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This 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

This 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 ago
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.
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 ago
  We 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 ago
    Once 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.
    - yalogin 4y ago
      The evidence is all around you. We are talking about 100s of millions of years. You seem to be way too fixated on flying cars for some reason. Look at the progress in just the last 100 years, it's astounding. I am more than comfortable to extrapolate from there. Also, it's not like we haven't done space travel, unlike flying cars, we are able to go to Mars too. Entering and living in space outside the earth's atmosphere is something we do on a continuous basis. I understand the problem is hard, but given the timescales involved I am more than happy to be optimistic about the human race. If anything I find your take incredibly shortsighted. It's ok we can differ in our outlooks.
      - bena 4y ago
        I'm not fixated on flying cars. I brought it up initially, along with meals in pill form, and shows set in the future that have either already passed or will pass soon, to show how shit we are at predicting the progress of progress. You then said we haven't done flying cars yet. You singled it out and made it the point of your response to me. So I was supposed to not respond? Because there are good reasons to not have flying cars. And I mentioned that. But most of all of my posts have been about things other than flying cars. We may feel comfortable to extrapolate on timescales humans haven't even existed on yet, that doesn't make that extrapolation good. You want to look at just the last 100 years and extrapolate from that. First by assuming that the last 100 years is geometric progress and not linear. But even given that it is geometric, where's the evidence that it will continue being geometric. Look at the last 50 years. We haven't done much more. We went to the Moon in 1969. We've thrown some robots at Mars since then. It's possible that progress isn't a vertical asymptote, but a sigmoid with a hard upper boundary. We don't know. And we can't get to Mars. As in actual people. It will take a person 9 months to make it to Mars, assuming all of the other problems are solved. Because there are other problems. We are not built for space travel. The radiation and lack of gravity are real problems with no good solutions at the moment. We haven't been to space (depending on your definition of space) since the Moon missions. Everything we do now is technically in the atmosphere and protected by the Earth's magnetosphere. Yes, the ISS is above the Karman line, but it's still within the thermosphere. And I'm not completely sure about the Apollo missions, but the Moon spends some time within our magnetosphere as well, so they may have done those missions during the time when the Moon was under Earth's protection. And that magnetosphere is important. Like all life on the planet would die without it important. So, living outside the Earth's atmosphere is not something we do. Ever. I find this extreme long term techno futurist optimistic thinking worse than useless. This is navel gazing at its most extreme. It either wants us to ignore the problems of today or ignore very real limitations imposed on us by various aspects of reality. Thinking ahead is fine. But techno-optimism forecasting out millenia is not thinking ahead. It's wishing.
bricemo 4y ago
I agree. 1 billion years is a lot of research and development time. It only took us a few hundred years to go from agricultural society to spacefaring. 10 million X that amount of progress and we can either fix the sun, move the earth, or repopulate on other stars. This will be a non-issue.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  > It only took us a few hundred years to go from agricultural society to spacefaring Exactly as long trash the ecosphere - not coincidental. > This will be a non-issue I despair.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > It only took us a few hundred years to go from agricultural society to spacefaring. Arguably, since less than 600 individuals have made it to LEO with 2 dozen going around the Moon, this doesn't translate to "spacefaring society." If only 600 people had cars among 8B, we wouldn't describe this as an automotive society. When thousands are regularly traveling outside the Earth-Moon system, then we will be spacefaring. Troubles are lowering the expense and having the practical incentive beyond discovery.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Well, replace with borderline spacefaring if you prefer. On the timeframes people are throwing around here, neither the "borderline" nor our previous false start, or not even a few more false starts in our future make any difference.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      It's still incredibly optimistic. It may very well remain the domain of only a precious few career experts for quite some time, if not indefinitely, unless space begins to generate absurd revenue unavailable on Earth. There are valid and practical reasons for LEO. Beyond that, the Moon, Mars, Asteroid Belt, moons of Jupiter, etc., I don't see any advantage other than discovery and the benefit of working out how to do something (but not how to do something cheaply). Somehow ferrying back a massive asteroid made of pure gold matching the amount already on Earth would likely not even be profitable. I suppose that climbing Everest never had any practical purpose, and an economy has developed around it. But still, cost per person is a fraction of $1M to do so. It costs an average of $58M/person to get to orbit and back safely for a short trip, and that is just LEO for a few days or maybe a couple weeks. Economies of scale may never materialize for space travel. Even if we do legitimately become spacefaring and stretch out into the Solar System for some reason, high costs and accidents may, like nuclear energy, cause it to scale back and diminish to its current state of roughly 50 people per year to LEO. Without the incentive of profit, which I doubt tourism could sustain by itself, I don't see how spacefaring ever gets off the ground. Maybe mushrooms found on Europa become an insanely expensive delicacy, or similar. But it seems astronomically unlikely. If the profit incentive can be found, then it could not be stopped, but it really needs to do more than pay for itself, and at a current pace of sinking $20B/yr into it without a return, ever, who knows if it will ever even break even?
atty 4y ago
Considering basically all of modern technology has been invented in the last 150 years, and just how far we have come in that time, i think it’s relatively safe to assume that in 100x that time (say 15000 years in the future) we will have either destroyed ourselves, colonized other portions of the solar system, or significantly terraformed earth and/or built megastructures in space in such a way as to be able to better control the environment.
forgotpwd16 4y ago
We could also remove, a process called star lifting, part of the sun's matter to decrease its burning rate, retain its current output, and consequently increase its main sequence lifetime. Depending on the amount of material removed, we could even alter its destiny from becoming a red giant to becoming a white dwarf.

Projectiboga 4y ago

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.

