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.)
Tony C. 1, September 21, 2013 at 1:25 pm
Dredd: My views are consistent; I think humans are emotional animals and make mistakes. That doesn’t mean we are suicidal, or intelligence is lethal.
It means science can be slow and get stalled by irrational road blocks and turf protecting, but eventually the emotional persons being irrational or protecting their turf will be naturally retired from the debate, replaced by others with a lessened stake in the outcome, and science will creep forward again. Less like suicide, more like waiting in line at the DMV.
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So why are you worried about the asteroids, and why did you say upthread “Humanity is collectively mentally ill, so focused upon immediate rewards that we don’t care if it kills us to get them.”
Humanity is waiting in line at the DMV … that’s all, and of course these fellows should have listened to you, realizing your DMV thingy:
When an individual commits suicide or takes risks likely to end their existence, it is considered suicidal.
One wonders why that same principle would not apply to groups and Freud suggested:
The consensus of climate and nuclear scientists is that civilization can destroy itself with what it has fabricated while in the DMV line.
Avram Noam Chomsky … born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, and political commentator and activist. Working for most of his life at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, he has authored over 100 books on various subjects.
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He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.
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Highly influential, between 1980 and 1992, Chomsky was cited within the field of Arts and Humanities more often than any other living scholar, and eighth overall within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index during the same period. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the “world’s top public intellectual” in a 2005 poll. (Wikipedia).
Ernst Walter Mayr (July 5, 1904 – February 3, 2005) was one of the 20th century’s leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, and historian of science. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept. (Wikipedia).
Tony C. 1, September 21, 2013 at 1:25 pm
Dredd: My views are consistent;
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That is of no consequence, since consisten error is still error.
Gene H. 1, September 21, 2013 at 12:44 pm
Dredd,
…As usual, Dredd, you take a fringer idea and run with it. Just because an idea is radical doesn’t mean it is correct.
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And as usual, very respected scientists around the world, Mayr and Chomsky, are called fringe by you, the center and light of all science.
You seek to make bufoonery holy intelligence.
Gene H. 1, September 21, 2013 at 12:44 pm
Dredd,
It is arguable that some kinds of intelligence is a lethal mutation, i.e. socipathy and psychopathy. The notion that intelligence as a whole is a lethal mutation is simply ridiculous. Just because our species is being selfish, shortsighted and stupid in handling our technological adolescence doesn’t mean an alien species would be. Absent evidence, the answer is just as likely that humans are uniquely self-destructive. As usual, Dredd, you take a fringer idea and run with it. Just because an idea is radical doesn’t mean it is correct
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Tony C. 1, September 21, 2013 at 1:15 pm
Dredd: What Gene said.
Mayr’s argument is ludicrous from both a scientific and statistical point of view. Given the one example, Earth, the most intelligent species is not (absent intelligence) the fastest, quickest, best defended, most lethal or anything else; absent intelligence we are essentially prey animals.
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If you notice the title to the post I linked to, (“what kind of intelligence is a lethal mutation”) I did not intend to advance an argument that all intelligence is a lethal mutation.
So, I agree and instead advance an argument that the non-lethal type of intelligence is not necessarily the more predominant intelligence (politically) nor is it a lethal mutation.
The intelligence that holds power is more likely the lethal mutation form, which is another problem itself.
In the context of intelligence that is capable of adapting to our cosmic environment (including a Sun that will destroy all forms of human intelligence still here on Earth when the Sun does the thing JT posted about) it remains to be seen what the ultimate result will be.
Like Tony said, we have a difficult time, collectively, even taking the asteroid danger seriously enough.
It would seem that Cheezus will rapture away the lethal mutation intelligence, but the remaining intelligence that can take a warning will have to use other means.
Dredd: My views are consistent; I think humans are emotional animals and make mistakes. That doesn’t mean we are suicidal, or intelligence is lethal.
It means science can be slow and get stalled by irrational road blocks and turf protecting, but eventually the emotional persons being irrational or protecting their turf will be naturally retired from the debate, replaced by others with a lessened stake in the outcome, and science will creep forward again. Less like suicide, more like waiting in line at the DMV.
Dredd: What Gene said.
Mayr’s argument is ludicrous from both a scientific and statistical point of view. Given the one example, Earth, the most intelligent species is not (absent intelligence) the fastest, quickest, best defended, most lethal or anything else; absent intelligence we are essentially prey animals.
