A step-by-step guide to our solar system’s demise
nautil.us
nautil.us
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?
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.
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.
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...
There's a youtube channel dedicated to this kind of stuff called "Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur".
Are you kidding? What was humanity a billion years ago?
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.
This "pressure" is completely different from evolutionary pressure for virtually every other single species on Earth.
I don't think all humans have the same chance of making successful descendants. Whether that has correlation to genetics is an open question.
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.
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.
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.
However, even that gets fuzzy--there's a "species" of bird whose name escapes me that lives in high latitudes. They can all breed with the neighbors, but birds from the two ends of the span can't breed with each other. I expect to see the same thing happen with humanity--eventually highly modded individuals won't be able to breed with unmodded individuals. (Although, unless immortality is developed there won't be any unmodded individuals to breed with. Why would the genetic engineers care about compatibility with the old version that's no longer around?)
Who is this "we" that you think might be around in 50 billion years, to colonise the moons of Saturn?
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.
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.
Did you think the Queen was due to have a couple more heirs before her untimely passing?
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.
https://planetplanet.net/2022/09/15/the-end-of-the-solar-sys...
Reprinted with permission from Sean Raymond’s blog PlanetPlanet.net.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly as long trash the ecosphere - not coincidental.
> This will be a non-issue
I despair.
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.
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?
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.)
> But somehow the "no large enough group - and it means 100 or 200 people - will ever want this" argument
idk who argued that, but it wasn't me. My argument is economic. I didn't make it but would make further argument(s) basically that 1) it's insanely dangerous, and 2) there's nothing out there, which together is really the same risk vs reward argument that is notably top heavy with a wide spread.
This is false equivalence. Assume everyone wanted it to the maximum possible level of desire, and it is still possible that desire will be unfulfilled due to economics, namely, expense. You can't say of a home that someone can not afford means they did not want it badly enough. No matter how badly they want it, it is not possible for them to get it if it is beyond their means. Humanity may not be able to afford human-attended space exploration beyond LEO and, vanishingly rarely, the Moon simply due to expense no matter what the level of desire is.
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?
Similarly I found that in the geologically recent past, the ice–albedo positive feedback has played a major role in the advances and retreats of the Pleistocene (~2.6 Ma to ~10 ka ago) ice sheets and that the ice at the arctic is in fact not that negligible given the loss of it in relation to the much higher warming at the poles.
To what extent do you believe clouds contribute?
As I understand it, the extent of cloud cover affecting the planet's albedo (and whether that offsets the warming from the greenhouse effect from water vapour) is still an open question in meteorology.
I'm absolutely not an expert on any of this - I was genuinely asking the question out of interest.
Good luck in implementing it tho.
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.
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.
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.
doesn't throw any light? Perhaps, thought of course that would depend on what spectrum of light one was sensitive to.
I, for one, have a hard time seeing ultraviolet. Unlike my friends the bees.
You might enjoy Vonnegut's Galapagos, if you've not read it. It's a quick and easy read like most of his books.
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.
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.
One could imagine an "Earth 2.0" that we can move around the solar system, positioning it perfectly for the right weather.
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.
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.
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.
Chelyabinsk should have been that wake up call but most people don’t think about it deeply enough to realize how much worse it can be.
If we’re unlucky then the first big impact we experience will be our last.
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
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.
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
Not particularly no, but that’s a very unpopular opinion to hold. I remain unconvinced that this is preferable to non-existence.
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?
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?