[HN Gopher] A step-by-step guide to our solar system's demise
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A step-by-step guide to our solar system's demise
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 143 points
Date : 2022-09-30 09:43 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| kaon123 wrote:
| I love stuff like this. If you do too, then I highly recommend
| this incredible youtube video of the end of time:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA&ab_channel=melod...
| crmd wrote:
| It's a crime this lovely video didn't end with a voiceover of
| sir Roger Penrose explaining conformal cyclic cosmology theory.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| While interesting and putting perspectives into place I'm
| having a really hard time following how there can be a black
| hole merger area (let alone the black hole era) having the
| model of redshift engrained in my brain.
|
| Serious question: wouldn't all mass that had time to gravitate
| towards and convene into galaxies, stars and black holes been
| drifting too far apart by then to be even remotely close for
| their gravities overcome these - then - unimaginable distances?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Any group of galaxies that is gravitationally bound will end
| up in effect putting the black holes into orbit about each
| other. The orbits will be across incredible distances and
| move very slowly, but it will happen. Orbital energy over
| time gets converted to gravitational waves and thus they
| spiral inwards. (All orbits actually spiral inwards, it's
| just the effect is so tiny that in all but extreme cases you
| won't notice it within the current age of the universe.)
|
| Galaxies which are not gravitationally bound won't encounter
| each other, so it doesn't end up merging the whole universe
| into a single black hole.
| nofinator wrote:
| Thanks. I also love Wikipedia's Timeline of the far future:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
| amflare wrote:
| If you like that one, then you'd probably love
| https://www.futuretimeline.net/. Fair warning, you may lose
| your afternoon to it.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| ^^^ This is worth your time to watch.
| lucb1e wrote:
| That cookie wall uses a font too small to read without zooming.
| Anyone pressing the 'go away' button on such screens can probably
| not be considered to have freely given consent and their data
| should be... Ah, who am I kidding.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Clickbait title. Page does not contain a guide on how I can
| destroy the solar system.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Is there anything we could be doing to prevent this?
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| No, but becoming a multi-planet species starting with Mars is a
| good first step toward Plan B.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Like entropy and the heat death of the universe, I find this
| subject always fascinating--yet somehow it always seems
| depressing.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| This appears to possibly be a freebooted version of this link:
|
| https://planetplanet.net/2022/09/15/the-end-of-the-solar-sys...
| 300bps wrote:
| It's the same author reported on both pages.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's not the credit they're typically after, but the traffic.
| explodingcamera wrote:
| There's no way that this is free booting, nautilus is a
| decently sized publication.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Author by the way is a very active researcher in planetary
| science. Man has h-index > 60.
| mannykannot wrote:
| There's an acknowledgement at the end:
|
| Reprinted with permission from Sean Raymond's blog
| PlanetPlanet.net.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| https://archive.is/YeVOS
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I thought the Cloud Question was still unresolved?
|
| More water vapour = more clouds. Clouds are highly reflective, so
| reflect much of the incoming solar energy away.
|
| Last I heard, the net effect of More Greenhouse vs Higher Albedo
| wasn't worked out. Has this changed?
| modo_mario wrote:
| Will we get a much stronger Albedo effect considering all the
| ice that's melting?
| pfdietz wrote:
| The clouds of Venus reflect most of the sunlight hitting the
| planet. The 1% that reaches the surface is still enough to keep
| that surface hot enough to melt lead.
| layer8 wrote:
| See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth.
| yalogin wrote:
| This is new for me, I have never thought about the fusion in the
| sun and that its energy emission is actually increasing. Makes
| total sense but never thought of it. However since we know this
| is going to happen, over the next billion years, can we not build
| some kind of "cover" in space away from the earth's atmosphere to
| block or deflect this extra energy from entering the atmosphere?
| I somehow believe humans will be capable of that in that time.