But with intelligence, we dominate the planet and all other species; a Tyrannosaur or Great White or any other animal that ever lived could be trapped, killed and eaten by a single human using intelligence and nothing but the products of nature (suitably modified).
In the single example of Earth, humans win, and have multiplied to dominate virtually every corner of the planet they care to dominate; nothing can stand in their way; not even rivers and mountains if they get in our way.
To argue that intelligence is a lethal mutation is to ignore the evidence before our eyes, it certainly has not been lethal yet, and in fact stunningly the opposite; intelligence has multiplied a population of hundreds of thousands to billions. To declare that species suicide is inevitable is as wrong-headed as declaring that personal suicide is inevitable. While either is certainly possible I suspect both would be equally rare.
My belief, based on the evidence of our single example (with millons of species past and present) is that in the universe, life, plants, brains, and animals are probably as common as dirt, but conscious, recursively abstract thinking (which distinguishes humans from all other animals) may just be so rare a genetic accident and consequence of environmental accidents that we are truly unique. Out of all the millions of species that have existed for a few billion years, it seems to have occurred ONCE about 250,000 or 400,000 years ago (to me Heidelbergensis is the first species for which there is any evidence) and never again.
Just because an adaptation is devastatingly useful (like recursively abstract thinking) for both survival and reproduction is no guarantee it will occur. In fact, if that guarantee existed, think of all the predators (and species) on the brink of extinction, despite reasonably large brains, that would survive if only they could develop that adaptation.
triggernometry:
“Wow, its warming to feel surrounded by so many fellow astrophysicists.”
you too? 🙂
Dredd,
It is arguable that some kinds of intelligence is a lethal mutation, i.e. socipathy and psychopathy. The notion that intelligence as a whole is a lethal mutation is simply ridiculous. Just because our species is being selfish, shortsighted and stupid in handling our technological adolescence doesn’t mean an alien species would be. Absent evidence, the answer is just as likely that humans are uniquely self-destructive. As usual, Dredd, you take a fringer idea and run with it. Just because an idea is radical doesn’t mean it is correct.
Tony C. 1, September 21, 2013 at 11:20 am
Dredd: Science is a human enterprise, and as such, some famous scientific leaders are protected emotionally instead of rationally, and it can take a generation or two for that to happen. Science is often a rather meandering stroll in the general direction of “the truth.”
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I disagree with the idea that aliens would find this unusual. If they exist I think they will be sporadically emotional and irrational very much like us, meaning guided by rationality much of the time but prey to emotional obsession and stubbornness and irrational risk taking quite often.
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You had previously said “Humanity is collectively mentally ill, so focused upon immediate rewards that we don’t care if it kills us to get them.”
Thus, you are in agreement with Ernst Mayr as paraphrased by Chomsky:
(What Kind of Intelligence Is A Lethal Mutation?, link above). I suppose you and Mayr are saying that intelligence is a lethal mutation in both aliens and earthlings, as Mayr was wont to say too.
The solar induced catastrophe this post talks about, then, may be a solar cleansing built into the machine?
Wow, its warming to feel surrounded by so many fellow astrophysicists.
Tony,
In theory I agree what superconductors would be easier to use in space for a variety of reasons, but the scale and constraints of a ship and the scale and constraints of a habitat are two totally different engineering propositions.
OS,
Speaking of simplicity, you should also check out that article on particle geometry as well. It’s orders of magnitude more efficient than Feynman diagrams.
Tony,
You should really read up on M-theory before dismissing String Theory altogether. It’s closing a lot of the gaps. Also, you might find this interesting: spacetime might be an illusion created by particle geometry.
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/
This new model makes Feynman diagrams a thing of the past. No diss on Feynman though. These guys are standing on his shoulders.
Also, it seems to play in to this idea that our 3D universe might be the result of a 4D singularity (which in turn plays into ‘tHooft and Susskind’s holographic universe idea).
Tony,
It is interesting that Steven Hawking does not seem to be caught up in the ego thing as much as some of his colleagues. He has surprised more than one symposium by making radical changes in the direction of his thinking.
I am torn about the Big Bang, and I always did think string theory was kind of nutty. When they come up with this stuff, they forget the universe works mostly by the rule of Ockham’s Razor. Unnecessarily complex theories are probably wrong for that very reason. Compare that to the elegant simplicity of the General Theory of Relativity or Newton’s Laws.
