predict, according to the information we have right now, is that humans will be able to decide whether or not the Earth gets incinerated, unless they die off first.
Yes, moving the Earth is a larger project than replacing CFCs. But the humans harness progressively larger amounts of power per capita over time, historically at the rate of about 1.2% per year. At that rate, a Dyson swarm will capture effectively all of the Sun's 48-petawatt output in six or seven hundred years, though I expect the rate to accelerate. That's over a billion times larger than the power required to move Earth to anywhere. If you were to distribute the Sun's power evenly to the world's current population, only 7 people (per generation) would need to pool their shares to achieve it. So the magnitude of investment is extremely manageable.
I'm not interested in the real and very big obstacles that are in your way right now. I'm interested in which of those obstacles will remain 400 million years from now. It seems irresponsible to speculate that humanity will remain collectively suicidal for such long spans of time—if nothing else, you'd expect the collectively-suicidal subpopulations to become scarcer over time.
If we still need to live around Sol when the sun goes red giant, we will have deserved to be selected out of existence.
It would be a shame to abandon her entirely, but don’t count on nostalgia to last for billions of years. We will have empires of people who never lived in Sol who think Good Riddance.
> If we still need to live around Sol when the sun goes red giant, we will have deserved to be selected out of existence.
"We" is doing a lot over work over, what, five billion years? That's longer than the history of existing life. Literally unimaginable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
A handy reference for this topic
I love this article. Especially the part where, about 2 billion years after the last traces of even unicellular life on the planet has become extinct, the length of a calendar day will have to be officially adjusted, since it will then be 48 hours.
The idea of keeping bureaucracy alive much longer than our planet is human optimism at its best. Death and taxes, come Hell, high water, and the literal evaporation of Earth's oceans due to surface temperatures exceeding 1130 C.
>bureaucracy
Fellas, is it bureaucratic to use calendars?
During last year's total eclipse I learned that in the future, and not so far away, there will never be total eclipses again because the moon's orbit is slowly getting further away from our planet. Folks, enjoy those total eclipses while you can and write poetry and make films so the future humans can enjoy with a sad wonder what they could never experience.
Even better:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
> five billion years
250 million, owing to the expansion of the sun and formation of a supercontinent.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01259-3
The sun going red giant seems both easier to reason about and much more assured than trying to reason about global metabolic processes that have repeatedly changed on much shorter time frames, including in the last few hundred years at our own hand. Hell if there's one thing i'd put money on it's in life's ability to exploit hitherto-unknown chemistries to alter global metabolism. But physics, especially anything involving the energy output of the sun, is much harder to hand-wave away like that.
Not that I don't find that article interesting, of course. And I wouldn't underestimate our ability to (continue) to terraform the earth, intentionally sure, but much more certainly unintentionally.
Eg https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...
Yea, although true timescales are at least 10x shorter. In 500m years Earth oceans will boil out completely, talk about global warming. Humans will die way sooner, though.
I understand that in 500m years luminosity will increase by 5%. By then we should be able to survive that modest increase. Where did you get 500m years?
As you said, luminosity increases. It isn't a matter of survival, it's a physics problem. If a planet absorbs more energy from its star than it's capable of radiating away, it will rise in temperature forever until and unless energy output increases above energy input.
And when you consider that by this point energy input is on a permanent increase, there's really not much you can do apart from moving the whole damn planet out of the way.
It's kind of pointless to speculate what kind of technology we'll have in 500m years (or indeed if there is a 'we' left in the system). The time scale is so enormous that there's simply no way to predict anything at all involving humans or human-derivatives.
The planet (without literally unimaginable intervention) will heat up and become uninhabitable sometime around 500m years from now.
> If a planet absorbs more energy from its star than it's capable of radiating away, it will rise in temperature forever until and unless energy output increases above energy input.