| atty wrote:
| Considering basically all of modern technology has been
| invented in the last 150 years, and just how far we have come
| in that time, i think it's relatively safe to assume that in
| 100x that time (say 15000 years in the future) we will have
| either destroyed ourselves, colonized other portions of the
| solar system, or significantly terraformed earth and/or built
| megastructures in space in such a way as to be able to better
| control the environment.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| We could also remove, a process called star lifting, part of
| the sun's matter to decrease its burning rate, retain its
| current output, and consequently increase its main sequence
| lifetime. Depending on the amount of material removed, we could
| even alter its destiny from becoming a red giant to becoming a
| white dwarf.
| bricemo wrote:
| I agree. 1 billion years is a lot of research and development
| time. It only took us a few hundred years to go from
| agricultural society to spacefaring. 10 million X that amount
| of progress and we can either fix the sun, move the earth, or
| repopulate on other stars. This will be a non-issue.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| > It only took us a few hundred years to go from agricultural
| society to spacefaring
|
| Exactly as long trash the ecosphere - not coincidental.
|
| > This will be a non-issue
|
| I despair.
| Maursault wrote:
| > It only took us a few hundred years to go from agricultural
| society to spacefaring.
|
| Arguably, since less than 600 individuals have made it to LEO
| with 2 dozen going around the Moon, this doesn't translate to
| "spacefaring _society_. " If only 600 people had cars among
| 8B, we wouldn't describe this as an automotive society. When
| thousands are _regularly_ traveling outside the Earth-Moon
| system, then we will be spacefaring. Troubles are lowering
| the expense and having the practical incentive beyond
| discovery.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, replace with borderline spacefaring if you prefer. On
| the timeframes people are throwing around here, neither the
| "borderline" nor our previous false start, or not even a
| few more false starts in our future make any difference.
| Maursault wrote:
| It's still incredibly optimistic. It may very well remain
| the domain of only a precious few career experts for
| quite some time, if not indefinitely, unless space begins
| to generate absurd revenue unavailable on Earth. There
| are valid and practical reasons for LEO. Beyond that, the
| Moon, Mars, Asteroid Belt, moons of Jupiter, etc., I
| don't see any advantage other than discovery and the
| benefit of working out how to do something (but not how
| to do something cheaply). Somehow ferrying back a massive
| asteroid made of pure gold matching the amount already on
| Earth would likely not even be profitable.
|
| I suppose that climbing Everest never had any practical
| purpose, and an economy has developed around it. But
| still, cost per person is a fraction of $1M to do so. It
| costs an average of $58M/person to get to orbit and back
| safely for a short trip, and that is just LEO for a few
| days or maybe a couple weeks. Economies of scale may
| never materialize for space travel. Even if we do
| legitimately become spacefaring and stretch out into the
| Solar System for some reason, high costs and accidents
| may, like nuclear energy, cause it to scale back and
| diminish to its current state of roughly 50 people per
| year to LEO.
|
| Without the incentive of profit, which I doubt tourism
| could sustain by itself, I don't see how spacefaring ever
| gets off the ground. Maybe mushrooms found on Europa
| become an insanely expensive delicacy, or similar. But it
| seems astronomically unlikely. If the profit incentive
| can be found, then it could not be stopped, but it really
| needs to do more than pay for itself, and at a current
| pace of sinking $20B/yr into it without a return, ever,
| who knows if it will ever even break even?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, with the timeframes here, there exist only two
| options: "never" and "very soon".
|
| So, yeah, if you want to argue for "never", it's valid.
| It's just talking about delays that isn't.
|
| (But somehow the "no large enough group - and it means
| 100 or 200 people - will ever want this" argument doesn't
| look reasonable either. We are talking about an empty
| ecological niche and a timeframe large enough for
| biologic kingdoms to appear.)
| Projectiboga wrote:
| It's gotten brighter over even just the last 20 million years.
| The ice caps helped reflect nearly .39 of it, but soot and
| melting are lowering that. It's called albedo and that loss
| will dwarf the CO2 Heat trapping.
