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If 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 enti
by hinkley 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.
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.
- kragen 1y agoRight, to distinguish fanfic, incorrect conspiracy theories, myth, and AI-generated hallucinations from what really happened.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoHow much interesting stuff is there to learn about Olduvai Gorge though? I expect Earth will be viewed as we view Athens now. There's a lot of important history which happened there, and schoolchildren spend a lot of time studying it, but the center of the action has moved elsewhere. Instead of "How often do men think about ancient Rome?", people will ask: "How often do men think about ancient Earth?"
- 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.