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When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?
- darkteflon 1y agoOf course it’s Europa.
- kaffekaka 1y ago[flagged]
- hinkley 1y agoIf we still need to live around Sol when the sun goes red giant, we will have deserved to be selected out of existence. It would be a shame to abandon her entirely, but don’t count on nostalgia to last for billions of years. We will have empires of people who never lived in Sol who think Good Riddance.
- ecshafer 1y agoIn the setting of the Traveller rpg, which has many thousands of years of time since people came from Earth. Earth is a bit of a backwater, the people on Earth have a bit of a superiority complex, but no one else cares. Its just some random planet many jumps away from the core, why would anyone care?
- rezmason 1y agoThe locals still insist the best pizza comes from Earth. Something about the water.
- DonHopkins 1y agoThe Earth is our mother, but we treat her like dirt.
- jerf 1y agoI would expect "I'm from Earth" to get about as much respect as "I'm from Olduvai Gorge". Well, isn't that nice for you, basically, but that's it. It's not a hard guess, we already don't reward people just because they were born near the origin of humanity. It'll be a while, though. There will certainly still be a long period of time where Earth is the most powerful by sheer inertia, no matter how fast space civilization develops.
- evan_ 1y ago> I would expect "I'm from Earth" to get about as much respect as "I'm from Olduvai Gorge". Maybe that's because we don't have cultural traditions that identifiably connect us to that. (We probably do, but they're so deeply ingrained that we can't even identify them as "culture"). People of Italian extraction have a certain affinity for Italians, German-descendants for Germans, etc- Unless we just totally forget about Earth-That-Was I think it's reasonable to think we'd find it interesting in 1000 years.
- kragen 1y agoWe're talking about a much longer period of time than 1000 years. Like, 4.5 billion years. Or at least 500 million. People who speak Indo-European languages such as English, Hindi, and Portuguese descend from migrants from the Caspian steppe. Do they have strong Caspian steppe affinities? And that's only been about 4000 years.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoWe're much better at recording history nowadays though. People seem to find the Yamnaya culture interesting, we just know rather little about it. Nowadays we have ubiquitous, effortless recording and copying capabilities. The struggle for historians will be to sort through all the data in order to identify a coherent narrative.
- vinni2 1y agoIt’s incredibly optimistic and egotistical to even think that humans will be around that long.
- danielbln 1y agoWe won't be around, but something we turned into, or something we built. Maybe.
- MangoToupe 1y ago> If we still need to live around Sol when the sun goes red giant, we will have deserved to be selected out of existence. "We" is doing a lot over work over, what, five billion years? That's longer than the history of existing life. Literally unimaginable.
- deepsun 1y agoYea, although true timescales are at least 10x shorter. In 500m years Earth oceans will boil out completely, talk about global warming. Humans will die way sooner, though.
- Bootvis 1y agoI understand that in 500m years luminosity will increase by 5%. By then we should be able to survive that modest increase. Where did you get 500m years?
- mystified5016 1y agoAs you said, luminosity increases. It isn't a matter of survival, it's a physics problem. If a planet absorbs more energy from its star than it's capable of radiating away, it will rise in temperature forever until and unless energy output increases above energy input. And when you consider that by this point energy input is on a permanent increase, there's really not much you can do apart from moving the whole damn planet out of the way. It's kind of pointless to speculate what kind of technology we'll have in 500m years (or indeed if there is a 'we' left in the system). The time scale is so enormous that there's simply no way to predict anything at all involving humans or human-derivatives. The planet (without literally unimaginable intervention) will heat up and become uninhabitable sometime around 500m years from now.
- datadrivenangel 1y agoI suspect with the right mix of aerosol injection and additional megaengineering of radiators pointing to deep space we could make that work
- shortrounddev2 1y agoIn Foundation, humanity is so far removed from Earth that people who claim Sol is the ancestral homeland of humans are seen as religious lunatics
- burnt-resistor 1y agoPlease don't conflate fiction with reality.
- misnome 1y agoThis entire thread is science fiction
- more_corn 1y agolol, you think we’ll live a hundred years let alone a couple billion? Given our pathological inability to solve even the most basic and obvious existential risks, I give odds of seeing the end of humanity in my lifetime at around 50%. I mean we still put forever chemicals in our food containers. There’s a segment of the population that aggressively opposes efforts to save humanity from global warming (the earth abides but humanity is quite fragile). We’ve had at least six known near misses in nuclear annihilation. We’ve been utterly unable to stamp out obvious misinformation, lies and utter bullshit in public discourse (so we can’t even talk about the real problems with anything approaching consensus on facts) The good news is we really don’t have to worry about the timeframes where the death of our star would cause problems.