| bena wrote:
| > I somehow believe humans will be capable of that in that
| time.
|
| Why? Because we've done stuff before? We live past the times of
| flying cars and meals in pill form. We are 40 years from the
| Jetsons, three years past the original Blade Runner, etc.
|
| This is just handwaving away all of the hard parts of the
| solution and saying that otherwise, it would be simple. Yes,
| yes it would. It would definitely be easy if it weren't hard.
| yalogin wrote:
| We have done incredible things just not flying cars yet. I am
| talking 100s of millions of years (if we survive that far of
| course)
| bena wrote:
| Once again, where's the evidence we will?
|
| There's also the logistical practicality of what is being
| proposed. We don't have flying cars for many reason, one of
| them being that any benefits they may have is outweighed by
| all of the very real logistical issues they have.
|
| I find this level of "techno-optimism" just flat out naive.
| It's a bet you never have to worry about being called. On
| the time scale of thousands of years, neither you nor I
| will be alive to find out who was right, but you are
| willing to say with unwavering faith that we will be able
| to do it.
|
| Simply because you believe smarter people than you will be
| able to solve the hard problems. Including problems we
| don't even know exist yet. Just to get to the moon, we had
| to first discover just how ill-equipped the human body is
| for travel outside of our atmosphere.
|
| But you talk as if building a giant shade in space is going
| to be relatively trivial in the future. There is nothing
| trivial about leaving the Earth. And it's quite possible
| that it will never be trivial. Before we worry about solar
| shades, we should wonder how we're first going to solve
| those hard problems.
| yalogin wrote:
| The evidence is all around you. We are talking about 100s
| of millions of years. You seem to be way too fixated on
| flying cars for some reason. Look at the progress in just
| the last 100 years, it's astounding. I am more than
| comfortable to extrapolate from there. Also, it's not
| like we haven't done space travel, unlike flying cars, we
| are able to go to Mars too. Entering and living in space
| outside the earth's atmosphere is something we do on a
| continuous basis. I understand the problem is hard, but
| given the timescales involved I am more than happy to be
| optimistic about the human race. If anything I find your
| take incredibly shortsighted. It's ok we can differ in
| our outlooks.
| bena wrote:
| I'm not fixated on flying cars. I brought it up
| initially, along with meals in pill form, and shows set
| in the future that have either already passed or will
| pass soon, to show how shit we are at predicting the
| progress of progress.
|
| You then said we haven't done flying cars yet. You
| singled it out and made it the point of your response to
| me.
|
| So I was supposed to not respond? Because there are good
| reasons to not have flying cars. And I mentioned that.
| But most of all of my posts have been about things other
| than flying cars.
|
| We may feel comfortable to extrapolate on timescales
| humans haven't even existed on yet, that doesn't make
| that extrapolation good. You want to look at just the
| last 100 years and extrapolate from that. First by
| assuming that the last 100 years is geometric progress
| and not linear. But even given that it is geometric,
| where's the evidence that it will continue being
| geometric. Look at the last 50 years. We haven't done
| much more. We went to the Moon in 1969. We've thrown some
| robots at Mars since then. It's possible that progress
| isn't a vertical asymptote, but a sigmoid with a hard
| upper boundary. We don't know.
|
| And _we_ can 't get to Mars. As in actual people. It will
| take a person 9 months to make it to Mars, assuming all
| of the other problems are solved. Because there are other
| problems. We are not built for space travel. The
| radiation and lack of gravity are real problems with no
| good solutions at the moment. We haven't been to space
| (depending on your definition of space) since the Moon
| missions. Everything we do now is technically in the
| atmosphere and protected by the Earth's magnetosphere.
| Yes, the ISS is above the Karman line, but it's still
| within the thermosphere. And I'm not completely sure
| about the Apollo missions, but the Moon spends some time
| within our magnetosphere as well, so they may have done
| those missions during the time when the Moon was under
| Earth's protection.
