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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

My biggest question is whether this will be the next climate crisis. There have been recent articles about how the earth's geology is cooling faster than expected. There are questions around if our planet will become a dead planet as it cools. It seems like speeding this up could be an issue, especially given how little we know.

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Total human energy consumption is 7.8e20 joules[0]. The heat content of the earth is 1e31 joules[1]. That is a difference of 100 billion times. Safe to say there is not going to be a problem for a very long time.

[0]: https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/climate-change/ene...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient

Yeah, but it looks like humans are doubling the amount of energy produced/consumed per year every 30-40 years.[0] If we say it takes 150 years to increase the amount of energy consumed by a factor of 10, then we'll be consuming 100 billion times more energy than we do today in well under 2,000 years.

Compared to a human life, that is a very long time. Compared to the time it's going to take for the sun to expand and swallow the earth (which others in the thread are doing), it really isn't.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...

There were also roughly 50% fewer people on Earth 40 years ago. The population is expected to peak and then decline in much less than 2000 years.

Simple extrapolation is not always effective. "This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”" [0].

[0] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great...

Geothermal heat provides less than 0.1% of the total heat of our planet. It is pretty much all just the sun. So as long as the output of the sun does not change much it won't be a problem (so will have to wait billions of years and even then sun will actually get bigger and hotter first before getting colder)

The issue is that when the core cools too much it will cease to be magnetic, and then solar radiation strips the atmosphere.

But it’s not a major concern, in this case faster still means billion year time scales.

The planet is expected to still be mostly molten by the time the sun swallows it, so there is a huge margin. I think people underestimate just how much energy there is down there.

And it's being replenished by nuclear decay. It's not just the original heat from the compression/collisions of material when the planet formed.

Venus doesn’t have an internal magnetic field and has a thicker atmosphere than earth.

Won't Earth be engulfed in the first phase? If that's the case, Solar gasses will also drag down our orbital velocity and Earth will fall towards the core. So it won't be around for the second phase.

Can you link an article?

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