- thfuran 1y ago>lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years let alone a couple billion? I probably won't be around in 100 years, but I'd place the odds of human extinction in that time frame at approximately 0. 1 billion is right out though. If there are descendants, they almost certainly won't be homo sapiens.
- bravesoul2 1y agoWhich makes the moot, because why do we care if X life is in that future reference frame or not. There will be life somewhere.
- bryant 1y ago50%, probably not. 0.1%? Probably. And that's probably the highest that number has been in millennia. You did mention "the end of humanity in my lifetime" after all.
- d_tr 1y ago> lol, you think we’ll live a hundred years... ... Yes? Do you really, seriously think that eight billion people can so easily disappear within a couple of generations and there won't be anyone left for the population to start growing again?
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- floxy 1y agoI mean, in 10 million years we will have colonized the Milky Way. Seems likely that a historical society in 200 million years will be vacuuming out heavy elements from the sun to keep it chugging along. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting#Stellar_husbandry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting#Stellar_husbandry
- UltraSane 1y agoYes. By then humanity will either be extinct or living in Dyson swarms around at least one other star or around a black holes. Even for Dyson swarm levels of technology black holes enable many new capabilities because they are an infinite heat sink that actually get COLDER as you drop matter into them.
- whycome 1y agoWe will have seeded the life there. And earth will be obliterated. And the emergent intelligent beings will wonder if life can exist somewhere else in the universe. They’ll specifically look for moons around large gas giants orbiting a red giant sun.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> They’ll specifically look for moons around large gas giants orbiting a red giant sun You're writing as if watery moons around gas giants aren't something we look for.
- anikan_vader 1y agoTo date, there have been no confirmed exomoon detections. So hopefully they'll do a better job than we have so far.
- watersb 1y agoAnywhere there's liquid water, we will find mildew. A bazillion dollars to explore new worlds, to find this mold that won't come off. Maybe it will talk to us.
- WalterBright 1y agoRadiation on Europa would kill people in a day.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoWe'll just need to evolve into self-replicating AI Mantrid arms and dispense with organic forms. ;)
- latexr 1y agoThe article isn’t suggesting we move there, it’s merely pointing out life could possibly survive. Life takes many more forms than humans.
- MrGuts 1y ago"When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?" The answer is yes, of course. Everyone on Europa is going to be fine.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoSo, why'd they tell us to attempt no landings there?
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThe monoliths really like their beaches free of tourists when they're getting a suntan from both stars.
- Henchman21 1y agoTo paraphrase from the Matrix: Humanity is a virus
- treebeard901 1y agoOn a large enough scale of the solar system, if you zoom out just right, planets and stars can resemble interactions you can see on a molecular level inside a human body. Most of the time, it is normal organic operation. Every so often though, something goes wrong and you can see a new virus or cancer form on previously healthy cells. Smith had a point. From that perspective life on a planet doesnt look much different.
- binary132 1y agoFinally a reasonable, level-headed take in this gloomy thread! How refreshing.
- krunck 1y agoMaybe before then a passing star will allow humanity or it's progeny to transfer over to one of the star's orbiting planets?
- hx8 1y agoAt first I thought this was crazy, but we actually don't know if there will be a passing star when the Milky Way collides with Andromeda which will happen before Sol transitions into a Red Giant.
- kragen 1y agoThe article claims that Earth will be incinerated, but we could just move Earth further from the Sun. The energy of escape velocity is just GMm/r. r is one AU, 150 gigameters. G is the gravitational constant, 67 piconewton square meters per square kilogram, M is the Sun's mass, 2.0 billion yottagrams. m is the Earth's, 6000 yottagrams. It works out to 5.3 billion yottajoules. The Sun emits 380 yottawatts, thus providing enough energy to move the Earth out of the Solar System entirely every five months. Moving it to a somewhat higher orbit, such as Jupiter's, would require somewhat less energy than that. And we have 500 million years, which most experts consider to be a significantly longer time than five months, so the problem is clearly soluble. A possible problem is that Jupiter itself could destabilize Earth's new orbit. Possibly putting Earth into orbit around Jupiter as an additional moon would be a solution, but if not, I think we could solve that problem by removing Jupiter. If we drop it into the Sun, we can gain all of its orbital energy in the process.