|
| And that magnetosphere is important. Like all life on the
| planet would die without it important.
|
| So, living outside the Earth's atmosphere is not
| something we do. Ever.
|
| I find this extreme long term techno futurist optimistic
| thinking worse than useless. This is navel gazing at its
| most extreme. It either wants us to ignore the problems
| of today or ignore very real limitations imposed on us by
| various aspects of reality. Thinking ahead is fine. But
| techno-optimism forecasting out millenia is not thinking
| ahead. It's wishing.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| We're doomed if we don't spread out. Staying on earth guarantees
| destruction by asteroid, super volcano, coronal mass ejection,
| war, disease, ecological collapse, etc. Settling the solar system
| is a bit better but still subject to rogue brown dwarfs or black
| holes, gamma ray bursts, variability of Sol its eventual death.
| Even settling our local group of stars could end badly with a big
| enough super nova. Every year we delay expanding into the
| universe is another light year of distance we may never get back.
| cpsns wrote:
| Of course we're doomed, on a long enough timeline our only fate
| is extinction. The only question is how long it will take to
| reach that point, it's not a matter of "if".
| lisper wrote:
| > We're doomed
|
| That depends on how you define "we".
|
| If you define "we" as "homo sapiens", or even "biological
| creatures evolved (and therefore specialized) for survival on
| earth" then you are almost certainly correct. And such a "we"
| is almost certainly doomed even if "we" do spread out because a
| "we" defined as organisms specialized for survival on earth
| cannot survive anywhere except some place that is very similar
| to earth. This is true _by definition_. This does not
| necessarily mean that "we" have to find other earths. "We" can
| engineer earth-like environments. But that is a lot of work.
|
| You can make the problem a lot easier simply by redefining what
| you mean by "we". If by "we" you mean "systems that _think_ in
| a manner akin to what we (humans) do " that dramatically
| expands the scope of possible solutions. Being biological is
| (almost certainly) not a pre-requisite to thinking. By
| redefining "we" in this way we open the door to solving the
| problem by sending robots or even just raw information out into
| the universe. That is still a significant challenge of course,
| but it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to keep bags of
| water and meat alive (to say nothing of mentally competent) in
| interstellar space.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| I'm always amazed when people seem to miss the obvious
| answer. Robots won't get us there. Digitizing consciousness
| won't either. We already have perfectly good nanotechnology
| capable of adapting to any environment. It's staring us in
| the face, literally when you look in a mirror. DNA and
| proteins are how you do nanotechnology right. Add to that a
| guiding consciousness so we don't have to wait millions of
| years for the slow search algorithm of evolution to find the
| answer and there's nothing we can't do. Our biggest task is
| reverse engineering the machine and learning to control it
| but given the tools we have now I believe we can master it
| within this century.
|
| Interstellar distances at sub light speed are no obstacle if
| you have complete control over your
| biology/lifespan/metabolism. Just bring a big enough pile of
| enriched uranium, water and biomass and you're good to go for
| hundreds of years.
|
| Yes we do still need mechanical and electrical machines where
| they are more efficient but biology can provide for the
| lion's share of our needs once it is under our control.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| We're all going to be gone at some point regardless. We
| shouldn't make the effort to spread out if it's going to make
| the average person's life worse over the course of humanity's
| existence.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| The continued existence of humanity and life in general is a
| good in itself. Besides that, why would you think that space
| exploration and colonization would reduce living standards?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The continued existence of humanity is only a good to the
| degree that it brings good. The continued existence of a
| species of psychic vampires that draw sustenance from
| causing pain to other conscious beings would very much not
| be a good in itself, and with habit and environment
| destruction and worker subjugation/disenfranchisement our
| species causes in the name of unfettered capitalism we're
| not so far off from that.
