For those who are fastidious in scheduling on their iPhone planners, you might want to set one of those ten-minute alerts for 1.75 billion years to address any remaining items on your to-do list. Scientists have determined that, absent a nuclear holocaust, catastrophic asteroid or new William Shatner album, the Earth could continue to support life for at least another 1.75 billion years.
Indeed, the calculation is not exactly precise. With a strong wind at our planetary back, we could go as long as 3.25 billion years before the Earth will travel out of the solar system’s habitable zone and into the “hot zone.” We have only been around for 200,000 years, that is still a fairly generous amount of time.
The research can be found in the journal Astrobiology where the total time for the Earth in the habitable zone is calculated at 7.79 billion years. (Earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old unless you are a creationist where you still believe we are only a few thousand years old.)
Elaine, LOL, literally laughing out loud. It’s not a funny scenario but, ‘now we’ve got nuclear winter and Australia’s still like, WTF? but they’ll be dead soon…” the video is hilarious and outstanding. Great video.
Darren: Presuming we avoid extinction beforehand, I would assume the most sensible thing to do is, long before we even lose Mercury, is to use the material of the inner solar system (and Earth) to build a modified version of a Dyson Ring. Modified to be discontinous, so the parts can be periodically moved further from the sun.
The average distance of the Earth from the sun is 150M km. So the circumference of Earth’s orbit is about 950M km. The dry surface of the Earth is about 150M sq km, which will presumably be enough space. But for this exercise, we can presume 500M sq km, the entire surface of the Earth, approximately.
The Earth’s height in orbit is a little over 12,000 km, so the area of the orbital band is 11.4 trillion sq km.
So, on average, we would want to provide structures orbiting the sun within the orbital band that give us, on average, 1 sq km per 11.4T/500M
sq km of area; that is a density 22,600 sq km per 1 sq km of surface area.
Which should be easily doable without collision. For example, to provide 100 sq km per structure, we could do that with disc structures about 12 km wide; in space I imagine well within the range of constructibility in the very near future. Also, each such disk would have 2.26M sq km to “work in,” which would be 1500 km on a side, which would allow about 725 km between disk edges (60 times the disc width, a good margin of safety, and discs can also be staggered within the orbital band for greater safety, should one explode or get hit by something).
I only say disks because they are easy to deal with; we could use rotating cylinders (to generate artificial gravity and day and night), bicycle-tire looking things, etc. Every few hundred thousand years, we can move them further from the sun. And presumably, long before the sun dies altogether, we can put engines on them and leave; and use plain old nuclear fission plants to power them — Trailing a very long way behind us, for safety. We could take up residence around Jupiter or Neptune or something. No real need to travel to another star; even with our current relatively primitive level of technology (I presume it is relatively primitive) I think this would be pretty survivable, given a few hundred thousand years notice.
OS,
I was surprised to hear one of the folks that works for an oil company in Colorado say that they were not worried about the contamination or something like that…. In the back ground was an over turned oil reserve tank…. I guess BPs still not concerned about the gulf either…
Darren,
I fear that will be a moot question given our current race over the environmental cliff. We won’t have to wait until the sun turns into a red giant, because the human race will already baked itself out of existence. At the rate we are going, by the end of this century.
So do we try to find a way to move to another planet when the time has arrived, spending a great deal of resources and effort in the process, or do we learn that a future extinction is ahead and just try to make the best of the time here?
Maybe a mixture of both.
This is irrelevant, as in about 330 million years the Sun will have become a Red Giant and expanded to engulf the Earth. Just look up where we are on the stellar main sequence and do the math.
REM: It’s the End of the World As We Know It
Don’t these dumb scientists know that GOD will decide when the Earth–which is 6,000 years old–will expire!
Bruce: I think if anybody literally on their death bed orders nuclear war, the people beside the bed, with their own lives at stake, will say, “Sure, sure, hey we did it! Boom! You are a great and victorious leader! Would you like some Jello now?”
All this is immaterial, global warming, the sun burning out, etc. when everyone has nuclear weapons someone will use one and like a chain reaction the world will become uninhabitable to human life. What if the Ayatollah on his death bed decides it’s time for Armageddon
nick,
Yes I have. They are far less impressive than the real thing and in a much grungier neighborhood.
Gene, Have you seen the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?
I usually ignore expiration dates on food. They cause billions in dollars of waste. Food pantries cannot accept food w/ expired dates. I’m not talking perishables. I’ll give the milk, cheese, etc. a sniff if it’s been expired a week or so. The date is the about when food should be sold, not eaten. Few people realize that food panties throw away a can of corn, or box of mac n’ cheese, etc.if the date has expired. Hell, that shit is still good for a couple decades. Unintended consequences people.
Stellar life cycle –
Short version;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM9CQDlQI0A
Long version;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0qzpi4bWvc
If you are interested in the chemistry of it in any kind of detail, Google the term “stellar nucleosynthesis”.
As you can guess by my avatar, I’m a big fan of stars.
If I know us, the ten-minute alert will be about right, we tend to wait until there is barely enough (or not enough) time to address our problems… Just look at our progress (or complete lack thereof, or even anti-progress) on our Global Warming problem, our income disparity problem, our over-fishing problems, our Autism problems, our political corruption problems, our energy (and peak oil) problems, our diabetes and obesity and other health epidemic problems, and on and on.
A ten minute warning on the End of the Earth should roughly coincide with humanity’s realization that something really does need to be done….
Thank you OS…. Thank you…
AY,
The calculations are basic physics, since the sun is nothing more than a giant fusion reaction. In other words, a really big hydrogen bomb type explosion. They can calculate mass and density, therefore the life cycle of the sun. Other stars have been studied for their behavior as the nuclear fuel runs out. If you want the math, here is a paper on the subject. This is seriously dense reading, but there are good pictures and diagrams (PDF warning, 44 pages total, may load slow):
http://sci-ed.org/documents/LCP%209%20%20EARTH%20SUN%20May%2020.pdf
As the nuclear fuel begins to run out, the sun will become a red giant, large enough to reach about the earths orbit. As the sun gets larger and brighter, earth will bake and the oceans will boil off.
And how did they go about this calculation….
The timing is less certain than that based upon recent nova / supernova events that happened billions of years earlier than the models show.
The larger problem is that humanity, in the clutches of Oil-Qaeda, will take care of the destruction business well before that (The Life and Death of Bright Things). –nervous laughter–