- DonHopkins 1y agoI've noticed how you regularly use five digit zero prefixed Y10K-compliant Long Now Years, but if things go well, you're going to need a lot more digits than that! ;) https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-and-10k-compliance-at-home/ https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an... Zager & Evans - In the Year 2525 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQfxi8V5FA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQfxi8V5FA Now it's been ten thousand years, man has cried a billion tears For what, he never knew, now man's reign is through But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight So very far away, maybe it's only yesterday Party like it's 99999!
- rollcat 1y agoOur dominant culture's "year zero" (aka the Common Era) is based on an estimated date of birth of a messiah of the currently-dominating religion. That calendar has also seen a major revision in October 1582. Long before and after that religion became dominant, many people have used different calendar systems - and many still do. Rome was founded in 753 BCE, and the Western Roman Empire fell around 476 CE. That's over 1200 years. It's more likely that another "year zero" event will happen in less than 8000 years. If the history survives that, we will probably just call the current era "Gregorian" or so.
- kwoff 1y agoThere's a paper that suggests that de-oxygenation might happen in around a billion years, so before the sun swallows the earth: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00693-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00693-5
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- quantadev 1y agoWithout the sun the only source of energy would be starlight. Planets don't _generate_ energy of their own, they only radiate away energy. So without the sun everything will simply freeze to near absolute zero, once it radiates away all heat energy.
- antihipocrat 1y agoTidal forces on a moon in orbit around a large body generate heat. This doesn't need the sun. Certain orbits will generate more heat and orbits aren't permanent, but technically it is possible post sun to have a source of energy
- quantadev 1y agoYep, I forgot to consider the tidal forces, but that generates heat for sure.
- serallak 1y agoGeothermal energy is also a thing. Is the heat produced inside a planet, mostly from the radioactive decay of natural isotopes. Volcanoes are not powered by the Sun. Of course this production will cease when all isotopes will be depleted, but that will take a very long time.
- Toritori12 1y agoI read somewhere that apparently a planet (I think either Saturn or Jupiter) can generate energy when gets smaller.
- quantadev 1y agoRight, there's kinetic energy in a system, and potential energy. For example the total energy that can be released from a moon in orbit is it's 1) kinetic energy of motion plus 2) potential energy, available thru the gravitational fields. If something with rotational energy shrinks it's rotational speed necessarily speeds up (energy conservation), and that can cause friction, resulting in heat. Any energy that isn't radiated away gets converted to heat ultimately yes. (this all omits nuclear reactions too!)
- justforfunhere 1y ago>> the sun will enter the final phase of its life. Its core of hydrogen fusion will expand and, in doing so, inflate the outer atmosphere of the star into gross proportions. It will swell and become a red giant star that will engulf Mercury and Venus and incinerate Earth. Does anybody know what is the timescale we are talking about here? From start of inflation of Sun's outer atmosphere to engulfing of earth?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- worik 1y agoWhew!
- southernplaces7 1y agoOne interesting thing to keep in mind here is that life could even survive on Earth itself when the Sun dies. If the red giant phase of the Sun (before its collapse) were to be just not quite hot enough to do more than scorch the surface of the earth and maybe heat the crust down only partially, microbial life would survive in deep fissures. Studies (link below) have shown that a whole ecosystem of life exists in wet cracks down to a depth of up to maybe 10 kilometers. Assuming the red giant phase of the sun only manages to cook the earth's surface, it's possible that the heat radiates down into the crust by a few hundred meters, or maybe a kilometer. After all, though rock as a dense object in your hand isn't a good thermal insulator, the porous, cracked substrate of our crust is indeed wonderful at insulating (second link). If it weren't we'd have long since cooked from the enormous heat beneath us. The same process works in the opposite direction. Thus IF, if the sun expands just enough to only scorch our world, once the sun collapses again and our planet enters its deep freeze, the microbes that survived far beneath its surface could live their strange existence indefinitely, close to magmatic heat sources in the delicately balanced equilibrium zones between these and the frozen world above. Yes, the core of the earth will also eventually cool too, but the combination of residual heat from formation, compressive friction heat and radioactive decay is enough to keep that from happening for at least tens of billions of years. It's a fascinating scenario to consider: the extreme limits of how tenacious life could stay alive on our world long after everything we consider sustaining is dead and gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biosphere https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/physical/ocean-floor/continental-movement-plate-tectonics#:~:text=Earth's%20solid%20crust%20acts%20as,to%20flow%20in%20convection%20currents. https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/physical/oce...