|
| Big goals take sacrifice and hard work. Any cosmic human
| diaspora would require sacrificing earthly abundance and
| leisure, and the colonists wouldn't be having a good time
| either, so the main beneficiaries would be the billionaires
| and politicians that could wave their dicks around about
| how they're responsible for sending man to the stars.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Plenty of people choose sacrifice, hard work and
| discomfort because they find more fulfillment in it than
| idle leisure. Those who wish to remain behind can stay
| put, just don't stand in the way.
| jjulius wrote:
| >We're doomed if we don't spread out.
|
| And we're doomed if we do. Ultimately, the universe will
| experience heat death and everything will cease to be.
|
| Have a wonderful weekend, everybody! :D
| towaway15463 wrote:
| If that's the limiting factor then it gives us a heck of a
| lot of time to work on the answer.
| [deleted]
| toofnbad wrote:
| I disagree. The Earth will end, but not in the timelines they
| provide. In a million years it is unlikely we won't have the
| technology to hold the sun back from expansion. All we need are
| orbiting superconducting supermagnets to hold back the sun,
| tame volcanos, hold back cosmic radiation, etc. Asteroids would
| be nothing but mining prospects to humans in 1 000 000 AD.
| bhedgeoser wrote:
| I disagree. Forget about sun, the strongest weapons we have
| are microscopic even at the geological scale:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSjratvNGmo
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUREX8aFbMs
| toofnbad wrote:
| You're not telling me anything I don't already know. The
| strongest weapons we have /right now/ have no implications
| for what we will have in the future. A million years is a
| lot of time. Long live the Earth! We cannot conceive of how
| we will contain the suns expansion, just like cavemen could
| not conceive any of our technological advancements mundane
| to us.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| One would think in a million years if we have that sort of
| technology, we would no longer be dependent on Earth for
| humans survival. Whether we would colonize other planets and
| make them habitable through terraform or build our own
| planets at that point.
|
| One could imagine an "Earth 2.0" that we can move around the
| solar system, positioning it perfectly for the right weather.
| withinboredom wrote:
| That would probably destroy the solar system. Without the
| moon, the earth would just exit the solar system.
| Increasing the mass of earth by mining too much asteroids
| would cause the earth to fall into the sun. It's a quite
| delicate balance.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Excuse me, what? Maybe if you somehow added enough energy
| to immediately jettison the moon from Earth's orbit or
| steered every asteroid in the solar system into the
| surface of the Earth. This is just nonsense otherwise.
| Any future mega projects can easily account for orbital
| mechanics, it's just physics not magic.
| withinboredom wrote:
| The mass of the moon is "not that much" on a solar scale.
| The comment was about adding another planet and moving it
| around the solar system to "adjust the thermostat." We
| can't even get a rocket off the ground without blowing it
| up sometimes... I have little faith that we can move a
| whole freakin planet around without killing everyone.
| toofnbad wrote:
| When you can tune the fusion of the sun using advanced
| particle physics and as of yet undiscovered branches of
| science, you don't need to move planets.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| The key challenge is getting to 1000000AD intact as a
| civilization. For that to happen we need to get our
| collective asses to Mars in the next 50 years and then
| continue to develop space habitats and colonies on other
| bodies at a steady clip from there on out. If we stay put
| something will get us whether it's nuclear war or just plain
| apathy.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I'm all for spreading out but prudent stellar husbandry[1] is
| another potential solution to the problem.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > We're doomed
|
| Yup. We're doomed, because we're an evolving species. In a few
| hundred thousand years we'll be very different - perhaps our
| overweight brains will have shrunk, and we'll no longer be
| curious about silly things like the origin or final fate of the
| Universe.
|
| "Spreading out" is more likely to happen to fungus and bacteria
| spores, than bipedal mammals.
| mellavora wrote:
| > In a few hundred thousand years we'll be very different..
|
| And thanks to the magic of epigenetic regulation, I'd say
| we'll be pretty different in 600 years.
|
| We are following the path of the social insects, becoming
| more drone-like, docile, and specialized.
|
| Also more humane and selfless.
|
| Also more childlike.
