There is nothing we can do… Yet!
And there never will be. Then again, we won’t stay around long enough to have to worry about it.
Well, we might be able to siphon enough plasma from the sun and disperse it to make it so small it will not explode when it reaches its end of service period, but I guess a Type 3 civilization might have other priorities
If life could do the things you think it might, our own galaxy would already look a lot different compared to what we’re seeing.
What’s scary is that was already a few years ago, so it’s a EVEN CLOSER now!
let’s feed it more hydrogen!
That’ll make it worse, unless we combine it with removing heavier elements. Basically if we figure out how to strip-mine the sun one day we’ll make it last much longer
Have no fear, the sun will not explode. You need about 8 times the mass of the sun in order for a star to explode in a supernova. The sun will expand into a red giant when it finishes fusing hydrogen into helium. When this happens the earth might be swallowed up in the expansion. After the sun finishes burning helium and continues up the fusion chain to iron the fusion in the core will fail and the outer layers of the sun will puff off into a planetary nebula. This won’t be a particularly violent event. The naked core leftover will be a white dwarf which is effectively just a molten ball of iron and lighter elements gradually cooling off. It will take trillions of years to cool off.
Although, it’s just a couple of hundreds of thousands of years before the sun expansion makes Earth inhabitable. Not to make anyone freak out, but that’s about 10 times less than 5 billions! Enjoy your life while you can!
No, the expansion will start in about 5 billion years. The subgiant expansion phase will last for about 1 billion years. The earth may or may not be engulfed during the expansion as the best guess is the sun will expand to somewhere between venus and earth’s orbit. The planet will be uninhabitable but again, the expansion won’t start for about 5 billion years.
You’re the second person in as many days that I’ve come across saying the red giant expansion phase will start in 500 million years. Where are you guys getting this info?
I may have confused expansion with brightness, it is increasing steadily and will make our planet inhabitable in that time frame. From astrophysist Paul M. Sutter https://www.space.com/solar-system-fate-when-sun-dies
That makes sense. I actually had to go look up to make sure I wasn’t giving out wrong information since you were the second person. Maybe the other guy had read this article too. Glad we got it sorted. :)
I looked up more and found another source of worries with a slightly shorter deadline https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/25/supercontinent-could-make-earth-uninhabitable-in-250m-years-study-predicts
It’s a few hundred million years, not a few hundred thousand, before the photosynthetic cycle is disrupted by silicate weathering from increased brightness.
Oh, I thought I had written millions as in my source instead of thousands, I shouldn’t write comments at 2 am, two mistakes. I didn’t know about the silicate issue but the estimated remain consistant with my initial source.
Yeah, no worries. Hundreds of thousands of years would be very rapidly impending doom though!
What’s interesting is that we’re at about the halfway point in terms of complex life on Earth. The Cambrian Explosion happened about 538 million years ago and complex life likely has about the same time left. Interesting that humans happened to emerge right around the midpoint of that journey, and makes you wonder what kind of life will be around in the waning years.
Source?
Wikipedia has a summary:
“The luminosity of the Sun will steadily increase, causing a rise in the solar radiation reaching Earth and resulting in a higher rate of weathering of silicate minerals. This will affect the carbonate–silicate cycle, which will cause a decrease in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In about 600 million years from now, the level of carbon dioxide will fall below the level needed to sustain C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis used by trees. Some plants use the C4 carbon fixation method to persist at carbon dioxide concentrations as low as ten parts per million. However, the long-term trend is for plant life to die off altogether. The extinction of plants will be the demise of almost all animal life since plants are the base of much of the animal food chain on Earth.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth
It links to additional academic sources in the footnotes.
We will have the collision with Andromeda Galaxy a few billion years before, so don’t worry :)
5 is a few
The sun is also slowly increasing in energy output. Earth will be too hot for complex life to exist in about 800 million years.
Neat there’s even a video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision
Nah, we will build a stellar engine prior and move ourselves wherever we want. We will have colonized all the Milky Way and most of Andromeda. It’ll be like a brother and sister finally meeting near the washer.
Colliding with andromeda won’t do anything. Galaxies are almost all empty space.
It could set if a wave of supernovas, though, which would be bad for anything living in either galaxy. AFAIK our understanding of the process isn’t good enough to know.
Can’t it mess up our nice solar system if other large objects come even remotely close?
