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A step-by-step guide to our solar system’s demise
- Cyberdog 4y agoClickbait title. Page does not contain a guide on how I can destroy the solar system.
- Camisa 4y agoStep 1: Wait about 100 billion years. Good luck in implementing it tho.
- rbanffy 4y ago> From that point on, there won’t be any more liquid water on Earth Not so fast - we can build a parasol and place it a bit closer to the Sun than the Earth/Sun L1 point so it'd act as a solar sail to keep itself in place. This can buy us a lot of time. Moving to Saturn's moons is also an option for a while - the'll be warm and cozy for a couple billion years after the Earth is toast. If we don't learn how to do things like this (and to travel to other stars and settle Earth-like planets) in these billion of years, well, then we deserve that fate.
- bloopernova 4y agoAssuming we could stabilize the Earth's climate as it is now, and discarding any questions of resources, I wonder if humanity could remain as-is for a billion years? We'd still be under (non-natural) evolutionary pressure, unless we learned enough to stop that happening too. If we did become a stable species that decided to stick around the Solar system, maybe we'd be powerful enough to move Earth slowly outwards as Sol expanded? Maybe with the gravitational effects of millions of planetoid flybys. Makes me wonder if we could do the same with stars, lol! Become a shepherd of our local galactic area, carefully keeping stars away from our precious birthplace over timescales of trillions of years...
- LorenPechtel 4y agoI would be astounded if "humanity" exists a million years from now. I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't exist a thousand years from now. The thing is we are a technological species, we don't need to rely on random chance for evolution. We can already create DNA on demand and insert it into microorganisms. AFIAK we currently only do this with already-known proteins, but that is a limit of knowing what will be useful, not a limit of the technique. As time goes on it seems inconceivable that we will not reach the point we can apply this to human DNA at conception. I expect the first manifestations will be editing out known-bad genes and replacing them with the properly-working equivalents. Next will come replacing ordinary genes with known-superior genes. Then they'll be inventing new superior genes. I expect in almost all cases they'll make the edits backwards-compatible but we've all seen it with software--backwards compatibility only works over a range of generations. Don't expect v20 to play nice with v2. Once the mods reach the point that reproduction with a stock human is no longer possible we have a speciation event--the results can no longer be considered human even if they would not raise an eyebrow if dropped into today's society. As for long-term protection of our solar system--I can't imagine why. It would be a lot easier to protect the Earth by moving it rather than moving anything that might threaten it.
- rbanffy 4y ago> Then they'll be inventing new superior genes. The thing is, they only need to do it once in all those billions of years, and they become a totally different species. And that's assuming they'll still be fond of organic bodies and not decide to live in simulated environments that are much easier to move than planets.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoInventing a superior gene doesn't itself make them a new species. They only become a new species when the result can't breed with a base human. However, even that gets fuzzy--there's a "species" of bird whose name escapes me that lives in high latitudes. They can all breed with the neighbors, but birds from the two ends of the span can't breed with each other. I expect to see the same thing happen with humanity--eventually highly modded individuals won't be able to breed with unmodded individuals. (Although, unless immortality is developed there won't be any unmodded individuals to breed with. Why would the genetic engineers care about compatibility with the old version that's no longer around?)
- denton-scratch 4y agoOur species has evolved from apes over about a million years. A billion years ago, we were bacteria. Who is this "we" that you think might be around in 50 billion years, to colonise the moons of Saturn?
- rbanffy 4y agoWe have removed most of natural selection from our evolution. It's entirely possible we could evolve to be H. G. Well's Eloi, served by mechanized Morlocks, or just that we extinguish ourselves after a couple centuries of Idiocracy.
- denton-scratch 4y ago> We have removed most of natural selection from our evolution. Ho-ho! So nobody died from COVID-19, because we have defeated disease? There's a new outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. QE2 just died of "old age". New variants of COVID-19 Omicron are circulating in EU, and killing people vaccinated against the old variants. I've been reading of new polio outbreaks. But it's great that we've defeated natural selection; clearly the Brave New World has arrived.
- samatman 4y agoThe number of people of childbearing age who died of COVID is a rounding error, which is true of everything else you mentioned as well. Did you think the Queen was due to have a couple more heirs before her untimely passing?
- rbanffy 4y agoI said most, not all. We'll eventually grow resistance to COVID or Ebola provided enough exposure, the same way we developed resistance against the flu (that, for instance, South American indigenous populations didn't when the Spanish first arrived), as we'll weed out those with propensity not to vaccinate their kids, because their kids may not be able to reproduce. But you won't die because you are not strong enough to hunt a mammoth.