| Mtinie wrote:
| Eloi-esque.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Not really. The Eloi seem to be like wealthy students -
| young, good teeth, straight blonde hair, nice duds, no
| job they have to do. There doesn't appear to be any
| significant evolution that could have affected them since
| the present. Only the Morlocks appear to have changed;
| there are no contemporary humans that are remotely like
| Morlocks.
|
| Dammit, this is scifi from 100 years ago; it doesn't
| throw any light on the future of humanity. I'm going to
| butt out, because I think this is OT.
| tomrod wrote:
| Obesity rates and cultural milieu suggest that it's not
| just Eloi-esque, unfortunately. But I think you nailed
| the general trend.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Yup. We're doomed, because we're an evolving species. In a
| few hundred thousand years we'll be very different - perhaps
| our overweight brains will have shrunk, and we'll no longer
| be curious about silly things like the origin or final fate
| of the Universe.
|
| You might enjoy Vonnegut's _Galapagos_ , if you've not read
| it. It's a quick and easy read like most of his books.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Galapagos
|
| Yes, I read it. There's a twist in the tail that nobody
| should spoil.
|
| I haven't yet encountered anything by Vonnegut that I
| didn't enjoy reading. I want to re-read Breakfast of
| Champions. My first encounter was Slaughterhouse 5,
| followed closely by Cat's Cradle.
|
| So it goes.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > I haven't yet encountered anything by Vonnegut that I
| didn't enjoy reading.
|
| Attempted _Slapstick_ or _Happy Birthday, Wanda June_?
| :-)
|
| Or most of the posthumously-released material, for that
| matter.
|
| But yeah, his batting average was pretty damn high.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| No mention of Galactus?
| rbanffy wrote:
| > From that point on, there won't be any more liquid water on
| Earth
|
| Not so fast - we can build a parasol and place it a bit closer to
| the Sun than the Earth/Sun L1 point so it'd act as a solar sail
| to keep itself in place. This can buy us a lot of time.
|
| Moving to Saturn's moons is also an option for a while - the'll
| be warm and cozy for a couple billion years after the Earth is
| toast.
|
| If we don't learn how to do things like this (and to travel to
| other stars and settle Earth-like planets) in these billion of
| years, well, then we deserve that fate.
| ufmace wrote:
| I saw a paper just a few years ago about how to shift the Earth
| to a higher orbit to mitigate solar brightening/expansion. It
| involved a large asteroid in a careful orbit that could
| gradually pull the whole Earth to a higher orbit.
|
| Probably couldn't do it tomorrow, but sounded like something we
| might be able to do in a few hundred years instead of tens of
| thousands.
| cevn wrote:
| I was just wondering about this problem, that's an incredible
| solution..
| rbanffy wrote:
| In Charles Stross' Palimpsest, humans use a fleet of solar
| sails that constantly transfer momentum to the Earth over
| very long periods.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Our species has evolved from apes over about a million years. A
| billion years ago, we were bacteria.
|
| Who is this "we" that you think might be around in 50 billion
| years, to colonise the moons of Saturn?
| rbanffy wrote:
| We have removed most of natural selection from our evolution.
| It's entirely possible we could evolve to be H. G. Well's
| Eloi, served by mechanized Morlocks, or just that we
| extinguish ourselves after a couple centuries of Idiocracy.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > We have removed most of natural selection from our
| evolution.
|
| Ho-ho! So nobody died from COVID-19, because we have
| defeated disease?
|
| There's a new outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. QE2 just
| died of "old age". New variants of COVID-19 Omicron are
| circulating in EU, and killing people vaccinated against
| the old variants. I've been reading of new polio outbreaks.
| But it's great that we've defeated natural selection;
| clearly the Brave New World has arrived.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I said most, not all.
|
| We'll eventually grow resistance to COVID or Ebola
| provided enough exposure, the same way we developed
| resistance against the flu (that, for instance, South
| American indigenous populations didn't when the Spanish
| first arrived), as we'll weed out those with propensity
| not to vaccinate their kids, because their kids may not
| be able to reproduce.
