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While 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 0.5
by IsTom 2y ago
While 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 2y 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 2y agoWe'll put a giant sunshade in the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point.
- Nevermark 2y 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 2y agoSee, it all comes together! ^.^
- farmdve 2y agoSadly it is still only a stop-gap measure. The sun is for all intents and purposes, dying a slow death.
- meindnoch 2y agoSure, but it may keep Earth habitable for an extra billion years.
- psychoslave 2y agoUnfortunately it looks like we are more in the track to human inhabitable earth :(
- generic92034 2y agoLong before death it will expand to or almost to Earth's orbit. I doubt humanity could isolate Earth from that.
- BirAdam 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y agoSure, and entropy will end us all one way or another
- floxy 2y agoWe'll have colonized the galaxy in 10 million years. In 200 million years, I'd expect that some future historical society could undertake a project to clean out the heavy elements in the Sun to keep it going.
- IsTom 2y 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 2y 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 2y agoYes but the point is that the window in which we have developed this capability is quite short.
- AlecSchueler 2y agoYou're assuming we make it out of the industrial age while we backpedal on all of our climate commitments.
- goognighz 2y agolol 0.5B to 1.5B is a pretty big difference. Sounds like we really don’t know what we are talking about.
- cess11 2y agoMaybe it'll help if you think of it as 5-6.5 billion years instead.
- XorNot 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.