The article claims that Earth will be incinerated, but we could just move Earth further from the Sun. The energy of escape velocity is just GMm/r. r is one AU, 150 gigameters. G is the gravitational constant, 67 piconewton square meters per square kilogram, M is the Sun's mass, 2.0 billion yottagrams. m is the Earth's, 6000 yottagrams. It works out to 5.3 billion yottajoules. The Sun emits 380 yottawatts, thus providing enough energy to move the Earth out of the Solar System entirely every five months. Moving it to a somewhat higher orbit, such as Jupiter's, would require somewhat less energy than that. And we have 500 million years, which most experts consider to be a significantly longer time than five months, so the problem is clearly soluble.
A possible problem is that Jupiter itself could destabilize Earth's new orbit. Possibly putting Earth into orbit around Jupiter as an additional moon would be a solution, but if not, I think we could solve that problem by removing Jupiter. If we drop it into the Sun, we can gain all of its orbital energy in the process.
A more practical way to lift the orbit is probably to "capture an asteroid of suitable size and set it on a series of fly-bys, shuttling between near the Earth and near Jupiter" https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-theoretically-possible-to-...
I've noticed how you regularly use five digit zero prefixed Y10K-compliant Long Now Years, but if things go well, you're going to need a lot more digits than that! ;)
https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...
Zager & Evans - In the Year 2525
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQfxi8V5FA
Party like it's 99999!Now it's been ten thousand years, man has cried a billion tears For what, he never knew, now man's reign is through But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight So very far away, maybe it's only yesterdayOur dominant culture's "year zero" (aka the Common Era) is based on an estimated date of birth of a messiah of the currently-dominating religion. That calendar has also seen a major revision in October 1582.
Long before and after that religion became dominant, many people have used different calendar systems - and many still do. Rome was founded in 753 BCE, and the Western Roman Empire fell around 476 CE. That's over 1200 years.
It's more likely that another "year zero" event will happen in less than 8000 years. If the history survives that, we will probably just call the current era "Gregorian" or so.
It is only in the last century or two that humanity has reached the technological and economic level that a single standard global year numbering made any sense-before that, year numbering systems were highly culture-specific. And it just happened by accident that Western European-derived cultures were globally ascendant at that point in history, so that culture’s calendar became the de facto global standard. And if history turned out a bit differently, it easily could have been another calendar instead - e.g. the Islamic chronology (AH).
But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now.
I think the most likely way it might change would be (a) if humanity collapsed back to a premodern civilisation, and later recovered; or (b) some new culture/religion became globally dominant which demanded the calendar be changed.
Personally, I’m sceptical (a) is going to happen in the next few thousand years. I think the most likely scenarios are (i) technological modernity survives, (ii) humanity goes extinct completely, (iii) a more moderate collapse in which things get very messy but don’t go all the way back to the premodern era. I think all three are more likely than the kind of complete and extended collapse then eventual recovery which would be most likely to reboot the calendar into a new and different global standard.
I don’t think odds of (b) are high-it would require not just a new dominant culture, but also one which felt very strongly about wiping out all traces of the old calendar. Suppose 1000 years from now, 99% of humans are devout Muslims-I personally think that’s rather unlikely to happen, but anything is possible-would that trigger the current year numbering to be replaced by the Islamic one? I’m sceptical-all Muslim majority countries currently heavily use the Gregorian calendar for business use, computer systems, etc, and they don’t have a theological issue with that, so I’m sceptical they’d feel the need to change even if Islam became the globally dominant culture. And this isn’t a new thing in history-many historical Islamic empires continued the use of pre-Islamic calendars in parallel with the Islamic, especially since the Islamic calendar, being purely lunar, was less than ideal for agricultural use.
> But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now.
We have two global standards, both from the Western Christian tradition. The Gregorian calendar, and Unix time. Order of magnitude, they're probably baked into the same number of processes.
What's Christian about Unix time? I don't recall ever reading that either Thompson or Ritchie was theist at all, much less Christian. And the division of the solar day into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds is not Christian but, mostly, Sumerian: both pagan and Eastern.
It's an offshoot of the Gregorian calendar, being offset from it by a whole number of years.
And Thompson and Ritchie grew up and worked in a majority-Christian country: their individual faith doesn't have much to do with it.
The Gregorian calendar is essentially non-Christian in origin. Yes, it is named for Pope Gregory, but he just tinkered with the leap year rule, other than that it is essentially the same as the Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar
Now, the common AD/CE year numbering is obviously Christian in motivation, but that’s technically distinct from the Gregorian calendar-the Julian calendar historically used other year numbering systems too (ab urbe condita, anno Diocletiani aka anno martyrum, anno mundi), and the Gregorian calendar itself doesn’t care what numbers you assign to years beyond modulo 400 - you could replace 2025 with 2425 or 12025 and it would still work fine. But that’s the thing, Unix time doesn’t care whether 1970 is called 1970 or 1570 or 2370 or 11970, only how distant you are from it - so it isn’t really tied to our Christianity-inspired year numbering, only to 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z as an instant
I think CE + 10,000 - called “Holocene Era” (HE), also sometimes expanded Human Era or Historical Era - is a good proposal - high compatibility with CE (you can just pretend 2025 is missing the leading digit), makes all dates from recorded human history positive. Okay, is ambiguous in that 2025 CE might get confused with 2025 HE (= -7975 CE = 7976 BCE), but in practice that’s unlikely since that’s prehistorical and essentially nothing (outside astronomy) from that long ago can be dated to a year’s accuracy anyway
Unix time is explicitly anti-Christian!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon
>The copyright on the official BSD Daemon images is owned by Marshall Kirk McKusick, a very early BSD developer who worked with Bill Joy. McKusick has freely licensed the mascot for individual "personal use within the bounds of good taste (an example of bad taste was a picture of the BSD Daemon blowtorching a Solaris logo)."[ Any use requires both a copyright notice and attribution.