|
| But you won't die because you are not strong enough to
| hunt a mammoth.
| samatman wrote:
| The number of people of childbearing age who died of
| COVID is a rounding error, which is true of everything
| else you mentioned as well.
|
| Did you think the Queen was due to have a couple more
| heirs before her untimely passing?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I think the more urgent question is 50 years from now when we
| might have general AIs that are smarter and faster than us.
| Maybe they'll figure something out for us. From there to the
| end of the solar system and eventually the universe will be
| quite a bit of a journey that may or may not feature some of
| the more wacky stuff that Ian Banks and other authors have
| already imagined. Given how we struggle to foresee even the
| very near future, I'd say all bets are off that far out.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Assuming we could stabilize the Earth's climate as it is now,
| and discarding any questions of resources, I wonder if humanity
| could remain as-is for a billion years? We'd still be under
| (non-natural) evolutionary pressure, unless we learned enough
| to stop that happening too.
|
| If we did become a stable species that decided to stick around
| the Solar system, maybe we'd be powerful enough to move Earth
| slowly outwards as Sol expanded? Maybe with the gravitational
| effects of millions of planetoid flybys.
|
| Makes me wonder if we could do the same with stars, lol! Become
| a shepherd of our local galactic area, carefully keeping stars
| away from our precious birthplace over timescales of trillions
| of years...
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I mean, large engineering projects for the greater good of
| humanity don't really seem like our thing as a species, but
| the answers to most of your questions are yes in theory. If
| you can surround a star with a Dyson Sphere/Swarm, you can do
| all kinds of things to it including concentrating all its
| energy into a beam to destroy a planet like the Earth in
| seconds (though you can't blow it apart like in Star Wars
| that easily).
|
| There's a youtube channel dedicated to this kind of stuff
| called "Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur".
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > I wonder if humanity could remain as-is for a billion
| years?
|
| Are you kidding? What was humanity a billion years ago?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Remember evolution is based on the survival of the fittest.
| Not necessarily of the smartest.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Frankly, there are no evolution pressure on humans right
| now. The only "Evolutionary" pressure today is the
| willingness to procreate, which is generally low across
| much of the developed world.
|
| This "pressure" is completely different from evolutionary
| pressure for virtually every other single species on
| Earth.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > there are no evolution pressure on humans right now
|
| I don't think all humans have the same chance of making
| successful descendants. Whether that has correlation to
| genetics is an open question.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In fact for humans the evolutionary pressure has
| reversed. We're able to save many people who are too
| "unfit" to have survived without modern medicine and
| industrial technology.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Said another way, the fitness criteria for survival has
| shifted. A reversal implies there's a single linear
| direction for evolution when we know there definitely
| isn't. That's why there's a mix of heights, body builds,
| intelligences, soft skills like charisma, skin colors,
| etc etc. In fact, ops claim that we could somehow stop
| evolutionary pressure is itself bonkers. At that point
| the evolutionary pressure might become for the traits
| that enable you to maintain some definition of stasis.
| Above all else, human culture is never static so there's
| always a bias for internal evolutionary pressure even if
| we manage to control external factors (which even then
| we're not able to beyond some point).
| rbanffy wrote:
| Survival of the hottest?
| wrycoder wrote:
| That would be fungi.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| There was a book published in the early 70's, called
| "Musrum", by Thacker and Earnshaw. It inspired in me the
| idea that Fungus spores are maybe the most-likely way for
| life to travel star-to-star.
|
| That's not what's best about that book, BTW; it's a
| magical book. I'd love to see a copy.
|
| [Edit] Not Bradshaw - Earnshaw.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Not only on "survival of the fittest"; evolution also
| supposes that species change more-or-less randomly.
