presumably he has guessed the path evolution will take? It seems rather far fetched to be able to predict something so uncertain and dependent on e.g. anthropomorphic behaviour (including the behaviour of whatever we evolve into), geology, climate, sun, solar system events, etc.
It’s not so much evolution he is predicting, but the biological and geological future of the Earth based on several known long-term effects.
The rate of cooling of the Earth’s interior, the gravitational interactions with other objects, and a steady increase in the Sun's luminosity is well documented.
The sun is just another star, and the basic of star phases is good understood. The sun will eventually burn up most of its fuel and enter a red giant phase that destroys the Earth if we don't intervene [0].
Evolution requires natural selection pressure, which we've largely eliminated. I don't think our species will evolve much more unless we deliberately start selectively breeding.
Evolution requires selection pressure, whether natural or otherwise.
And there's still selection pressure from so many sources. Partial list: Some people die before they reach breeding age, some people refuse to have children, some people are born unable to have children, some people have children with dead-beat spouses, some people are simply incapable of caring properly for kids, some people are prohibitively undesirable as mates, and so on.
This article is based on the assumption that we won't figure out a way to manage and/or refuel the sun, even in a billion years.
Given the incredible technological progress since the industrial revolution (cooking by fire to walking on the moon and nuclear power in under two centuries), I am highly skeptical of this assumption.
The only things that can stop us are regressions to the primitive, of which I know of only two forms: the first is belief in the supernatural and its primacy as the basis of abstract thought. The second is nihilistic hatred of man and progress masked as practical necessity and love of nature.
I stand for life, and for progress. I am proud, and you should be, too. Whatever challenges nature holds in store for us, we can figure it out!
> (cooking by fire to walking on the moon and nuclear power in under two centuries),
I really don't know what to make of this. You surely can't think that "cooking by fire" was the height of technological sophistication in the year 1813?
Sorry guys, I meant "cooking over an open fire." Setting campfire smores and charcoal grills aside, this is a pretty primitive way of cooking. If you came from a place where this was your only option for heating your food, you'd be astounded at the cleanliness and ease provided by any modern gas or electric range.
For most of human history, the vast majority of people cooked their food over open fires. Cooking with anything more advanced is an aspect of modern living that is only a very recent development, especially given that the time scale I was addressing is a billion years long.
I Agree. The sun is also just another star. Humans may have colonized lot of other star systems in a billion years, so the loss of a single one is not a threat to mankind and the species that originated on earth.
It may be sad to lose the home planet, with all its historical importance, but maybe then we are routinely terraforming other planets and moving them around.
All the other stars are running down at the same time. Although admittedly not at the same rate.
If you're interested in really long term survival, arguably the thing to do is to work out how to store the energy, or to turn the temperature down a bit so you're using less fuel, or to find out how to live on less fuel ourselves. Or all of the above.
Lots of energy going to waste out there - and the underlying point behind the article, I suppose, is that the universe has a limited energy budget. Like cancer - if you live long enough something will get you.
> All the other stars are running down at the same time. Although admittedly not at the same rate.
I don't think it works like that. There is no known principle that allows energy to be created or destroyed. So theoretically, the total amount of energy in the universe must remain constant.
So when one star disappears the energy gets transferred as radiation, mass and heat that eventually will be used to create new starts in a process known as "stellar evolution"[0].
As far as I'm aware, so don't take this as gospel or anything:
Its total potential to do work within the reference frame of any given system, which is what we're interested in here, doesn't remain a constant. It's like... if you think of it like water: If you have all your water at the top of a cliff in a big reservoir and it runs down into a turbine linked up to a generator, then you can get a lot of work out of that water. But once it's gone down the cliff, despite it still being the same mass of water, your ability to extract useful work from that water is dramatically less. You'd have to pump it back to the top of the cliff to repeat the exercise (at a loss since the system you're playing with is never going to be perfectly efficient, i.e. the second law of thermodynamics - so there'd basically be no point in doing so.)
