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> death-in-40-million-years This sounds like a bold claim. Everything that I'd read before predicted about ~1 billion years before the surface of earth is func

> death-in-40-million-years This sounds like a bold claim. Everything that I'd read before predicted about ~1 billion years before the surface of earth is functionally dead - 600 million years before there's not enough carbon for trees, and by at about billion years from now we'd be looking at extinction of eukaryotic life, the beginnings of runaway evaporation of the oceans etc. 40 million years is small enough period on a geological (or solar!) timescale that I would think it would be a lot more obvious if we were already living in the end times.

eru 4y ago
Slight tangent: even with the 600 million year scale, it's somewhat scary to think that we are living much closer to the end of the earth than it's beginning. And also closer to the end of life on earth than to its beginning. I suspect, if humanity survives even for another 1,000 years, we will be advanced enough to consider moving earth further out. It would take enormous efforts and expenditures of energy, but we'd also have millions of years to do it. I've read about some speculative mechanism we could use. Eg move earth by its magnetic field, or move earth via carefully tugging on the moon etc.
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  The funny thing is while we're towards the tail end of life on earth in general, we're pretty much smack-bang in the middle of what we'd consider complex life. Multicellular plants are about a billion years old, and the entire kingdom of Animalia (including all vertabtrates, arthropods, molluscs, worms, etc) only crop up in the fossil record about 600 million years ago. The preceding two billion years were basically nothing but single celled organisms, phytoplankton, and simple eukaryots. Those guys will probably still survive us, but not for as long as they preceded us.
  - eru 4y ago
    Yes, complex life is pretty new. Another way to say the same is that nano-technology is ancient on earth, but macro-machinery is new. My favouritely named era of life on earth is the Boring Billion.

eru 4y ago

Slight tangent: even with the 600 million year scale, it's somewhat scary to think that we are living much closer to the end of the earth than it's beginning. And also closer to the end of life on earth than to its beginning. I suspect, if humanity survives even for another 1,000 years, we will be advanced enough to consider moving earth further out. It would take enormous efforts and expenditures of energy, but we'd also have millions of years to do it. I've read about some speculative mechanism we could use. Eg move earth by its magnetic field, or move earth via carefully tugging on the moon etc.

DoughnutHole 4y ago
The funny thing is while we're towards the tail end of life on earth in general, we're pretty much smack-bang in the middle of what we'd consider complex life. Multicellular plants are about a billion years old, and the entire kingdom of Animalia (including all vertabtrates, arthropods, molluscs, worms, etc) only crop up in the fossil record about 600 million years ago. The preceding two billion years were basically nothing but single celled organisms, phytoplankton, and simple eukaryots. Those guys will probably still survive us, but not for as long as they preceded us.
- eru 4y ago
  Yes, complex life is pretty new. Another way to say the same is that nano-technology is ancient on earth, but macro-machinery is new. My favouritely named era of life on earth is the Boring Billion.