That’s a really misleading way to describe what going on. The amount of energy radiated into space is a function of temperature, so increasing incoming radiation also increases outgoing radiation. 5% increase in luminosity is roughly 3.5C increase in earths average surface temperatures ignoring other effects.
However, you get a feedback loop as water vapor is a greenhouse gas which makes things hard to model. Here’s a study suggesting the tipping point is on 1 billion years https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216142310.h... but it’s not suggesting the oceans literally boil but rather a transition point where there’s a lot more water in the atmosphere.
> there's really not much you can do apart from moving the whole damn planet out of the way.
You can put something in between, a giant sun shade
Chunks of other planets, we have always been pretty good at creating explosives previous generations couldn't even fathom so such destructive disposition may get to be a positive thing for once.
Can artificial clouds help? Geo hacking might be cheaper than building billions of acres of shade.
We just build an L1 Solar park for micro g manufacturing of space mined materials.
Can you without making a ringworld?
I guess you’re thinking of something that orbits earth? If you build something that orbits the sun at the same rate as us then it could just be flat and circular.
Maybe someone smarter than me can calculate the optimal parameters to get the smallest shade that orbits the sun. If we are looking to only block out a percentage of the sun then it doesn’t even need to be fully opaque, maybe a giant dream catcher would be fine.
>orbits the sun at the same rate as us
That means you're heavily restricted in where you can put it. It has to be either right next to earth, in which case it's hard to keep away from Earth, or at L1, which is not stable. There's no other place you can put something where it will stay directly between us and the sun.
Why restricted? Are we assuming it does not produce thrust here? Because it could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
And already a known option for our current global warming situation.
Shades could just orbit like any other artificial satellite. It does not have to block the sun all of the time, just part of the day.
I suspect the atmosphere, ecology and albedo would adjust to radiate the extra energy away anyway.
Or a giant solar array?
The interest in speculating, to me at least, is the impact of intelligent life still existing. It puts an upper bound on the life span on single planet species.
...it also pushes the lower bound lower :( really it just means we can extrapolate less from the historical record than had we not evolved, although I suppose that's a rather silly statement to make given that it was "non-intelligent" life that produced us in the only sample we have.
Now I'm actually morbidly curious: do you think humans could even come close to sterilizing this planet if we wanted to? I mean maybe we could burn away the atmosphere if we set off enough nukes (probably more than humanity's ready-to-use-stockpile, I think?), but the biomass that's inside the ocean (...would that even remain without an atmosphere or would it boil off? regardless...) and crust is simply massive. I strongly suspect that life would keep on going.
I suspect with the right mix of aerosol injection and additional megaengineering of radiators pointing to deep space we could make that work
The human species doesn't matter. Species come and go. The only thing that matter is Life. Life must continue.
This is hacker news, and so I mean this earnestly
Why though? Because they have little to no ability to understand the consequences of their actions?
ot: have you ever looked into what the proper nomenclature is for dog breeds? None! They have subspecies based on vibes. Species is a human construct, one that doesn't even serve us in our second most familiar of categories. It seems difficult to double down based on a "science" of naming things.
> Why though?
Life matters. A lot. The whole Universe is this big mechanical device that obeys to the law of causality: every change in nature is produced by some cause. For billions of years, this was all there was. Then suddenly Life happened, turning causation on it's head: Life's actions have what Aristotle called a "final cause", that never existed before. Life has at least the goal of survival, and maybe more, yet to be discovered. And this changes the nature of the Universe for the Universe now has will.
As for humans, my comment was not meant to disparage them. They are far from perfect, basically apes, and right now they are the best hope we have for Life to survive the Sun. But humans are only a transient form that Life can take. There was Life before humans, let's hope there the will be Life after them. They are no more than a cog, albeit one that may someday reveal itself to be useful.
Well, over a sufficient timeline, humans will just be a common ancestor species of a series of new, distinct species. That's how it goes.
It's a bit disappointing to think that billions of years of evolution would result in only hardy bacteria or algae surviving to represent life. I think the continuation of consciousness is a more interesting goal... whether it happens in our carbon-based biology or in some other way is a secondary concern.