What we really want are high concentrations of energy; low entropy sources. We're looking for those situations where the water is still at the top of the cliff. A star is fussing down through the various elements, and in the process it emits a lot of radiation during its lifetime. And it's not getting that energy back. Once the elements have undergone the process you'd have to put energy back into them to return them to their earlier states. But that energy's been leaving the star for years, and some of it travels at the speed of light so it's very far away - so... it's just not gonna happen. Stars do go through life cycles and produce various phenomena but always at a loss of their potential to do useful work, always at an increase in entropy.
If by then we have the technology to refuel the sun, we'll probably also have the means for interstellar travel. I'm betting we leave this joint for somewhere more hospitable.
that technology and progress are going to keep going forward in a more or less linear pattern for thousands of years, after only a few hundred years precedent is a _huge_ assumption. The number of ways progress can slow, be stopped, or reversed, are many - asteroids, viruses, calderas, wars, catastrophic scientific accidents, severe climate change, and of course the influence of governments, both repressive or ineffective, or lack thereof. I sincerely hope progress continues forward but at the same time when I think of "1000 years from now" I can't help but think the planet might be a dystopian wasteland by then.
>This article is based on the assumption that we won't figure out a way to manage and/or refuel the sun, even in a billion years. Given the incredible technological progress since the industrial revolution (cooking by fire to walking on the moon and nuclear power in under two centuries), I am highly skeptical of this assumption.
You shouldn't be. Basing your argument on "incredible technological progress since the industrial revolution" and "a billion years" passing is mere extrapolation.
Extrapolation of this form is like saying "I ate 1 burger on Monday, 2 on Tuesday and 4 on Wednesday. Given this rate, I'll be eating billions of burgers by next week".
For one, early discoveries, when science started its' pacing were easier. They are "low hanging fruit". We got the most basic stuff in 2-3 centuries (electricity, magnetism, gravity, modern math, evolution, boolean algebra, sets, engineering), refined them in another (relativity, quantum physics, computing, DNA). At some point you reach a plateau. We are not increasing anywhere near the same pace as in the start in breadth and quality: mostly in volume (more research into various aspects of stuff) and detail (more detailed results).
Second, there are other limits. For example, handling stuff below or above some natural limits requires (by the physics of the thing) enormous energy -- and we either don't have that or couldn't use it without melting earth.
There are also limits to our resources -- the very stuff we use to make our tech. From minerals to water. And then there's social limits. We could have been wiped out from a WWIII style thing several times during the cold war -- and could be even worse going forward, if on top of the usual greed and diplomatic expansion games there's also something like a fight for natural resources (draught, famine, etc).
It's much easier to move Earth to a higher orbit than it would be to refuel the Sun. In fact, we should de-fuel the Sun to prolong its life and move the Earth closer to it. One could move the Earth with a collection of bodies orbiting the Sun pulling the Earth in the right direction with gravity. Those bodies could obtain their own momentum from solar sails. It's not fancy technology beyond major bruteforce work (we'd need to disassemble the Moon, at least)
Remember the timeframes involved are of many million years. The Sun will change very slowly until the very end and moving the Earth any faster would create climate problems of their very own.
BTW, we'll have some problems before that, when the Milky Way merges with Andromeda. I imagine lots of stars will gain excessive mass from fast moving gas clouds and may decide to go nova/supernova in the millennia it will take for both galaxies to pass through each other.
I don't understand why everyone immediately dismisses the possibility of "life" on planets like Jupiter, Venus, and even the Sun.
We have an extremely limited understanding of these places. We barely have an inkling of how elements and compounds behave in such temperatures/pressures/environments, particularly with respect to each other.
Even on Earth, places we consider to be "harsh" environments are often found to be thriving with life.
What kind of "life" would be possible on the Sun? I don't think basic life form - even the rawest form you can think of - can survive at those temperatures. It's hostile even to complex chemistry.
"harsh" environments on Earth, such as the depths of the oceans, are still quite life-friendly compared to places like the Sun, Venus or Jupiter.
Nobody is dismissing the possibility of life on the Sun, Venus or Jupiter... it's just very unlikely. I would personally rate more life-friendly places such as Europa or Titan. The oceans of Europa could be thriving with sea-life and it's so exciting to have that possibility right in our own solar system.
> What kind of "life" would be possible on the Sun?
Life is a kind of pattern that can replicate itself in a certain environment. We usually consider it as chemical reproduction but why should it be. There's more energy in stars and complex magnetic structures. Who's to say that over billions of years some of them couldn't become replicating?
