6 ms·

The 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

by kragen 1y ago

The 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 ago
I'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 ago
  Our 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.
  - skissane 1y ago
    It is only in the last century or two that humanity has reached the technological and economic level that a single standard global year numbering made any sense-before that, year numbering systems were highly culture-specific. And it just happened by accident that Western European-derived cultures were globally ascendant at that point in history, so that culture’s calendar became the de facto global standard. And if history turned out a bit differently, it easily could have been another calendar instead - e.g. the Islamic chronology (AH). But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now. I think the most likely way it might change would be (a) if humanity collapsed back to a premodern civilisation, and later recovered; or (b) some new culture/religion became globally dominant which demanded the calendar be changed. Personally, I’m sceptical (a) is going to happen in the next few thousand years. I think the most likely scenarios are (i) technological modernity survives, (ii) humanity goes extinct completely, (iii) a more moderate collapse in which things get very messy but don’t go all the way back to the premodern era. I think all three are more likely than the kind of complete and extended collapse then eventual recovery which would be most likely to reboot the calendar into a new and different global standard. I don’t think odds of (b) are high-it would require not just a new dominant culture, but also one which felt very strongly about wiping out all traces of the old calendar. Suppose 1000 years from now, 99% of humans are devout Muslims-I personally think that’s rather unlikely to happen, but anything is possible-would that trigger the current year numbering to be replaced by the Islamic one? I’m sceptical-all Muslim majority countries currently heavily use the Gregorian calendar for business use, computer systems, etc, and they don’t have a theological issue with that, so I’m sceptical they’d feel the need to change even if Islam became the globally dominant culture. And this isn’t a new thing in history-many historical Islamic empires continued the use of pre-Islamic calendars in parallel with the Islamic, especially since the Islamic calendar, being purely lunar, was less than ideal for agricultural use.
    - dmurray 1y ago
      > But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now. We have two global standards, both from the Western Christian tradition. The Gregorian calendar, and Unix time. Order of magnitude, they're probably baked into the same number of processes.
- Arcorann 1y ago
  RFC 2550 to the rescue: handling the transition from A99999 to B100000, or even from Z999999999999999999999999999999 to ^A1000000000000000000000000000000 will be a piece of cake.
peeters 1y ago
> 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. How did you come up with dropping Jupiter into the sun being a net energy producing operation? You have to cancel out around 10^35 J of kinetic energy to drop it from its orbit, and that is real work. How do you get that 10^35 J back? (Ignoring that from your own math, that E35J is around 100,000 years of the sun's total energy output).
- beAbU 1y ago
  You reach up and pull jupiter down while pulling yourself up? Not an orbital mechanicist though.
  - peeters 1y ago
    Pulling an object "down" (ie towards the gravitational focus) doesn't lower the energy of its orbit, it just changes the eccentricity. To lower its orbit you have to slow it down.
- kragen 1y ago
  I don't know, but Jupiter has that kinetic energy now, and if you slow it down until it falls into the Sun, it won't have it anymore. The energy has to go somewhere. Maybe you scoop up big balloons of gas, slingshot them to Mercury with a tether, catch them with another tether on the dark side of Mercury to decelerate them (thus generating electricity which you use to make some kind of fuel), and toss them Sunwards from there. Or maybe you use an electromagnetic mass driver in the Asteroid Belt to launch an unbelievable number of small rocky masses to a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter back to the same mass driver again, but at a higher velocity, so they generate electric power when it catches them before launching them again. Each mass goes through this circuit tens of thousands of times. There are lots of possibilities.
  - vikramkr 1y ago
    You're not capturing usable energy, to slow it down, you're accelerating it the other way, consuming usable energy
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bravesoul2 1y ago
I think it'd be easier to colonise another moon/planet. You have a few 100k years go do it.
Asraelite 1y ago
If we had the technology to move a planet, we would also have the technology to build a planet-sized space station, which would be a much more efficient use of resources. You could use spin gravity to make the entire mass inhabitable and useful, instead of almost all of the mass sitting in the core/mantle.
- kragen 1y ago
  We already have the technology to move a planet; it's just orbiting rockets. (Ion thrusters are especially promising here because of the small amount of mass you lose from the planet in the process.) We just don't have the necessary industrial scale to supply enough rockets and energy. A planet-sized space station is almost certainly possible with carbon nanotube ropes, but those have not yet been demonstrated to work in practice. However, smaller O'Neill-cylinder space stations are feasible even with just steel cables, and I look forward to a future where the vast majority of inhabited land area is in such contraptions. It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course.
  - myrmidon 1y ago