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 ago
We 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 ago
  Once 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.
  - yalogin 4y ago
    The evidence is all around you. We are talking about 100s of millions of years. You seem to be way too fixated on flying cars for some reason. Look at the progress in just the last 100 years, it's astounding. I am more than comfortable to extrapolate from there. Also, it's not like we haven't done space travel, unlike flying cars, we are able to go to Mars too. Entering and living in space outside the earth's atmosphere is something we do on a continuous basis. I understand the problem is hard, but given the timescales involved I am more than happy to be optimistic about the human race. If anything I find your take incredibly shortsighted. It's ok we can differ in our outlooks.
    - bena 4y ago
      I'm not fixated on flying cars. I brought it up initially, along with meals in pill form, and shows set in the future that have either already passed or will pass soon, to show how shit we are at predicting the progress of progress. You then said we haven't done flying cars yet. You singled it out and made it the point of your response to me. So I was supposed to not respond? Because there are good reasons to not have flying cars. And I mentioned that. But most of all of my posts have been about things other than flying cars. We may feel comfortable to extrapolate on timescales humans haven't even existed on yet, that doesn't make that extrapolation good. You want to look at just the last 100 years and extrapolate from that. First by assuming that the last 100 years is geometric progress and not linear. But even given that it is geometric, where's the evidence that it will continue being geometric. Look at the last 50 years. We haven't done much more. We went to the Moon in 1969. We've thrown some robots at Mars since then. It's possible that progress isn't a vertical asymptote, but a sigmoid with a hard upper boundary. We don't know. And we can't get to Mars. As in actual people. It will take a person 9 months to make it to Mars, assuming all of the other problems are solved. Because there are other problems. We are not built for space travel. The radiation and lack of gravity are real problems with no good solutions at the moment. We haven't been to space (depending on your definition of space) since the Moon missions. Everything we do now is technically in the atmosphere and protected by the Earth's magnetosphere. Yes, the ISS is above the Karman line, but it's still within the thermosphere. And I'm not completely sure about the Apollo missions, but the Moon spends some time within our magnetosphere as well, so they may have done those missions during the time when the Moon was under Earth's protection. And that magnetosphere is important. Like all life on the planet would die without it important. So, living outside the Earth's atmosphere is not something we do. Ever. I find this extreme long term techno futurist optimistic thinking worse than useless. This is navel gazing at its most extreme. It either wants us to ignore the problems of today or ignore very real limitations imposed on us by various aspects of reality. Thinking ahead is fine. But techno-optimism forecasting out millenia is not thinking ahead. It's wishing.

bricemo 4y ago

I agree. 1 billion years is a lot of research and development time. It only took us a few hundred years to go from agricultural society to spacefaring. 10 million X that amount of progress and we can either fix the sun, move the earth, or repopulate on other stars. This will be a non-issue.

zasdffaa 4y ago
> It only took us a few hundred years to go from agricultural society to spacefaring Exactly as long trash the ecosphere - not coincidental. > This will be a non-issue I despair.
Maursault 4y ago
> It only took us a few hundred years to go from agricultural society to spacefaring. Arguably, since less than 600 individuals have made it to LEO with 2 dozen going around the Moon, this doesn't translate to "spacefaring society." If only 600 people had cars among 8B, we wouldn't describe this as an automotive society. When thousands are regularly traveling outside the Earth-Moon system, then we will be spacefaring. Troubles are lowering the expense and having the practical incentive beyond discovery.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Well, replace with borderline spacefaring if you prefer. On the timeframes people are throwing around here, neither the "borderline" nor our previous false start, or not even a few more false starts in our future make any difference.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    It's still incredibly optimistic. It may very well remain the domain of only a precious few career experts for quite some time, if not indefinitely, unless space begins to generate absurd revenue unavailable on Earth. There are valid and practical reasons for LEO. Beyond that, the Moon, Mars, Asteroid Belt, moons of Jupiter, etc., I don't see any advantage other than discovery and the benefit of working out how to do something (but not how to do something cheaply). Somehow ferrying back a massive asteroid made of pure gold matching the amount already on Earth would likely not even be profitable. I suppose that climbing Everest never had any practical purpose, and an economy has developed around it. But still, cost per person is a fraction of $1M to do so. It costs an average of $58M/person to get to orbit and back safely for a short trip, and that is just LEO for a few days or maybe a couple weeks. Economies of scale may never materialize for space travel. Even if we do legitimately become spacefaring and stretch out into the Solar System for some reason, high costs and accidents may, like nuclear energy, cause it to scale back and diminish to its current state of roughly 50 people per year to LEO. Without the incentive of profit, which I doubt tourism could sustain by itself, I don't see how spacefaring ever gets off the ground. Maybe mushrooms found on Europa become an insanely expensive delicacy, or similar. But it seems astronomically unlikely. If the profit incentive can be found, then it could not be stopped, but it really needs to do more than pay for itself, and at a current pace of sinking $20B/yr into it without a return, ever, who knows if it will ever even break even?

atty 4y ago

Considering basically all of modern technology has been invented in the last 150 years, and just how far we have come in that time, i think it’s relatively safe to assume that in 100x that time (say 15000 years in the future) we will have either destroyed ourselves, colonized other portions of the solar system, or significantly terraformed earth and/or built megastructures in space in such a way as to be able to better control the environment.

forgotpwd16 4y ago

We could also remove, a process called star lifting, part of the sun's matter to decrease its burning rate, retain its current output, and consequently increase its main sequence lifetime. Depending on the amount of material removed, we could even alter its destiny from becoming a red giant to becoming a white dwarf.