- 4y ago
- ufmace 4y agoI saw a paper just a few years ago about how to shift the Earth to a higher orbit to mitigate solar brightening/expansion. It involved a large asteroid in a careful orbit that could gradually pull the whole Earth to a higher orbit. Probably couldn't do it tomorrow, but sounded like something we might be able to do in a few hundred years instead of tens of thousands.
- kaon123 4y agoI love stuff like this. If you do too, then I highly recommend this incredible youtube video of the end of time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA&ab_channel=melodysheep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA&ab_channel=melod...
- zikduruqe 4y ago^^^ This is worth your time to watch.
- crmd 4y agoIt’s a crime this lovely video didn’t end with a voiceover of sir Roger Penrose explaining conformal cyclic cosmology theory.
- nofinator 4y agoThanks. I also love Wikipedia's Timeline of the far future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
- amflare 4y agoIf you like that one, then you'd probably love https://www.futuretimeline.net/ https://www.futuretimeline.net/. Fair warning, you may lose your afternoon to it.
- whiteboardr 4y agoWhile interesting and putting perspectives into place I’m having a really hard time following how there can be a black hole merger area (let alone the black hole era) having the model of redshift engrained in my brain. Serious question: wouldn’t all mass that had time to gravitate towards and convene into galaxies, stars and black holes been drifting too far apart by then to be even remotely close for their gravities overcome these - then - unimaginable distances?
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
- Ygg2 4y agohttps://archive.is/YeVOS https://archive.is/YeVOS
- marcus_holmes 4y agoI thought the Cloud Question was still unresolved? More water vapour = more clouds. Clouds are highly reflective, so reflect much of the incoming solar energy away. Last I heard, the net effect of More Greenhouse vs Higher Albedo wasn't worked out. Has this changed?
- pfdietz 4y agoThe clouds of Venus reflect most of the sunlight hitting the planet. The 1% that reaches the surface is still enough to keep that surface hot enough to melt lead.
- modo_mario 4y agoWill we get a much stronger Albedo effect considering all the ice that's melting?
- marcus_holmes 4y agoice only appears at the poles and mountainous regions. the poles are negligable for albedo becuase so little solar radiation reaches them. And the glaciers as a percentage of global area are negligable (glaciers are a minor % of land, and land is only 25% of global area. Clouds cover the oceans).
- modo_mario 4y agoSomeone else in this thread thought differently saying : "It's gotten brighter over even just the last 20 million years. The ice caps helped reflect nearly .39 of it, but soot and melting are lowering that. It's called albedo and that loss will dwarf the CO2 Heat trapping." Similarly I found that in the geologically recent past, the ice–albedo positive feedback has played a major role in the advances and retreats of the Pleistocene (~2.6 Ma to ~10 ka ago) ice sheets and that the ice at the arctic is in fact not that negligible given the loss of it in relation to the much higher warming at the poles. To what extent do you believe clouds contribute?
- 4y ago
- kar1181 4y agoGanymede sounds like it will be great!
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThis appears to possibly be a freebooted version of this link: https://planetplanet.net/2022/09/15/the-end-of-the-solar-system/ https://planetplanet.net/2022/09/15/the-end-of-the-solar-sys...
- 300bps 4y agoIt’s the same author reported on both pages.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIt's not the credit they're typically after, but the traffic.
- explodingcamera 4y agoThere's no way that this is free booting, nautilus is a decently sized publication.
- forgotpwd16 4y agoAuthor by the way is a very active researcher in planetary science. Man has h-index > 60.
- mannykannot 4y agoThere's an acknowledgement at the end: Reprinted with permission from Sean Raymond’s blog PlanetPlanet.net.
- towaway15463 4y agoWe’re doomed if we don’t spread out. Staying on earth guarantees destruction by asteroid, super volcano, coronal mass ejection, war, disease, ecological collapse, etc. Settling the solar system is a bit better but still subject to rogue brown dwarfs or black holes, gamma ray bursts, variability of Sol its eventual death. Even settling our local group of stars could end badly with a big enough super nova. Every year we delay expanding into the universe is another light year of distance we may never get back.
- denton-scratch 4y ago> We’re doomed Yup. We're doomed, because we're an evolving species. In a few hundred thousand years we'll be very different - perhaps our overweight brains will have shrunk, and we'll no longer be curious about silly things like the origin or final fate of the Universe. "Spreading out" is more likely to happen to fungus and bacteria spores, than bipedal mammals.
- mellavora 4y ago> In a few hundred thousand years we'll be very different.. And thanks to the magic of epigenetic regulation, I'd say we'll be pretty different in 600 years. We are following the path of the social insects, becoming more drone-like, docile, and specialized. Also more humane and selfless. Also more childlike.