    > It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course. I don't think there is a clear trend toward this goal at all. Extrapolating current trends, we are fairly likely to peak in total population as a species long we become space-constrained on earth; more remote living space is pretty cheap in basically every industrialized country right now, and living in a conventional house in the boonies is like ten orders of magnitude easier than making anything extraterrestrial work (neither climate change nor even global nuclear war is enough to flip that). Sure, people might like the concept of space colonization, but we're not seeing significant amounts of people living on boats in the Atlantic, so I would not expect to see people living on spaceships within the next centuries, either...
    - kragen 1y ago
      Be careful to note that I didn't say the majority of people would be living in space colonies, but that the majority of inhabited land area would be found in them. Probably you're right that most people will choose to die on the same planet they're born on. Most people today choose to die in the same city they were born in, and most coconuts sprout, if at all, within a few meters of the tree they fell from. That doesn't mean that coconuts' ability to float across the ocean is inconsequential to coconut species distribution. It only takes one coconut making landfall on a barren atoll to start a new coconut grove. There are, in fact, a significant number of people who live on boats. There would be many more if the boats weren't dependent on docking to refuel. It's a mistake to extrapolate from current trends when it comes to exponentially growing phenomena. In April of 02020 covid had killed less than 1000 people after six months. In 01770 two million years of human beings had managed to speed up their transportation from the speed of a marathon runner to the speed of a racehorse. You have to look at the underlying dynamics, and even then what you often learn is that the future is very uncertain.
latexr 1y ago
> The article claims that Earth will be incinerated, but we could just move Earth further from the Sun. The article isn’t trying to make science-fiction predictions, it’s simply explaining how things are expected to go according to the workings of the Universe. The article also isn’t suggesting humans will go to Europa to survive, only that life could theoretically develop and persist there. We can’t even let our fellow humans live. Hatred and division is growing, and we’re ever more worshipping and giving power to destructive, selfish, science-denying, power-hungry maniacs with access to world-destroying technology. And you think there’s any chance we’ll all agree and unite to move the whole planet? It would be nonsensical for the article to even hint at entertainment that scenario in any serious capacity, and it would have been rightly dismissed by most people if it did.
- kragen 1y ago
  The thing people should rightly dismiss is the idea that human engineering is a minor enough consideration in predictions of the far future that it can be ignored as a sort of rounding error. The humans have already destroyed much of Earth's ozone layer, then restored it through exactly the kind of global agreement you're dismissing as unachievable. Now they've doubled the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, a change which would melt away the icecaps and raise sea levels dramatically over a few centuries if it weren't reversed. They don't have anything approaching world-destroying technology, but in a few decades they will. Undoubtedly, if there are still humans after a few hundred million years, they will disagree about exactly what orbit Earth should be in, but that doesn't mean it will stay in the same orbit until after its oceans boil dry.
  - latexr 1y ago
    > The thing people should rightly dismiss is the idea that human engineering is a minor enough consideration in predictions of the far future that it can be ignored as a sort of rounding error. Which is not my argument. At all. You’re talking about if we can, I’m talking about if we will. The article—again, rightly—explains what we predict is going to happen according to the information we have. It’s trying to be a scientific-minded article, not a science-fiction article. By your token, anyone could make up any technology to contradict the article, which is not a productive discussion. > the kind of global agreement you're dismissing as unachievable. I disagree it’s the same kind of agreement. The difference in magnitude and investment is gargantuan to the point it’s another category altogether. Like a group deciding where they’ll go out to dinner VS deciding which country they’ll all move to. Both require mutual agreement for the same group to advance, but that’s where the similarities end. > Undoubtedly, if there are still humans after a few hundred million years Which is a big if. You can’t in good faith flout “just move Earth further from the Sun” as if it was something routine without considering all the very real and very big obstacles which are in our way right now, billions of years before your proposed scenario. The crux of my point is merely that your criticism of the article is unwarranted. Sure, phantasise about any any possible approaches to the problem you can think of, but acting like the article somehow failed to consider those options is what I’m disagreeing with.
tim333 1y ago
A more practical way to lift the orbit is probably to "capture an asteroid of suitable size and set it on a series of fly-bys, shuttling between near the Earth and near Jupiter" https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-theoretically-possible-to-slowly-enlarge-the-Earth-s-orbit-around-the-Sun-perhaps-to-counter-the-increased-energy-output-of-the-sun-in-a-billion-years https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-theoretically-possible-to-...
omilu 1y ago
>>The Sun emits 380 yottawatts Only the part that illuminates the earth can do us any good.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > Only the part that illuminates the earth can do us any good. Well, that's clearly the part that is the lowest-effort to access, but on the timeline involved for concern about the Earth's biosphere being incinerated by changes to the Sun's size and output, there is plenty of time to develop means of leveraging more than the easy part.