Blowtorching a Solaris logo sounds like it's in good taste to me! Just not blowing it without a torch.
I see another possibility, on topic with TFA. We start colonising other worlds, and will need to coordinate timekeeping between them. Time dilation will also kick in (GPS already has to compensate).
An Earth year is a year only on Earth.
If humans were to colonise Mars, I suspect they might adopt a hybrid calendar, combining the Martian day with the Earth year
I think for humans on Mars, the local day-night cycle would likely be much more important than local seasonal cycles. Plus for a long time they’d be dependent on Earth (financially, politically, etc), and Earth years are a natural unit of Earth-centric planning, plus they’d see themselves as part of Earth-centric human history. And maybe eventually they’ll wean themselves off their dependence on Earth, but that would likely take centuries, by which time such a hybrid calendar may have become deeply embedded in Martian culture, and the use of the Earth year might endure long after the original motivations for it ceased to apply
So I could see our current Earth-centric year numbering system being maintained as humans spread out through our solar system. And if eventually we spread to other star systems, we might take that with us too
It would be interesting to have two sets of precessing holidays and weekends to enjoy!
If we had the technology to move a planet, we would also have the technology to build a planet-sized space station, which would be a much more efficient use of resources. You could use spin gravity to make the entire mass inhabitable and useful, instead of almost all of the mass sitting in the core/mantle.
We already have the technology to move a planet; it's just orbiting rockets. (Ion thrusters are especially promising here because of the small amount of mass you lose from the planet in the process.) We just don't have the necessary industrial scale to supply enough rockets and energy. A planet-sized space station is almost certainly possible with carbon nanotube ropes, but those have not yet been demonstrated to work in practice.
However, smaller O'Neill-cylinder space stations are feasible even with just steel cables, and I look forward to a future where the vast majority of inhabited land area is in such contraptions. It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course.
> It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course.
I don't think there is a clear trend toward this goal at all.
Extrapolating current trends, we are fairly likely to peak in total population as a species long we become space-constrained on earth; more remote living space is pretty cheap in basically every industrialized country right now, and living in a conventional house in the boonies is like ten orders of magnitude easier than making anything extraterrestrial work (neither climate change nor even global nuclear war is enough to flip that).
Sure, people might like the concept of space colonization, but we're not seeing significant amounts of people living on boats in the Atlantic, so I would not expect to see people living on spaceships within the next centuries, either...
Be careful to note that I didn't say the majority of people would be living in space colonies, but that the majority of inhabited land area would be found in them.
Probably you're right that most people will choose to die on the same planet they're born on. Most people today choose to die in the same city they were born in, and most coconuts sprout, if at all, within a few meters of the tree they fell from.
That doesn't mean that coconuts' ability to float across the ocean is inconsequential to coconut species distribution. It only takes one coconut making landfall on a barren atoll to start a new coconut grove.
There are, in fact, a significant number of people who live on boats. There would be many more if the boats weren't dependent on docking to refuel.
It's a mistake to extrapolate from current trends when it comes to exponentially growing phenomena. In April of 02020 covid had killed less than 1000 people after six months. In 01770 two million years of human beings had managed to speed up their transportation from the speed of a marathon runner to the speed of a racehorse. You have to look at the underlying dynamics, and even then what you often learn is that the future is very uncertain.
I do absolutely agree that extrapolating population over more than a few decades is basically a cointoss, but I still thank that exponential growth is far from certain: Basically every industrialized nation has negative population growth when excluding immigrants right now, and this is very much a global trend.
I like your optimism and would love to see colonies in space, but I think it is overly tempting to consider settling space akin to European colonization of America, when it is more similar to settling on the high seas/Antarctica (right now)-- technically feasible for decades or even centuries, but not really happening simply because of lacking incentives (and the incentive structure looks sadly even worse for settling in space than either of those to me).
> I think we could solve that problem by removing Jupiter. If we drop it into the Sun, we can gain all of its orbital energy in the process.
How did you come up with dropping Jupiter into the sun being a net energy producing operation? You have to cancel out around 10^35 J of kinetic energy to drop it from its orbit, and that is real work. How do you get that 10^35 J back? (Ignoring that from your own math, that E35J is around 100,000 years of the sun's total energy output).
I don't know, but Jupiter has that kinetic energy now, and if you slow it down until it falls into the Sun, it won't have it anymore. The energy has to go somewhere.