There are actually a bunch of stars that will pass by very close to the solar system in the far future (tens of thousands of years) and they could possibly increase the number of asteroid and comet impacts drastically.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda–Milky_Way_collision#Fate_of_the_Solar_System
Based on current calculations they predict a 50% chance that in a merged galaxy, the Solar System will be swept out three times farther from the galactic core than its current distance. They also predict a 12% chance that the Solar System will be ejected from the new galaxy sometime during the collision. Such an event would have no adverse effect on the system and the chances of any sort of disturbance to the Sun or planets themselves may be remote.
But it will be beautiful to watch!!
We’ll see.
What if some alien civilization is watching the whole thing and taking bets
If they live for billions of years, I’d imagine our human evolution has happened so quickly to them, that they wouldn’t even realize we were here.
I imagine that they perceive time like we do, they’re just very patient.
Imagine if the last thing we saw before colliding with another planet was another alien race on that planet looking hopelessly right back at us.
No. We will not.
You won’t mortal
Space is so vast that the Earth and Solar System will survive.
Although the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter. However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much farther from the galactic core than it is today. Source
Star lifting. Mine the metals and shit out of that star and it’ll potentially live trillions of years.
And no need to worry about political will. Thar’s gold in that thar sun!
Gold only forms in a supernova
Gold isn’t formed in the sun but plenty exists there for the same reason it exists on earth. Ancient supernova that provided the material for our star system.
But gold is just one thing they would mine there of course. My comment was referring to the value of the materials mined, not just the literal gold.
DON’T PANIC!
Not to worry. Before it explodes, our sun will expand into a red giant much larger than the orbit of the Earth.
No one on Earth will be around to witness the explosion. So we have that going for us, which is nice.Is this a universal experience.
I think it might be. I still remember it happening to me and that was decades ago.
Humanity will either be long dead or colonizing other planets by then.
There is a certain sort of ennui that comes with the realization that the heat death of the universe is inevitable, and no matter what you do, no matter how much you manage to make your mark on the world/solar system/galaxy/universe or how successful and prosperous your descendants may be, it will all eventually be lost to eternal entropic stasis.
“As a child, I once considered such unknowns sinister. Now, though, I understand they bear no ill will. The universe is, and we are.” - Solanum, Outer Wilds
Come join the last vibration
Whoa what do you call this crazy noodle haha you guys know how to party
I read somewhere that the sun might expand a bit and become too hot for Earth in just 500 million years time, so it might be a shorter window than you’d think
The sun will get brighter in 500 to 600 million years to the extent that many plants won’t be able to survive due to disruption to the carbon cycle. Expansion comes later.
You’re missing a zero. The sun will expand into the red giant phase in about 5 billion years.
Not if humans get their hands on it.
This is what I’ve heard, that basically if we were stomped back to single celled life today, evolution would not have time to bring back visible plants and animals before the earth became uninhabitable. So there’s no starting over. I admit it kind of depresses me.
Atlantis is under water because water is immune to fire. Checkmate.
Tbh I think this shared experience kinda shows to me how we grow selfish as we grow up, we were quite aware that it will not affect us, but the thought of the world where we see so many people living ending one day like this haunted us, now we don’t care, we don’t care about anything that doesn’t affect us or people we know…
Maybe, when we are young, the world (and the universe at large) are part of our identity of self, but as we grow older we reduce our sense of “self” to just our own physical body and mind.
I have seen some people having the inverse transition, blending with their environment and communities as they got older. Perhaps it’s more like a cultural thing than a personal process. It’s hard not to become selfish in our society model.
Personally I’ve always been into space exploration stories (I mean, Star Wars isn’t always exploration (I read the books, and some are about uncharted stuff a bit, like Outbound flight, and I do like Star Trek too) and kinda hope we’re at that tech by then. I also really enjoy stuff like Schlock Mercenary and videos like https://youtu.be/ulCdoCfw-bY which while showing a bomb, also talks about a way to use black holes to outlive Red and White Dwarves, which normally should be the last source of light and heat in the universe. A colony properly using the energy black holes would still contain could potentially last trillion of years longer than all stars.
And that’s the reason why we fuck our planet for profit. Climate change? Not our problem, the future generations can deal with it.
Tbh climate change has started to affect all of us who don’t have the luxury to always remain in a climate controlled environment, i am not looking forward to coming home at 2pm when the (feels like) temperature is 50C, and god knows what we will hit this year
Yes, me too. But sadly most people love it. “Oh it’s so warm, spring is finally coming”, there wasn’t even winter yet, bitch. “Aw it’s really bad weather outside”, it’s the first rain in 4 months, you should be happy you dense fuckwit.
too late. i hear the sun has already started exploding and that it’s allowing humanity to exist.
