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That's practically guaranteed. Eventually, the Sun will expand so much that Earth's atmosphere will boil clean off. A mega-civilization with enormous power co

That's practically guaranteed. Eventually, the Sun will expand so much that Earth's atmosphere will boil clean off. A mega-civilization with enormous power could move Earth, buy some time, but nothing lasts forever.

selcuka 6y ago
> buy some time, but nothing lasts forever That reminded me of The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. Quite enjoyable if you haven't read it already: https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  I remember, when I first read this story, thinking how quaint this notion was: "In his father's youth, the only computers had been tremendous machines taking up a hundred square miles of land. There was only one to a planet. Planetary ACs they were called." Yet here we are, consolidating our planet's computing power to a handful of cloud computing providers.
eloff 6y ago
Why move earth when you could just throw up some shade? By then things would be so different it's impossible to imagine what humans might do or be capable of our interested in - if we're still around.
- mrkstu 6y ago
  Shade won’t help much when the sun is a red giant star…
  - eloff 6y ago
    Why not? Shade continues to function the same. If placed at the Lagrange point between Earth and the Sun (supposing that's not too close to said red giant), you wouldn't even need that much.
- samatman 6y ago
  That's why I made reference to a generic "mega civilization". We're talking hundreds of millions of years from now, the only safe bet is that "humans" as we understand them won't be around. That would be as weird as the vernacular language of a people being an English we would understand, in 100,000 years! Our descendants might be a mega-civilization. Our creations might be, or rather the descendants of our creations. We might get wiped out by an alien von Neumann probe, get wiped out and then get von Neumann probed, or ordinary colonization, or, maybe we'll uplift the rats and they'll overthrow us, or dolphins will come back on land and grow thumbs! It's a lot of time, is what I'm saying.

selcuka 6y ago

> buy some time, but nothing lasts forever That reminded me of The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. Quite enjoyable if you haven't read it already: https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
I remember, when I first read this story, thinking how quaint this notion was: "In his father's youth, the only computers had been tremendous machines taking up a hundred square miles of land. There was only one to a planet. Planetary ACs they were called." Yet here we are, consolidating our planet's computing power to a handful of cloud computing providers.

eloff 6y ago

Why move earth when you could just throw up some shade? By then things would be so different it's impossible to imagine what humans might do or be capable of our interested in - if we're still around.

mrkstu 6y ago
Shade won’t help much when the sun is a red giant star…
- eloff 6y ago
  Why not? Shade continues to function the same. If placed at the Lagrange point between Earth and the Sun (supposing that's not too close to said red giant), you wouldn't even need that much.
samatman 6y ago
That's why I made reference to a generic "mega civilization". We're talking hundreds of millions of years from now, the only safe bet is that "humans" as we understand them won't be around. That would be as weird as the vernacular language of a people being an English we would understand, in 100,000 years! Our descendants might be a mega-civilization. Our creations might be, or rather the descendants of our creations. We might get wiped out by an alien von Neumann probe, get wiped out and then get von Neumann probed, or ordinary colonization, or, maybe we'll uplift the rats and they'll overthrow us, or dolphins will come back on land and grow thumbs! It's a lot of time, is what I'm saying.