5 ms·
The sun has about 5B years more to go before it turns into a red giant, not 0.5B years...
by dtech 1y ago
The sun has about 5B years more to go before it turns into a red giant, not 0.5B years...
- IsTom 1y agoWhile it has more time to become a red giant, it'll become more luminous over time and life on Earth will be impossible much earlier. I've seen estimates of 0.5B to 1.5B years.
- DiogenesKynikos 1y agoIn 500 million years, hopefully humans (or whatever humans have become at that point) will be able to modify the Earth's atmosphere to deal with the increased luminosity of the Sun.
- meindnoch 1y agoWe'll put a giant sunshade in the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point.
- Nevermark 1y agoWe might need to do that by the end of this century. If we are able to harvest the solar system resources it would take by then. Trial run for the bigger “solar warming” event.
- meindnoch 1y agoSee, it all comes together! ^.^
- farmdve 1y agoSadly it is still only a stop-gap measure. The sun is for all intents and purposes, dying a slow death.
- meindnoch 1y agoSure, but it may keep Earth habitable for an extra billion years.
- psychoslave 1y agoUnfortunately it looks like we are more in the track to human inhabitable earth :(
- generic92034 1y agoLong before death it will expand to or almost to Earth's orbit. I doubt humanity could isolate Earth from that.
- BirAdam 1y agoYeah, but if humans exist by the time the sun fails us, they wouldn’t really be the same species as us, and they’d hopefully have progressed to the point that they could escape the Earth.
- OhioMan2943 1y agoYou're saying we wont maintain tradition and our "humanity"?. I like to be a little more optimistic and believe in us as a species transferring values until the end.
- Scarblac 1y agoLook at all types of mammal that exist, from us to platypuses to bats to whales. Evolved in a few hundred million years. Modern humans have been here for a few hundred thousand. In 500 million years absolutely anything could happen (if we survive this century).
- ta1243 1y agoSure, and entropy will end us all one way or another
- 1y ago
- IsTom 1y agoWe might be lucky enough to do that, but it could have easily taken intelligence another 500M years to evolve on another planet. First animal fossils are something like 700M years old, so it took 2-3G years to just any animals.
- dmurray 1y agoThe problem is that there are just so many planets. Sure, another planet could be 500My slower, but with a billion planets, some of them should be 500My faster instead. It's possible we are absolutely one-in-a-billion uniquely lucky - after all, someone has to be the first and the luckiest. But every year we find indications that our planet is completely typical.
- the_gipsy 1y agoYes but the point is that the window in which we have developed this capability is quite short.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoYou're assuming we make it out of the industrial age while we backpedal on all of our climate commitments.
- goognighz 1y agolol 0.5B to 1.5B is a pretty big difference. Sounds like we really don’t know what we are talking about.
- cess11 1y agoMaybe it'll help if you think of it as 5-6.5 billion years instead.
- XorNot 1y agoThe lower end estimate depends on the specifics of the increase in brightness accelerating the weathering of silicates, leading to more CO2 absorbed out of the atmosphere until C3 photosynthesis isn't possible. Some plants use a different method which will continue to work (C4), but consequences of plant life as we know it dying off would be catastrophic for life on this planet - barring of course, whatever adaptations are made. But it's certainly the mark of "the beginning of the end" for life on this planet - it's a major milestone that we (the species) do need to leave eventually if we want to continue.
- FrustratedMonky 1y agoEvery field of study, subject, or problem, or even business cases, -- all have different ranges. Why does this one in-particular sound like they don't know what they are talking about? It would be just as accurate for me to say in the range of responses, yours kind of sounds like an anti-science bot. Typical of that type of thinking.
- iinnPP 1y agoThe difference between .5B years and 1.5B (BILLION) years is pretty staggering in a conversation basically focused around the last couple thousand years. Definitely room for the comment. Your anti-science bot comment however, is very anti-science.
- FrustratedMonky 1y agoReally? With the age of a star, that is too wide a range for you to accept? To pinpoint something like this. What if I were to say, "really it's 1.3435 Billion on a Tuesday". Of course, calling someone anti-anti-science. The new 'right'. Using science arguments against science. Yes. Your comment is typical, just spam fud. "look at this huge range, see, scientist don't know what they are doing"
- m4rtink 1y agoNothing a bit of stellar lifting would not fix[1]. Or worst case, move to a bunch of habitats orbiting stellified Jupiter[2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting [2] https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a48d58c84350 https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a48d58c84350
- Andrew_nenakhov 1y agoThat's not the point: if you have capabilities to do stellar lifting, interstellar travel is likely on the table too. Fermi paradox is about the question, why we can't detect any sign of extraterrestrial civilizations out there. One explanation is that while life in general might be relatively abundant, true sentience as in us humans that allows life to spread besides its cradle might be quite unique.
- ivan_gammel 1y agoEarth may become uninhabitable in 1By due to increasing brightness of the sun. In 3-4B years it will be too hot for liquid water on the surface.
- goognighz 1y ago[flagged]
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoEarth is on course to become uninhabitable for human civilisation its current form within a century, with an associated mass extinction. Even if all industrial activity stopped tomorrow there's now enough CO2 in the system to guarantee a succession of uncomfortable and expensive droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires for thousands of years. If it doesn't they will become more and more extreme very quickly. If ocean acidification and warming destroy the foodchain in the seas, collapse on land will happen very quickly.
- foxglacier 1y agoDid you notice that you aren't wrong because you're not really saying anything at all? "in its current form" - so maybe with slightly different distribution of land use but basically fine and not necessarily as different as today is from 50 years ago? "mass extinction" already been happening for ages for many species. "uncomfortable floods/etc?" Already been happening for all of history. "very quickly" is how quicky? "more extreme" is how much more extreme?
- AlecSchueler 1y ago> so maybe with slightly different distribution of land use but basically fine and not necessarily as different as today is from 50 years ago? No, probably very much more different than that, more like rolling back on industrialisation and globalisation. Closer to 500 years than 50, without the same hope of "progress" that we had back then. > "mass extinction" already been happening for ages for many species. Yeah, we all learned about dinosaurs when we were little kids, but if humanity collapses there's no guarantee of anything similar developing after us.
- coolThingsFirst 1y ago5B more years and we're here for max 100 years. Cruel joke. Life's too short.
- Andrew_nenakhov 1y agoAccording to this Timeline of the Far Future [0], we only have 500-600 million years. (warning, this is one of the most depressive pages on Wikipedia) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
- ianburrell 1y agoYou confused two things. There is the Sun turning into red giant in 5 billion years consuming the Earth, and the Sun getting too bright for Earth to be habitable in 500 million years.
- Andrew_nenakhov 1y agoWhat gives you an impression that I am confusing these two things? Becoming a red giant is a long process and increased luminosity and radius are parts of this process.