5 ms·

I hope that in a billion years we will have time lapse videos of how Earth changes :-).

by Ididntdothis 7y ago

izzydata 7y ago
Start taking 1 photo from space every 10 or 100 years.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  May have to procure a little cubesat. Now I just have to eat healthy to stay around for the final video :)
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  At 30 frames/second, shooting at one frame every 100,000 years, a film of the whole 4.5 billion years of Earth's evolution would run 25 minutes. If you wanted more detail, you could shoot every 10,000 years, running a bit over 4 hours. Humans would appear in this long version of the film, in the final 0.667 seconds, or the final 20 frames. The 2,000 years since Christ's death would be a blur on the final frame. All of human history for the past 10,000 years would almost fill out that frame. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs would appear 3 minutes 33 seconds before the end. The Cambrian Explosion, about 27 minutes from the end. That's the history of all multicellular life. At one frame every 100 years, the film would run 17 days 8 hours and change. And at a frame every decade, 300 years a seconds: 5 months 3 weeks. YouTube sees 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. If that were to corrspond with our movie of Earth's history, you'd need 150,000 years to upload all of it. Space is big, as you may have heard. Time is long.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    We can bullet time through humanity's time.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    And in this video you would witness how trees became the dominant lifeform on Earth and have remained as such ever since.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Or algae and plankton. Regards plant life generally, one rather stunning realisation for me is how recent many of the now-dominant forms are. Grass is younger than the dinosaurs. Flowering plants evolved during their reign. The major crops of the world (wheat, maize, rice) are all largely human-engineered, through artificial selection over the past few thousand years. There's a lot of competition in the primary-producer niche.
  - stOneskull 7y ago
    push the framerate up.
narag 7y ago
We? Ididntdothis, we won't do that :)
- alharith 7y ago
  If we as a species make it that far, parts of your genetic material will have survived, somewhere.
  - samatman 7y ago
    This doesn't even require the survival of the species, we share about half our DNA with bananas. Granted the persistence of humans provides quite a bit more, and implies the survival of (some) culture as well, which might matter more.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      > we share about half our DNA with bananas. I’ve seen this claim before. Where does it come from? Humans have 23† pairs of chromosomes covering 21 thousand genes; bananas have 11 pairs, triplets, or quads†† covering 36 thousand. † Usually, but there is a surprisingly high frequency of different chromosome counts †† I only found out about triploid and tetraploid chromosomes today, don’t expect me to know anything
      - samatman 7y ago
        It's because genes are highly conserved, and I should have been more precise: we share about 50% of our genetic code with bananas. Intuitively this makes sense, since genes code for proteins and we can eat bananas (which can in turn eat us, with some help). If you count the exome, which is not highly conserved because it doesn't play much of a role that we know of other than coiling, it's more like 1%. So "50% of our DNA" is not accurate, it's our genes.
soperj 7y ago
You could get it now. You just need a very powerful telescope that you send to somewhere a billion light years away faster than the speed of light, and take pictures along the way.
- amelius 7y ago
  Or more practically, hope for a bunch of alien civilizations to have put up mirrors aimed in our direction.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    I believe we may be stretching "practical".
    - te_platt 7y ago
      Not so bad. Assuming a spherical Earth in a vacuum and a bunch of other slightly less reasonable assumptions we have: 1E+45 photons from sun per second 1.49598E+11 distance to sun in meters 6365000 earth radius in meters 2.81229E+23 surface area of solar flux at earth orbit 1.27276E+14 surface area of earth exposed to sun 4.5257E-10 ration earth area to solar flux 4.5257E+35 photons hitting earth per second 6.49E+15 one light year in meters 1.947E+25 meters in 3 billion light years 4.76367E+51 surface are of sphere 3 billion ly across 9.50046E-17 photons per m^2 at 3B ly 1.05258E+16 m^2 per photon 57883255.23 radius in meters for mirror to reflect 1 photon/second 57883.25523 radus in km (Only 10x larger than Earth!) Then given a reasonably competent engineer to make a descent mirror with no aberration and a good telescope on a clear night away from the city, and a good bit a patience, you could watch a replay of the last 3 billion years.
      - dTal 7y ago
        > a good telescope on a clear night away from the city, and a good bit a patience > 1 photon/second Perhaps your eyes are better than mine...
      - deleted 7y ago

