"We" is doing a lot over work over, what, five billion years? That's longer than the history of existing life. Literally unimaginable.
A handy reference for this topic
The idea of keeping bureaucracy alive much longer than our planet is human optimism at its best. Death and taxes, come Hell, high water, and the literal evaporation of Earth's oceans due to surface temperatures exceeding 1130 C.
Fellas, is it bureaucratic to use calendars?
And when you consider that by this point energy input is on a permanent increase, there's really not much you can do apart from moving the whole damn planet out of the way.
It's kind of pointless to speculate what kind of technology we'll have in 500m years (or indeed if there is a 'we' left in the system). The time scale is so enormous that there's simply no way to predict anything at all involving humans or human-derivatives.
The planet (without literally unimaginable intervention) will heat up and become uninhabitable sometime around 500m years from now.
That’s a really misleading way to describe what going on. The amount of energy radiated into space is a function of temperature, so increasing incoming radiation also increases outgoing radiation. 5% increase in luminosity is roughly 3.5C increase in earths average surface temperatures ignoring other effects.
However, you get a feedback loop as water vapor is a greenhouse gas which makes things hard to model. Here’s a study suggesting the tipping point is on 1 billion years https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216142310.h... but it’s not suggesting the oceans literally boil but rather a transition point where there’s a lot more water in the atmosphere.
You can put something in between, a giant sun shade
Maybe someone smarter than me can calculate the optimal parameters to get the smallest shade that orbits the sun. If we are looking to only block out a percentage of the sun then it doesn’t even need to be fully opaque, maybe a giant dream catcher would be fine.
That means you're heavily restricted in where you can put it. It has to be either right next to earth, in which case it's hard to keep away from Earth, or at L1, which is not stable. There's no other place you can put something where it will stay directly between us and the sun.
And already a known option for our current global warming situation.
I suspect the atmosphere, ecology and albedo would adjust to radiate the extra energy away anyway.
Now I'm actually morbidly curious: do you think humans could even come close to sterilizing this planet if we wanted to? I mean maybe we could burn away the atmosphere if we set off enough nukes (probably more than humanity's ready-to-use-stockpile, I think?), but the biomass that's inside the ocean (...would that even remain without an atmosphere or would it boil off? regardless...) and crust is simply massive. I strongly suspect that life would keep on going.
Why though? Because they have little to no ability to understand the consequences of their actions?
ot: have you ever looked into what the proper nomenclature is for dog breeds? None! They have subspecies based on vibes. Species is a human construct, one that doesn't even serve us in our second most familiar of categories. It seems difficult to double down based on a "science" of naming things.
Life matters. A lot. The whole Universe is this big mechanical device that obeys to the law of causality: every change in nature is produced by some cause. For billions of years, this was all there was. Then suddenly Life happened, turning causation on it's head: Life's actions have what Aristotle called a "final cause", that never existed before. Life has at least the goal of survival, and maybe more, yet to be discovered. And this changes the nature of the Universe for the Universe now has will.
As for humans, my comment was not meant to disparage them. They are far from perfect, basically apes, and right now they are the best hope we have for Life to survive the Sun. But humans are only a transient form that Life can take. There was Life before humans, let's hope there the will be Life after them. They are no more than a cog, albeit one that may someday reveal itself to be useful.
It's a bit disappointing to think that billions of years of evolution would result in only hardy bacteria or algae surviving to represent life. I think the continuation of consciousness is a more interesting goal... whether it happens in our carbon-based biology or in some other way is a secondary concern.
It's totally possible that Life just dies. Like due to increased solar heat or a random comet.
Dinosaurs (and other saurs) wandered Earth for hundreds of millions of years, humans are just a blip on the radar. But dinosaurs wouldn't be able to predict Sun's death and do something about it.
250 million, owing to the expansion of the sun and formation of a supercontinent.
Not that I don't find that article interesting, of course. And I wouldn't underestimate our ability to (continue) to terraform the earth, intentionally sure, but much more certainly unintentionally.
Eg https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...
Huge fan btw, and thank you for the unix haters handbook.