Right, the problem is people give life the arbitrary prerequisite of being "in a solid/liquid state".
All you need is an energy source and a structure that can absorb the energy and contain enough information to reproduce. It can be made of anything and on any time scale.
>I don't understand why everyone immediately dismisses the possibility of "life" on planets like Jupiter, Venus, and even the Sun.
Indeed, why would anyone immediately dismiss life on the Sun!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Ray, pretend for a moment that I don't know anything about metallurgy, engineering, or physics, and just tell me what the hell is going on.
Jupiter and Venus are much more plausible than the sun.
There are just simply no available building blocks in the sun. The sun's gravity is so strong that it sorts out it's elements by atomic weight almost perfectly. Hydrogen, Helium, and then some heavier ones. At that point... we're just out of building blocks. What would we build the life with? Swirls of Hydrogen? Hydrogen can only bind to itself, one at a time. There's no way to make any structures.
As someone with a biochem degree (which is admittedly biased towards earthling life): my understanding of life is that it's fundamentally about selectively letting certains molecules in to create energy and chemical gradients. It's about separating one's inside from the surrounding, so the inside can be manipulated.
The insides of cells are a very different solution than outside--- and along similar lines of homeostatis, the blood of dolphins is very different from sea water.
I just have a ton of difficulty seeing how a uniform pool of plasma could hold life.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadThe rate of cooling of the Earth’s interior, the gravitational interactions with other objects, and a steady increase in the Sun's luminosity is well documented.
The sun is just another star, and the basic of star phases is good understood. The sun will eventually burn up most of its fuel and enter a red giant phase that destroys the Earth if we don't intervene [0].
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Life_phases
And there's still selection pressure from so many sources. Partial list: Some people die before they reach breeding age, some people refuse to have children, some people are born unable to have children, some people have children with dead-beat spouses, some people are simply incapable of caring properly for kids, some people are prohibitively undesirable as mates, and so on.
Given the incredible technological progress since the industrial revolution (cooking by fire to walking on the moon and nuclear power in under two centuries), I am highly skeptical of this assumption.
The only things that can stop us are regressions to the primitive, of which I know of only two forms: the first is belief in the supernatural and its primacy as the basis of abstract thought. The second is nihilistic hatred of man and progress masked as practical necessity and love of nature.
I stand for life, and for progress. I am proud, and you should be, too. Whatever challenges nature holds in store for us, we can figure it out!
I really don't know what to make of this. You surely can't think that "cooking by fire" was the height of technological sophistication in the year 1813?
My comment is wondering what he really meant; your explanation makes him sound like an idiot, frankly.
For most of human history, the vast majority of people cooked their food over open fires. Cooking with anything more advanced is an aspect of modern living that is only a very recent development, especially given that the time scale I was addressing is a billion years long.
It may be sad to lose the home planet, with all its historical importance, but maybe then we are routinely terraforming other planets and moving them around.
If you're interested in really long term survival, arguably the thing to do is to work out how to store the energy, or to turn the temperature down a bit so you're using less fuel, or to find out how to live on less fuel ourselves. Or all of the above.
Lots of energy going to waste out there - and the underlying point behind the article, I suppose, is that the universe has a limited energy budget. Like cancer - if you live long enough something will get you.
I don't think it works like that. There is no known principle that allows energy to be created or destroyed. So theoretically, the total amount of energy in the universe must remain constant.
So when one star disappears the energy gets transferred as radiation, mass and heat that eventually will be used to create new starts in a process known as "stellar evolution"[0].
However this process may stop in the far further, as the ultimate fate of the universe is currently unknown, but some theories has been made: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#T...
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution
Its total potential to do work within the reference frame of any given system, which is what we're interested in here, doesn't remain a constant. It's like... if you think of it like water: If you have all your water at the top of a cliff in a big reservoir and it runs down into a turbine linked up to a generator, then you can get a lot of work out of that water. But once it's gone down the cliff, despite it still being the same mass of water, your ability to extract useful work from that water is dramatically less. You'd have to pump it back to the top of the cliff to repeat the exercise (at a loss since the system you're playing with is never going to be perfectly efficient, i.e. the second law of thermodynamics - so there'd basically be no point in doing so.)