I hope that in a billion years we will have time lapse videos of how Earth changes :-).

izzydata 7y ago

Start taking 1 photo from space every 10 or 100 years.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
May have to procure a little cubesat. Now I just have to eat healthy to stay around for the final video :)
dredmorbius 7y ago
At 30 frames/second, shooting at one frame every 100,000 years, a film of the whole 4.5 billion years of Earth's evolution would run 25 minutes. If you wanted more detail, you could shoot every 10,000 years, running a bit over 4 hours. Humans would appear in this long version of the film, in the final 0.667 seconds, or the final 20 frames. The 2,000 years since Christ's death would be a blur on the final frame. All of human history for the past 10,000 years would almost fill out that frame. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs would appear 3 minutes 33 seconds before the end. The Cambrian Explosion, about 27 minutes from the end. That's the history of all multicellular life. At one frame every 100 years, the film would run 17 days 8 hours and change. And at a frame every decade, 300 years a seconds: 5 months 3 weeks. YouTube sees 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. If that were to corrspond with our movie of Earth's history, you'd need 150,000 years to upload all of it. Space is big, as you may have heard. Time is long.
- inetknght 7y ago
  We can bullet time through humanity's time.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  And in this video you would witness how trees became the dominant lifeform on Earth and have remained as such ever since.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Or algae and plankton. Regards plant life generally, one rather stunning realisation for me is how recent many of the now-dominant forms are. Grass is younger than the dinosaurs. Flowering plants evolved during their reign. The major crops of the world (wheat, maize, rice) are all largely human-engineered, through artificial selection over the past few thousand years. There's a lot of competition in the primary-producer niche.
- stOneskull 7y ago
  push the framerate up.

narag 7y ago

We? Ididntdothis, we won't do that :)

alharith 7y ago
If we as a species make it that far, parts of your genetic material will have survived, somewhere.
- samatman 7y ago
  This doesn't even require the survival of the species, we share about half our DNA with bananas. Granted the persistence of humans provides quite a bit more, and implies the survival of (some) culture as well, which might matter more.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    > we share about half our DNA with bananas. I’ve seen this claim before. Where does it come from? Humans have 23† pairs of chromosomes covering 21 thousand genes; bananas have 11 pairs, triplets, or quads†† covering 36 thousand. † Usually, but there is a surprisingly high frequency of different chromosome counts †† I only found out about triploid and tetraploid chromosomes today, don’t expect me to know anything
    - samatman 7y ago
      It's because genes are highly conserved, and I should have been more precise: we share about 50% of our genetic code with bananas. Intuitively this makes sense, since genes code for proteins and we can eat bananas (which can in turn eat us, with some help). If you count the exome, which is not highly conserved because it doesn't play much of a role that we know of other than coiling, it's more like 1%. So "50% of our DNA" is not accurate, it's our genes.

soperj 7y ago

You could get it now. You just need a very powerful telescope that you send to somewhere a billion light years away faster than the speed of light, and take pictures along the way.

amelius 7y ago
Or more practically, hope for a bunch of alien civilizations to have put up mirrors aimed in our direction.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  I believe we may be stretching "practical".
  - te_platt 7y ago
    Not so bad. Assuming a spherical Earth in a vacuum and a bunch of other slightly less reasonable assumptions we have: 1E+45 photons from sun per second 1.49598E+11 distance to sun in meters 6365000 earth radius in meters 2.81229E+23 surface area of solar flux at earth orbit 1.27276E+14 surface area of earth exposed to sun 4.5257E-10 ration earth area to solar flux 4.5257E+35 photons hitting earth per second 6.49E+15 one light year in meters 1.947E+25 meters in 3 billion light years 4.76367E+51 surface are of sphere 3 billion ly across 9.50046E-17 photons per m^2 at 3B ly 1.05258E+16 m^2 per photon 57883255.23 radius in meters for mirror to reflect 1 photon/second 57883.25523 radus in km (Only 10x larger than Earth!) Then given a reasonably competent engineer to make a descent mirror with no aberration and a good telescope on a clear night away from the city, and a good bit a patience, you could watch a replay of the last 3 billion years.
    - dTal 7y ago
      > a good telescope on a clear night away from the city, and a good bit a patience > 1 photon/second Perhaps your eyes are better than mine...
    - deleted 7y ago