You seem unaware of extinction events. Humans are not guaranteed descendent species.
Unnecessary snark, especially based on my comment and what I was replying to. Hope your day gets better.
How do you know bacteria and algae aren't conscious?
I asked them and they told me no.
Yes, but there's no universal law that Life must persist.
It's totally possible that Life just dies. Like due to increased solar heat or a random comet.
Dinosaurs (and other saurs) wandered Earth for hundreds of millions of years, humans are just a blip on the radar. But dinosaurs wouldn't be able to predict Sun's death and do something about it.
AI will take all our jobs by 2030 but apparently there will still be humans in millions of years time :)
Probably AI and tardigrades will be the only things existing.
The one we have right now is a stochastic - a good one, but it’s not the SCiFi AI, not even close. So I am not sure how an LLM without an operator makes any sense or if it counts as “something” in this context.
The hypothetical technological singularity is expressed as the superorganism of technology, systems, and people (for now) changing until something like not quite AGI and partial self-replication become attainable and iterate further. For better or worse, something is happening orthogonal to the hype.
An AI without an operator is like a person without religion is like a fish without a bicycle.
Not entirely sure I grasp the significance of this, but it's probably my favorite response to LLM-jaw-wagging I've ever seen.
Huge fan btw, and thank you for the unix haters handbook.
I would expect "I'm from Earth" to get about as much respect as "I'm from Olduvai Gorge". Well, isn't that nice for you, basically, but that's it. It's not a hard guess, we already don't reward people just because they were born near the origin of humanity.
It'll be a while, though. There will certainly still be a long period of time where Earth is the most powerful by sheer inertia, no matter how fast space civilization develops.
How much interesting stuff is there to learn about Olduvai Gorge though?
I expect Earth will be viewed as we view Athens now. There's a lot of important history which happened there, and schoolchildren spend a lot of time studying it, but the center of the action has moved elsewhere.
Instead of "How often do men think about ancient Rome?", people will ask: "How often do men think about ancient Earth?"
> I would expect "I'm from Earth" to get about as much respect as "I'm from Olduvai Gorge".
Maybe that's because we don't have cultural traditions that identifiably connect us to that. (We probably do, but they're so deeply ingrained that we can't even identify them as "culture").
People of Italian extraction have a certain affinity for Italians, German-descendants for Germans, etc- Unless we just totally forget about Earth-That-Was I think it's reasonable to think we'd find it interesting in 1000 years.
We're talking about a much longer period of time than 1000 years. Like, 4.5 billion years. Or at least 500 million.
People who speak Indo-European languages such as English, Hindi, and Portuguese descend from migrants from the Caspian steppe. Do they have strong Caspian steppe affinities? And that's only been about 4000 years.
We're much better at recording history nowadays though.
People seem to find the Yamnaya culture interesting, we just know rather little about it.
Nowadays we have ubiquitous, effortless recording and copying capabilities. The struggle for historians will be to sort through all the data in order to identify a coherent narrative.
Right, to distinguish fanfic, incorrect conspiracy theories, myth, and AI-generated hallucinations from what really happened.
In Foundation, humanity is so far removed from Earth that people who claim Sol is the ancestral homeland of humans are seen as religious lunatics
Please don't conflate fiction with reality.
This entire thread is science fiction
In the setting of the Traveller rpg, which has many thousands of years of time since people came from Earth. Earth is a bit of a backwater, the people on Earth have a bit of a superiority complex, but no one else cares. Its just some random planet many jumps away from the core, why would anyone care?
The locals still insist the best pizza comes from Earth. Something about the water.
The Earth is our mother, but we treat her like dirt.
It’s incredibly optimistic and egotistical to even think that humans will be around that long.
We won't be around, but something we turned into, or something we built. Maybe.
The timeframe of our demise really doesn’t leave much time for us to evolve or create anything.