by kragen 1y ago

DonHopkins 1y ago

I'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 ago
Our 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.
- skissane 1y ago
  It is only in the last century or two that humanity has reached the technological and economic level that a single standard global year numbering made any sense-before that, year numbering systems were highly culture-specific. And it just happened by accident that Western European-derived cultures were globally ascendant at that point in history, so that culture’s calendar became the de facto global standard. And if history turned out a bit differently, it easily could have been another calendar instead - e.g. the Islamic chronology (AH). But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now. I think the most likely way it might change would be (a) if humanity collapsed back to a premodern civilisation, and later recovered; or (b) some new culture/religion became globally dominant which demanded the calendar be changed. Personally, I’m sceptical (a) is going to happen in the next few thousand years. I think the most likely scenarios are (i) technological modernity survives, (ii) humanity goes extinct completely, (iii) a more moderate collapse in which things get very messy but don’t go all the way back to the premodern era. I think all three are more likely than the kind of complete and extended collapse then eventual recovery which would be most likely to reboot the calendar into a new and different global standard. I don’t think odds of (b) are high-it would require not just a new dominant culture, but also one which felt very strongly about wiping out all traces of the old calendar. Suppose 1000 years from now, 99% of humans are devout Muslims-I personally think that’s rather unlikely to happen, but anything is possible-would that trigger the current year numbering to be replaced by the Islamic one? I’m sceptical-all Muslim majority countries currently heavily use the Gregorian calendar for business use, computer systems, etc, and they don’t have a theological issue with that, so I’m sceptical they’d feel the need to change even if Islam became the globally dominant culture. And this isn’t a new thing in history-many historical Islamic empires continued the use of pre-Islamic calendars in parallel with the Islamic, especially since the Islamic calendar, being purely lunar, was less than ideal for agricultural use.
  - dmurray 1y ago
    > But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now. We have two global standards, both from the Western Christian tradition. The Gregorian calendar, and Unix time. Order of magnitude, they're probably baked into the same number of processes.
Arcorann 1y ago
RFC 2550 to the rescue: handling the transition from A99999 to B100000, or even from Z999999999999999999999999999999 to ^A1000000000000000000000000000000 will be a piece of cake.

peeters 1y ago

> 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. How did you come up with dropping Jupiter into the sun being a net energy producing operation? You have to cancel out around 10^35 J of kinetic energy to drop it from its orbit, and that is real work. How do you get that 10^35 J back? (Ignoring that from your own math, that E35J is around 100,000 years of the sun's total energy output).

beAbU 1y ago
You reach up and pull jupiter down while pulling yourself up? Not an orbital mechanicist though.
- peeters 1y ago
  Pulling an object "down" (ie towards the gravitational focus) doesn't lower the energy of its orbit, it just changes the eccentricity. To lower its orbit you have to slow it down.
kragen 1y ago
I don't know, but Jupiter has that kinetic energy now, and if you slow it down until it falls into the Sun, it won't have it anymore. The energy has to go somewhere. Maybe you scoop up big balloons of gas, slingshot them to Mercury with a tether, catch them with another tether on the dark side of Mercury to decelerate them (thus generating electricity which you use to make some kind of fuel), and toss them Sunwards from there. Or maybe you use an electromagnetic mass driver in the Asteroid Belt to launch an unbelievable number of small rocky masses to a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter back to the same mass driver again, but at a higher velocity, so they generate electric power when it catches them before launching them again. Each mass goes through this circuit tens of thousands of times. There are lots of possibilities.
- vikramkr 1y ago
  You're not capturing usable energy, to slow it down, you're accelerating it the other way, consuming usable energy

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

bravesoul2 1y ago

I think it'd be easier to colonise another moon/planet. You have a few 100k years go do it.

Asraelite 1y ago

If we had the technology to move a planet, we would also have the technology to build a planet-sized space station, which would be a much more efficient use of resources. You could use spin gravity to make the entire mass inhabitable and useful, instead of almost all of the mass sitting in the core/mantle.