|
| TBH, I'm not sure what your point is; my point was that
| whatever evolution is based on, evolution happens, and on
| these timescales it happens in the blink of an eye.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| No, individual mutations are random. Selection of the
| mutations in the gene pool happens through environmental
| constraints. Species don't change randomly, they change
| in an infinite optimization search for fitness. We humans
| aren't immune to this just because we have culture and
| medicine of course.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| For a good sci-fi take on this, read Dark is the Sun by
| Philip Jose Farmer
| rbanffy wrote:
| Also recommended: Palimpsest by Charlie Stross. It's an
| interesting take on Asimov's End of Eternity that explores
| deep time like few others.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I would be astounded if "humanity" exists a million years
| from now. I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't exist a
| thousand years from now. The thing is we are a technological
| species, we don't need to rely on random chance for
| evolution. We can already create DNA on demand and insert it
| into microorganisms. AFIAK we currently only do this with
| already-known proteins, but that is a limit of knowing what
| will be useful, not a limit of the technique.
|
| As time goes on it seems inconceivable that we will not reach
| the point we can apply this to human DNA at conception. I
| expect the first manifestations will be editing out known-bad
| genes and replacing them with the properly-working
| equivalents. Next will come replacing ordinary genes with
| known-superior genes. Then they'll be inventing new superior
| genes.
|
| I expect in almost all cases they'll make the edits
| backwards-compatible but we've all seen it with software--
| backwards compatibility only works over a range of
| generations. Don't expect v20 to play nice with v2. Once the
| mods reach the point that reproduction with a stock human is
| no longer possible we have a speciation event--the results
| can no longer be considered human even if they would not
| raise an eyebrow if dropped into today's society.
|
| As for long-term protection of our solar system--I can't
| imagine why. It would be a lot easier to protect the Earth by
| moving it rather than moving anything that might threaten it.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Then they'll be inventing new superior genes.
|
| The thing is, they only need to do it once in all those
| billions of years, and they become a totally different
| species. And that's assuming they'll still be fond of
| organic bodies and not decide to live in simulated
| environments that are much easier to move than planets.
| kar1181 wrote:
| Ganymede sounds like it will be great!
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| I actually don't care what happens in a thousand years and beyond
| that. I'm fine with humanity going extinct. This obsession with
| getting to Mars for the sake of surviving the collapse on our
| planet is beyond me. I find those ambitions rather cheesy.
| Teever wrote:
| What motivates you to write a comment like this?
|
| That's an honest question, like in your nihilistic worldview
| where humanity going extinct is no big deal, what drives you to
| do your every day things?
|
| If you could prevent humanity from going extinct by pressing a
| button, would you do it?
|
| If you could cause humanity to go extinct by pressing a button,
| would you do it?
|
| What _do_ you care about, and why?
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| > in your nihilistic worldview where humanity going extinct
| is no big deal, what drives you to do your every day things?
|
| Having a nihilistic worldview doesn't mean that a person
| doesn't have the same drives, emotions, desires, etc. as
| other people. It's not a contradiction to both enjoy being
| happy and be a nihilist.
|
| > If [something impossible], would you ...?
|
| The answer to questions like this is always "maybe." If the
| impossible is possible, who knows what other considerations
| there are?
| bricemo wrote:
| But humans thousands of years ago made decisions that make our
| lives today possible. Aren't you glad that you had the chance
| to exist and enjoy your own life?
|
| I highly recommend Ian McCaskill's recent book " what we owe
| the future." He makes a compelling rational argument that it
| makes no less sense to discount future generations than it does
| to discount physically distant people who are suffering today.
| cpsns wrote:
| > Aren't you glad that you had the chance to exist and enjoy
| your own life?
|
| Not particularly no, but that's a very unpopular opinion to
| hold. I remain unconvinced that this is preferable to non-
| existence.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to be glad one exists given that
|
| 1) you will go back to nonexistance anyway
|
| 2) you wouldn't care about not exisiting
|
| One just exists and has some fun, some worries - and that's
| it
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