- Mtinie 4y agoEloi-esque.
- tomrod 4y agoObesity rates and cultural milieu suggest that it's not just Eloi-esque, unfortunately. But I think you nailed the general trend.
- denton-scratch 4y agoNot really. The Eloi seem to be like wealthy students - young, good teeth, straight blonde hair, nice duds, no job they have to do. There doesn't appear to be any significant evolution that could have affected them since the present. Only the Morlocks appear to have changed; there are no contemporary humans that are remotely like Morlocks. Dammit, this is scifi from 100 years ago; it doesn't throw any light on the future of humanity. I'm going to butt out, because I think this is OT.
- fortran77 4y agoIs there anything we could be doing to prevent this?
- donkarma 4y ago
- dudeinjapan 4y agoNo, but becoming a multi-planet species starting with Mars is a good first step toward Plan B.
- fortran77 4y agoI don't think that will help us if the solar system burns out!
- yalogin 4y agoThis is new for me, I have never thought about the fusion in the sun and that its energy emission is actually increasing. Makes total sense but never thought of it. However since we know this is going to happen, over the next billion years, can we not build some kind of “cover” in space away from the earth’s atmosphere to block or deflect this extra energy from entering the atmosphere? I somehow believe humans will be capable of that in that time.
- Projectiboga 4y agoIt's gotten brighter over even just the last 20 million years. The ice caps helped reflect nearly .39 of it, but soot and melting are lowering that. It's called albedo and that loss will dwarf the CO2 Heat trapping.
- bena 4y ago> I somehow believe humans will be capable of that in that time. Why? Because we've done stuff before? We live past the times of flying cars and meals in pill form. We are 40 years from the Jetsons, three years past the original Blade Runner, etc. This is just handwaving away all of the hard parts of the solution and saying that otherwise, it would be simple. Yes, yes it would. It would definitely be easy if it weren't hard.
- yalogin 4y agoWe have done incredible things just not flying cars yet. I am talking 100s of millions of years (if we survive that far of course)
- bena 4y agoOnce again, where's the evidence we will? There's also the logistical practicality of what is being proposed. We don't have flying cars for many reason, one of them being that any benefits they may have is outweighed by all of the very real logistical issues they have. I find this level of "techno-optimism" just flat out naive. It's a bet you never have to worry about being called. On the time scale of thousands of years, neither you nor I will be alive to find out who was right, but you are willing to say with unwavering faith that we will be able to do it. Simply because you believe smarter people than you will be able to solve the hard problems. Including problems we don't even know exist yet. Just to get to the moon, we had to first discover just how ill-equipped the human body is for travel outside of our atmosphere. But you talk as if building a giant shade in space is going to be relatively trivial in the future. There is nothing trivial about leaving the Earth. And it's quite possible that it will never be trivial. Before we worry about solar shades, we should wonder how we're first going to solve those hard problems.
- dudeinjapan 4y agoNo mention of Galactus?
- layer8 4y agoSee also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth.
- 2-718-281-828 4y agoI actually don't care what happens in a thousand years and beyond that. I'm fine with humanity going extinct. This obsession with getting to Mars for the sake of surviving the collapse on our planet is beyond me. I find those ambitions rather cheesy.
- bricemo 4y agoBut humans thousands of years ago made decisions that make our lives today possible. Aren’t you glad that you had the chance to exist and enjoy your own life? I highly recommend Ian McCaskill‘s recent book “ what we owe the future.” He makes a compelling rational argument that it makes no less sense to discount future generations than it does to discount physically distant people who are suffering today.
- 2-718-281-828 4y agoIt doesn't make sense to be glad one exists given that 1) you will go back to nonexistance anyway 2) you wouldn't care about not exisiting One just exists and has some fun, some worries - and that's it
- cpsns 4y ago> Aren’t you glad that you had the chance to exist and enjoy your own life? Not particularly no, but that’s a very unpopular opinion to hold. I remain unconvinced that this is preferable to non-existence.
- Teever 4y agoWhat motivates you to write a comment like this? That's an honest question, like in your nihilistic worldview where humanity going extinct is no big deal, what drives you to do your every day things? If you could prevent humanity from going extinct by pressing a button, would you do it? If you could cause humanity to go extinct by pressing a button, would you do it? What do you care about, and why?
- unbalancedevh 4y ago
- hilbert42 4y agoLike entropy and the heat death of the universe, I find this subject always fascinating—yet somehow it always seems depressing.
- lucb1e 4y agoThat cookie wall uses a font too small to read without zooming. Anyone pressing the 'go away' button on such screens can probably not be considered to have freely given consent and their data should be... Ah, who am I kidding.