kragen 1y ago
We already have the technology to move a planet; it's just orbiting rockets. (Ion thrusters are especially promising here because of the small amount of mass you lose from the planet in the process.) We just don't have the necessary industrial scale to supply enough rockets and energy. A planet-sized space station is almost certainly possible with carbon nanotube ropes, but those have not yet been demonstrated to work in practice. However, smaller O'Neill-cylinder space stations are feasible even with just steel cables, and I look forward to a future where the vast majority of inhabited land area is in such contraptions. It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course.
- myrmidon 1y ago
  > It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course. I don't think there is a clear trend toward this goal at all. Extrapolating current trends, we are fairly likely to peak in total population as a species long we become space-constrained on earth; more remote living space is pretty cheap in basically every industrialized country right now, and living in a conventional house in the boonies is like ten orders of magnitude easier than making anything extraterrestrial work (neither climate change nor even global nuclear war is enough to flip that). Sure, people might like the concept of space colonization, but we're not seeing significant amounts of people living on boats in the Atlantic, so I would not expect to see people living on spaceships within the next centuries, either...
  - kragen 1y ago
    Be careful to note that I didn't say the majority of people would be living in space colonies, but that the majority of inhabited land area would be found in them. Probably you're right that most people will choose to die on the same planet they're born on. Most people today choose to die in the same city they were born in, and most coconuts sprout, if at all, within a few meters of the tree they fell from. That doesn't mean that coconuts' ability to float across the ocean is inconsequential to coconut species distribution. It only takes one coconut making landfall on a barren atoll to start a new coconut grove. There are, in fact, a significant number of people who live on boats. There would be many more if the boats weren't dependent on docking to refuel. It's a mistake to extrapolate from current trends when it comes to exponentially growing phenomena. In April of 02020 covid had killed less than 1000 people after six months. In 01770 two million years of human beings had managed to speed up their transportation from the speed of a marathon runner to the speed of a racehorse. You have to look at the underlying dynamics, and even then what you often learn is that the future is very uncertain.

latexr 1y ago

> The article claims that Earth will be incinerated, but we could just move Earth further from the Sun. The article isn’t trying to make science-fiction predictions, it’s simply explaining how things are expected to go according to the workings of the Universe. The article also isn’t suggesting humans will go to Europa to survive, only that life could theoretically develop and persist there. We can’t even let our fellow humans live. Hatred and division is growing, and we’re ever more worshipping and giving power to destructive, selfish, science-denying, power-hungry maniacs with access to world-destroying technology. And you think there’s any chance we’ll all agree and unite to move the whole planet? It would be nonsensical for the article to even hint at entertainment that scenario in any serious capacity, and it would have been rightly dismissed by most people if it did.

kragen 1y ago
The thing people should rightly dismiss is the idea that human engineering is a minor enough consideration in predictions of the far future that it can be ignored as a sort of rounding error. The humans have already destroyed much of Earth's ozone layer, then restored it through exactly the kind of global agreement you're dismissing as unachievable. Now they've doubled the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, a change which would melt away the icecaps and raise sea levels dramatically over a few centuries if it weren't reversed. They don't have anything approaching world-destroying technology, but in a few decades they will. Undoubtedly, if there are still humans after a few hundred million years, they will disagree about exactly what orbit Earth should be in, but that doesn't mean it will stay in the same orbit until after its oceans boil dry.
- latexr 1y ago
  > The thing people should rightly dismiss is the idea that human engineering is a minor enough consideration in predictions of the far future that it can be ignored as a sort of rounding error. Which is not my argument. At all. You’re talking about if we can, I’m talking about if we will. The article—again, rightly—explains what we predict is going to happen according to the information we have. It’s trying to be a scientific-minded article, not a science-fiction article. By your token, anyone could make up any technology to contradict the article, which is not a productive discussion. > the kind of global agreement you're dismissing as unachievable. I disagree it’s the same kind of agreement. The difference in magnitude and investment is gargantuan to the point it’s another category altogether. Like a group deciding where they’ll go out to dinner VS deciding which country they’ll all move to. Both require mutual agreement for the same group to advance, but that’s where the similarities end. > Undoubtedly, if there are still humans after a few hundred million years Which is a big if. You can’t in good faith flout “just move Earth further from the Sun” as if it was something routine without considering all the very real and very big obstacles which are in our way right now, billions of years before your proposed scenario. The crux of my point is merely that your criticism of the article is unwarranted. Sure, phantasise about any any possible approaches to the problem you can think of, but acting like the article somehow failed to consider those options is what I’m disagreeing with.

tim333 1y ago

A more practical way to lift the orbit is probably to "capture an asteroid of suitable size and set it on a series of fly-bys, shuttling between near the Earth and near Jupiter" https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-theoretically-possible-to-slowly-enlarge-the-Earth-s-orbit-around-the-Sun-perhaps-to-counter-the-increased-energy-output-of-the-sun-in-a-billion-years https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-theoretically-possible-to-...

omilu 1y ago

>>The Sun emits 380 yottawatts Only the part that illuminates the earth can do us any good.

dragonwriter 1y ago
> Only the part that illuminates the earth can do us any good. Well, that's clearly the part that is the lowest-effort to access, but on the timeline involved for concern about the Earth's biosphere being incinerated by changes to the Sun's size and output, there is plenty of time to develop means of leveraging more than the easy part.