Nobody can claim to have a clue about such a timeframe.
Even if every nation collapses into anarchy, that's a far cry from extinction.
I mean, in 10 million years we will have colonized the Milky Way. Seems likely that a historical society in 200 million years will be vacuuming out heavy elements from the sun to keep it chugging along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting#Stellar_husbandry
Yes. By then humanity will either be extinct or living in Dyson swarms around at least one other star or around a black holes. Even for Dyson swarm levels of technology black holes enable many new capabilities because they are an infinite heat sink that actually get COLDER as you drop matter into them.
lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years let alone a couple billion? Given our pathological inability to solve even the most basic and obvious existential risks, I give odds of seeing the end of humanity in my lifetime at around 50%.
I mean we still put forever chemicals in our food containers. There’s a segment of the population that aggressively opposes efforts to save humanity from global warming (the earth abides but humanity is quite fragile). We’ve had at least six known near misses in nuclear annihilation. We’ve been utterly unable to stamp out obvious misinformation, lies and utter bullshit in public discourse (so we can’t even talk about the real problems with anything approaching consensus on facts)
The good news is we really don’t have to worry about the timeframes where the death of our star would cause problems.
> I give odds of seeing the end of humanity in my lifetime at around 50%.
This is not well-reasoned.
Climate change, even in its most hysterical worst case scenarios, could make large areas of the planet uninhabitable, and cause massive migrations, wars, and famines. But it won't kill everyone.
Forever chemicals, even if you believe they're responsible for reduced fertility, haven't sterilized humans. We're not in the Handmaid's Tale yet, and if we were, it's pretty clear there would be resulting cultural shifts to address fertility.
Nuclear annihilation is not possible with current arsenal levels. You would need millions of high yield detonations to accumulate lethal levels of radiation planet wide. Nobody has that many nukes. There's enough to make large areas uninhabitable, but it won't kill everyone. Nuclear winter could cause famines, but isolated groups can use existing technology for indoor farming.
There are some things that could kill us off entirely (asteroid), but none of the things you mentioned are going to do it.
>lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years let alone a couple billion?
I probably won't be around in 100 years, but I'd place the odds of human extinction in that time frame at approximately 0. 1 billion is right out though. If there are descendants, they almost certainly won't be homo sapiens.
Which makes the moot, because why do we care if X life is in that future reference frame or not. There will be life somewhere.
> lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years let alone a couple billion? Given our pathological inability to solve even the most basic and obvious existential risks, I give odds of seeing the end of humanity in my lifetime at around 50%.
How old are you?
50%, probably not.
0.1%? Probably. And that's probably the highest that number has been in millennia.
You did mention "the end of humanity in my lifetime" after all.
> lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years...
... Yes? Do you really, seriously think that eight billion people can so easily disappear within a couple of generations and there won't be anyone left for the population to start growing again?
Anywhere there's liquid water, we will find mildew.
A bazillion dollars to explore new worlds, to find this mold that won't come off.
Maybe it will talk to us.
We will have seeded the life there. And earth will be obliterated. And the emergent intelligent beings will wonder if life can exist somewhere else in the universe. They’ll specifically look for moons around large gas giants orbiting a red giant sun.
> They’ll specifically look for moons around large gas giants orbiting a red giant sun
You're writing as if watery moons around gas giants aren't something we look for.
To date, there have been no confirmed exomoon detections. So hopefully they'll do a better job than we have so far.
One interesting thing to keep in mind here is that life could even survive on Earth itself when the Sun dies.
If the red giant phase of the Sun (before its collapse) were to be just not quite hot enough to do more than scorch the surface of the earth and maybe heat the crust down only partially, microbial life would survive in deep fissures. Studies (link below) have shown that a whole ecosystem of life exists in wet cracks down to a depth of up to maybe 10 kilometers. Assuming the red giant phase of the sun only manages to cook the earth's surface, it's possible that the heat radiates down into the crust by a few hundred meters, or maybe a kilometer.