What we really want are high concentrations of energy; low entropy sources. We're looking for those situations where the water is still at the top of the cliff. A star is fussing down through the various elements, and in the process it emits a lot of radiation during its lifetime. And it's not getting that energy back. Once the elements have undergone the process you'd have to put energy back into them to return them to their earlier states. But that energy's been leaving the star for years, and some of it travels at the speed of light so it's very far away - so... it's just not gonna happen. Stars do go through life cycles and produce various phenomena but always at a loss of their potential to do useful work, always at an increase in entropy.
^^;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
Around 1900, that seemed to be the state in physics.
You shouldn't be. Basing your argument on "incredible technological progress since the industrial revolution" and "a billion years" passing is mere extrapolation.
Extrapolation of this form is like saying "I ate 1 burger on Monday, 2 on Tuesday and 4 on Wednesday. Given this rate, I'll be eating billions of burgers by next week".
For one, early discoveries, when science started its' pacing were easier. They are "low hanging fruit". We got the most basic stuff in 2-3 centuries (electricity, magnetism, gravity, modern math, evolution, boolean algebra, sets, engineering), refined them in another (relativity, quantum physics, computing, DNA). At some point you reach a plateau. We are not increasing anywhere near the same pace as in the start in breadth and quality: mostly in volume (more research into various aspects of stuff) and detail (more detailed results).
Second, there are other limits. For example, handling stuff below or above some natural limits requires (by the physics of the thing) enormous energy -- and we either don't have that or couldn't use it without melting earth.
There are also limits to our resources -- the very stuff we use to make our tech. From minerals to water. And then there's social limits. We could have been wiped out from a WWIII style thing several times during the cold war -- and could be even worse going forward, if on top of the usual greed and diplomatic expansion games there's also something like a fight for natural resources (draught, famine, etc).
Remember the timeframes involved are of many million years. The Sun will change very slowly until the very end and moving the Earth any faster would create climate problems of their very own.
BTW, we'll have some problems before that, when the Milky Way merges with Andromeda. I imagine lots of stars will gain excessive mass from fast moving gas clouds and may decide to go nova/supernova in the millennia it will take for both galaxies to pass through each other.
We have an extremely limited understanding of these places. We barely have an inkling of how elements and compounds behave in such temperatures/pressures/environments, particularly with respect to each other.
Even on Earth, places we consider to be "harsh" environments are often found to be thriving with life.
"harsh" environments on Earth, such as the depths of the oceans, are still quite life-friendly compared to places like the Sun, Venus or Jupiter.
Nobody is dismissing the possibility of life on the Sun, Venus or Jupiter... it's just very unlikely. I would personally rate more life-friendly places such as Europa or Titan. The oceans of Europa could be thriving with sea-life and it's so exciting to have that possibility right in our own solar system.
Life is a kind of pattern that can replicate itself in a certain environment. We usually consider it as chemical reproduction but why should it be. There's more energy in stars and complex magnetic structures. Who's to say that over billions of years some of them couldn't become replicating?
All you need is an energy source and a structure that can absorb the energy and contain enough information to reproduce. It can be made of anything and on any time scale.
Indeed, why would anyone immediately dismiss life on the Sun!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Ray, pretend for a moment that I don't know anything about metallurgy, engineering, or physics, and just tell me what the hell is going on.
Dr Ray Stantz: You never studied.
There are just simply no available building blocks in the sun. The sun's gravity is so strong that it sorts out it's elements by atomic weight almost perfectly. Hydrogen, Helium, and then some heavier ones. At that point... we're just out of building blocks. What would we build the life with? Swirls of Hydrogen? Hydrogen can only bind to itself, one at a time. There's no way to make any structures.
As someone with a biochem degree (which is admittedly biased towards earthling life): my understanding of life is that it's fundamentally about selectively letting certains molecules in to create energy and chemical gradients. It's about separating one's inside from the surrounding, so the inside can be manipulated.
The insides of cells are a very different solution than outside--- and along similar lines of homeostatis, the blood of dolphins is very different from sea water.
I just have a ton of difficulty seeing how a uniform pool of plasma could hold life.