Dredd: Science is a human enterprise, and as such, some famous scientific leaders are protected emotionally instead of rationally, and it can take a generation or two for that to happen. Science is often a rather meandering stroll in the general direction of “the truth.”
That is human nature, large investments of one’s professional life are guarded jealously. We see the same thing happening in Physics, right now and for decades, because of String Theory. It is a dead end, I am personally certain, but at this point most physicists have invested a good part of their career in it. The only way out is for new physicists to realize the same thing and choose to specialize elsewhere (and there are good candidates like LQG), and in another 20 or thirty years, when the majority of string theorists have retired, we will hopefully see a revival of physics.
I think we have seen the same thing happen in Cosmology with the Big Bang and Inflation; there are serious flaws in that story and I think it will be, eventually, discarded. But there is resistance to the logic and emotional (and irrational, in my view) defenses of a Big Bang with Inflation because careers have been built on it.
I disagree with the idea that aliens would find this unusual. If they exist I think they will be sporadically emotional and irrational very much like us, meaning guided by rationality much of the time but prey to emotional obsession and stubbornness and irrational risk taking quite often. Or they wouldn’t have progressed; a great deal of our progress has been made because people (like Newton, Euler and Darwin) irrationally devoted breathtaking amounts of time to obsessively studying topics of curiosity that almost nobody cared about and that would probably never earn them a dime, just because they wanted to know.
Aliens don’t get into space unless, for some of them, like for some of us, research is its own reward, and some of that discovered knowledge is shared freely for the credit of having one’s name on it. In a way, that brings us back to the jealous defense of a wrong idea: If the idea is wrong, the credit or prestige of being the creator of the idea is obviously diminished.
Gene: My idea is that we can use super-conducting magnets (like those used in particle accelerators) in space to create a magnetic shield much like the Earth’s magnetic field, on a small scale. The Earth’s field is only about 0.5 Gauss (a refrigerator magnet is about 100 Gauss), so it does not take much to deflect the solar wind, but the Earth’s field is very large, like a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter (well, infinite, but at some point the deflection is slight enough that, were the target in the path of the particle it would be hit anyway).
But if we think of such deflection of particles as a kind of ricochet off of a wedge (or like a photon bent by a prism) then the further the wedge is from the target, the smaller the deflection angle has to be. And the smaller the target, the smaller the angle needs to be.
I think it would be easier to run a super-conducting magnet in space than on the Earth; it is much easier to chill it in space, and with some known super-conducting materials we would not have to chill it at all.
I don’t know enough about engineering magnetic fields and how they interact with each other, but perhaps for other cosmic rays we could have a “ceiling” of super-conducting deflectors that protect the ring; each generating a very strong field. (The world’s strongest magnet is currently 250,000 Gauss, about 500,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field strength.)
I think the precursor to a Dyson Ring would be something like a beaded necklace of habitats. They certainly would have to be covered and pressurized; but we don’t need the ozone layer, we can protect ourselves from UV rays with any number of materials (including transparent ones). (If disks, they could have a habitat on each side and rotate for day/night).
The key (I think) if we live in space is to exploit the distances available to us and the energy of the solar power on a large scale, many thousands of times the space available on Earth. In a way, I think ditching nature and making our own environment is what has gotten us here; from building a better cave (an artificial one) to a better path (roads) to artificial lakes and rivers (with dams). Heck, we started out by building better rocks than what nature was providing (hand axes).
In space all sorts of our problems are solved by distance or available area; nuclear fission becomes safe (and energy transmittable by IR laser); pollution is not an issue, solar power is near infinite, travel is pretty much free (zero resistance or drag), etc.
I’m sorry! Could you repeat that, Joe? I couldn’t hear you for all the Koch in your mouth. It’s not polite to talk with your mouth full and your head empty.
For once, Dredd, we are almost in agreement on net effect although not on mechanics. Joe Blow’s “thinking” such as it is represents the kind of behavior easily associated with both the AVPR1a gene (and mutations thereof) and the structural abnormalities of people with a smaller, lesser functioning anterior cingulate cortex.
People like him can’t help being selfish sociopathic b@stards, but by the same token, they should never be allowed any kind of responsibility that affects the lives of others.