After all, though rock as a dense object in your hand isn't a good thermal insulator, the porous, cracked substrate of our crust is indeed wonderful at insulating (second link). If it weren't we'd have long since cooked from the enormous heat beneath us. The same process works in the opposite direction.
Thus IF, if the sun expands just enough to only scorch our world, once the sun collapses again and our planet enters its deep freeze, the microbes that survived far beneath its surface could live their strange existence indefinitely, close to magmatic heat sources in the delicately balanced equilibrium zones between these and the frozen world above.
Yes, the core of the earth will also eventually cool too, but the combination of residual heat from formation, compressive friction heat and radioactive decay is enough to keep that from happening for at least tens of billions of years.
It's a fascinating scenario to consider: the extreme limits of how tenacious life could stay alive on our world long after everything we consider sustaining is dead and gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biosphere
https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/physical/oce...
"When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?"
The answer is yes, of course. Everyone on Europa is going to be fine.
Finally a reasonable, level-headed take in this gloomy thread! How refreshing.
So, why'd they tell us to attempt no landings there?
The monoliths really like their beaches free of tourists when they're getting a suntan from both stars.
To paraphrase from the Matrix:
Humanity is a virus
On a large enough scale of the solar system, if you zoom out just right, planets and stars can resemble interactions you can see on a molecular level inside a human body. Most of the time, it is normal organic operation. Every so often though, something goes wrong and you can see a new virus or cancer form on previously healthy cells. Smith had a point. From that perspective life on a planet doesnt look much different.
>> the sun will enter the final phase of its life. Its core of hydrogen fusion will expand and, in doing so, inflate the outer atmosphere of the star into gross proportions. It will swell and become a red giant star that will engulf Mercury and Venus and incinerate Earth.
Does anybody know what is the timescale we are talking about here? From start of inflation of Sun's outer atmosphere to engulfing of earth?
Radiation on Europa would kill people in a day.
We'll just need to evolve into self-replicating AI Mantrid arms and dispense with organic forms. ;)
The article isn’t suggesting we move there, it’s merely pointing out life could possibly survive. Life takes many more forms than humans.
Maybe before then a passing star will allow humanity or it's progeny to transfer over to one of the star's orbiting planets?
At first I thought this was crazy, but we actually don't know if there will be a passing star when the Milky Way collides with Andromeda which will happen before Sol transitions into a Red Giant.
Of course it’s Europa.
Whew!
Without the sun the only source of energy would be starlight. Planets don't _generate_ energy of their own, they only radiate away energy. So without the sun everything will simply freeze to near absolute zero, once it radiates away all heat energy.
Tidal forces on a moon in orbit around a large body generate heat. This doesn't need the sun. Certain orbits will generate more heat and orbits aren't permanent, but technically it is possible post sun to have a source of energy
Yep, I forgot to consider the tidal forces, but that generates heat for sure.
Geothermal energy is also a thing.
Is the heat produced inside a planet, mostly from the radioactive decay of natural isotopes.
Volcanoes are not powered by the Sun. Of course this production will cease when all isotopes will be depleted, but that will take a very long time.
I read somewhere that apparently a planet (I think either Saturn or Jupiter) can generate energy when gets smaller.
Right, there's kinetic energy in a system, and potential energy. For example the total energy that can be released from a moon in orbit is it's 1) kinetic energy of motion plus 2) potential energy, available thru the gravitational fields. If something with rotational energy shrinks it's rotational speed necessarily speeds up (energy conservation), and that can cause friction, resulting in heat. Any energy that isn't radiated away gets converted to heat ultimately yes. (this all omits nuclear reactions too!)
Thanks for the explanation ^ ^, kinda understood it with my basic knowledge of physics.
There's a paper that suggests that de-oxygenation might happen in around a billion years, so before the sun swallows the earth: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00693-5
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