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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. "We" is doing a lot over work over, w
by 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
- thebruce87m 1y ago> there's really not much you can do apart from moving the whole damn planet out of the way. You can put something in between, a giant sun shade
- WillAdams 1y agoOr a giant solar array?
- thfuran 1y agoCan you without making a ringworld?
- thebruce87m 1y agoI guess you’re thinking of something that orbits earth? If you build something that orbits the sun at the same rate as us then it could just be flat and circular. Maybe someone smarter than me can calculate the optimal parameters to get the smallest shade that orbits the sun. If we are looking to only block out a percentage of the sun then it doesn’t even need to be fully opaque, maybe a giant dream catcher would be fine.
- hinkley 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point And already a known option for our current global warming situation.
- thfuran 1y ago>orbits the sun at the same rate as us That means you're heavily restricted in where you can put it. It has to be either right next to earth, in which case it's hard to keep away from Earth, or at L1, which is not stable. There's no other place you can put something where it will stay directly between us and the sun.
- thebruce87m 1y agoWhy restricted? Are we assuming it does not produce thrust here? Because it could.
- Bootvis 1y agoThe interest in speculating, to me at least, is the impact of intelligent life still existing. It puts an upper bound on the life span on single planet species.
- MangoToupe 1y ago...it also pushes the lower bound lower :( really it just means we can extrapolate less from the historical record than had we not evolved, although I suppose that's a rather silly statement to make given that it was "non-intelligent" life that produced us in the only sample we have. Now I'm actually morbidly curious: do you think humans could even come close to sterilizing this planet if we wanted to? I mean maybe we could burn away the atmosphere if we set off enough nukes (probably more than humanity's ready-to-use-stockpile, I think?), but the biomass that's inside the ocean (...would that even remain without an atmosphere or would it boil off? regardless...) and crust is simply massive. I strongly suspect that life would keep on going.
- Retric 1y ago> 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. That’s a really misleading way to describe what going on. The amount of energy radiated into space is a function of temperature, so increasing incoming radiation also increases outgoing radiation. 5% increase in luminosity is roughly 3.5C increase in earths average surface temperatures ignoring other effects. However, you get a feedback loop as water vapor is a greenhouse gas which makes things hard to model. Here’s a study suggesting the tipping point is on 1 billion years https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216142310.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216142310.h... but it’s not suggesting the oceans literally boil but rather a transition point where there’s a lot more water in the atmosphere.
- ghssds 1y agoThe human species doesn't matter. Species come and go. The only thing that matter is Life. Life must continue.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- speakfreely 1y agoWell, over a sufficient timeline, humans will just be a common ancestor species of a series of new, distinct species. That's how it goes. It's a bit disappointing to think that billions of years of evolution would result in only hardy bacteria or algae surviving to represent life. I think the continuation of consciousness is a more interesting goal... whether it happens in our carbon-based biology or in some other way is a secondary concern.
- ghssds 1y agoHow do you know bacteria and algae aren't conscious?
- lazide 1y agoI asked them and they told me no.
- IAmBroom 1y agoYou seem unaware of extinction events. Humans are not guaranteed descendent species.
- speakfreely 1y agoUnnecessary snark, especially based on my comment and what I was replying to. Hope your day gets better.
- okayishdefaults 1y agoThis is hacker news, and so I mean this earnestly Why though? Because they have little to no ability to understand the consequences of their actions? ot: have you ever looked into what the proper nomenclature is for dog breeds? None! They have subspecies based on vibes. Species is a human construct, one that doesn't even serve us in our second most familiar of categories. It seems difficult to double down based on a "science" of naming things.
- aeve890 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future A handy reference for this topic
- fakedang 1y agoEven better: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
- simonask 1y agoI love this article. Especially the part where, about 2 billion years after the last traces of even unicellular life on the planet has become extinct, the length of a calendar day will have to be officially adjusted, since it will then be 48 hours. The idea of keeping bureaucracy alive much longer than our planet is human optimism at its best. Death and taxes, come Hell, high water, and the literal evaporation of Earth's oceans due to surface temperatures exceeding 1130 C.
- aeve890 1y ago>bureaucracy Fellas, is it bureaucratic to use calendars?
- telesilla 1y agoDuring last year's total eclipse I learned that in the future, and not so far away, there will never be total eclipses again because the moon's orbit is slowly getting further away from our planet. Folks, enjoy those total eclipses while you can and write poetry and make films so the future humans can enjoy with a sad wonder what they could never experience.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoProbably AI and tardigrades will be the only things existing.
- atmosx 1y agoThe one we have right now is a stochastic - a good one, but it’s not the SCiFi AI, not even close. So I am not sure how an LLM without an operator makes any sense or if it counts as “something” in this context.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThe hypothetical technological singularity is expressed as the superorganism of technology, systems, and people (for now) changing until something like not quite AGI and partial self-replication become attainable and iterate further. For better or worse, something is happening orthogonal to the hype.
- DonHopkins 1y agoAn AI without an operator is like a person without religion is like a fish without a bicycle.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- MangoToupe 1y agoNot entirely sure I grasp the significance of this, but it's probably my favorite response to LLM-jaw-wagging I've ever seen. Huge fan btw, and thank you for the unix haters handbook.
- thangalin 1y ago> five billion years 250 million, owing to the expansion of the sun and formation of a supercontinent. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01259-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01259-3
- MangoToupe 1y agoThe sun going red giant seems both easier to reason about and much more assured than trying to reason about global metabolic processes that have repeatedly changed on much shorter time frames, including in the last few hundred years at our own hand. Hell if there's one thing i'd put money on it's in life's ability to exploit hitherto-unknown chemistries to alter global metabolism. But physics, especially anything involving the energy output of the sun, is much harder to hand-wave away like that. Not that I don't find that article interesting, of course. And I wouldn't underestimate our ability to (continue) to terraform the earth, intentionally sure, but much more certainly unintentionally. Eg https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031920116300103 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...
- bravesoul2 1y agoAI will take all our jobs by 2030 but apparently there will still be humans in millions of years time :)