Maybe you scoop up big balloons of gas, slingshot them to Mercury with a tether, catch them with another tether on the dark side of Mercury to decelerate them (thus generating electricity which you use to make some kind of fuel), and toss them Sunwards from there.
Or maybe you use an electromagnetic mass driver in the Asteroid Belt to launch an unbelievable number of small rocky masses to a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter back to the same mass driver again, but at a higher velocity, so they generate electric power when it catches them before launching them again. Each mass goes through this circuit tens of thousands of times.
There are lots of possibilities.
You're not capturing usable energy, to slow it down, you're accelerating it the other way, consuming usable energy
That is not correct.
Care to elaborate? There might be some clever mechanism to slap regen brakes on Jupiter but that's gonna be hard without a road to slow down against
Already explained
You reach up and pull jupiter down while pulling yourself up?
Not an orbital mechanicist though.
Pulling an object "down" (ie towards the gravitational focus) doesn't lower the energy of its orbit, it just changes the eccentricity. To lower its orbit you have to slow it down.
>>The Sun emits 380 yottawatts
Only the part that illuminates the earth can do us any good.
> Only the part that illuminates the earth can do us any good.
Well, that's clearly the part that is the lowest-effort to access, but on the timeline involved for concern about the Earth's biosphere being incinerated by changes to the Sun's size and output, there is plenty of time to develop means of leveraging more than the easy part.
- [deleted]
I think it'd be easier to colonise another moon/planet. You have a few 100k years go do it.
> The article claims that Earth will be incinerated, but we could just move Earth further from the Sun.
The article isn’t trying to make science-fiction predictions, it’s simply explaining how things are expected to go according to the workings of the Universe. The article also isn’t suggesting humans will go to Europa to survive, only that life could theoretically develop and persist there.
We can’t even let our fellow humans live. Hatred and division is growing, and we’re ever more worshipping and giving power to destructive, selfish, science-denying, power-hungry maniacs with access to world-destroying technology. And you think there’s any chance we’ll all agree and unite to move the whole planet? It would be nonsensical for the article to even hint at entertainment that scenario in any serious capacity, and it would have been rightly dismissed by most people if it did.
The thing people should rightly dismiss is the idea that human engineering is a minor enough consideration in predictions of the far future that it can be ignored as a sort of rounding error. The humans have already destroyed much of Earth's ozone layer, then restored it through exactly the kind of global agreement you're dismissing as unachievable. Now they've doubled the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, a change which would melt away the icecaps and raise sea levels dramatically over a few centuries if it weren't reversed. They don't have anything approaching world-destroying technology, but in a few decades they will.
Undoubtedly, if there are still humans after a few hundred million years, they will disagree about exactly what orbit Earth should be in, but that doesn't mean it will stay in the same orbit until after its oceans boil dry.
> The thing people should rightly dismiss is the idea that human engineering is a minor enough consideration in predictions of the far future that it can be ignored as a sort of rounding error.
Which is not my argument. At all. You’re talking about if we can, I’m talking about if we will. The article—again, rightly—explains what we predict is going to happen according to the information we have. It’s trying to be a scientific-minded article, not a science-fiction article. By your token, anyone could make up any technology to contradict the article, which is not a productive discussion.
> the kind of global agreement you're dismissing as unachievable.
I disagree it’s the same kind of agreement. The difference in magnitude and investment is gargantuan to the point it’s another category altogether. Like a group deciding where they’ll go out to dinner VS deciding which country they’ll all move to. Both require mutual agreement for the same group to advance, but that’s where the similarities end.
> Undoubtedly, if there are still humans after a few hundred million years
Which is a big if. You can’t in good faith flout “just move Earth further from the Sun” as if it was something routine without considering all the very real and very big obstacles which are in our way right now, billions of years before your proposed scenario.
The crux of my point is merely that your criticism of the article is unwarranted. Sure, phantasise about any any possible approaches to the problem you can think of, but acting like the article somehow failed to consider those options is what I’m disagreeing with.
I'm not making up any technology. Conservation of energy, solar power, artificial satellites, and Newtonian gravitation are not the same kind of "science fiction" as faster-than-light drives, little green men, or inevitable human extinction. What we should predict, according to the information we have right now, is that humans will be able to decide whether or not the Earth gets incinerated, unless they die off first.
Yes, moving the Earth is a larger project than replacing CFCs. But the humans harness progressively larger amounts of power per capita over time, historically at the rate of about 1.2% per year. At that rate, a Dyson swarm will capture effectively all of the Sun's 48-petawatt output in six or seven hundred years, though I expect the rate to accelerate. That's over a billion times larger than the power required to move Earth to anywhere. If you were to distribute the Sun's power evenly to the world's current population, only 7 people (per generation) would need to pool their shares to achieve it. So the magnitude of investment is extremely manageable.
I'm not interested in the real and very big obstacles that are in your way right now. I'm interested in which of those obstacles will remain 400 million years from now. It seems irresponsible to speculate that humanity will remain collectively suicidal for such long spans of time—if nothing else, you'd expect the collectively-suicidal subpopulations to become scarcer over time.