• Magister@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    We will have the collision with Andromeda Galaxy a few billion years before, so don’t worry :)

  • teft@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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 mostly carbon and oxygen gradually cooling off. It will take trillions of years to cool off.

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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      9 months ago

      Although, it’s just a couple of hundreds of thousands millions of years before the sun expansion brightness 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!

      Edit: sorry for writing mistakes at 2 am, see various sources below.

      • teft@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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?

      • BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        It’s a few hundred million years, not a few hundred thousand, before the photosynthetic cycle is disrupted by silicate weathering from increased brightness.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            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.

          • BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            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.

  • fastandcurious@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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…

    • criitz@reddthat.com
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br
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        9 months ago

        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.

    • rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      And that’s the reason why we fuck our planet for profit. Climate change? Not our problem, the future generations can deal with it.

      • fastandcurious@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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

        • rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de
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          9 months ago

          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.

    • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 months ago

      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.

  • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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.

  • CaptnKarisma@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    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

    • teft@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      You’re missing a zero. The sun will expand into the red giant phase in about 5 billion years.

    • BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.

    • paysrenttobirds@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      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.

    • Deme@sopuli.xyz
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      9 months ago

      And there never will be. Then again, we won’t stay around long enough to have to worry about it.

      • Droechai@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        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

        • Deme@sopuli.xyz
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • psud@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            We have plans for how one would modify the Sun. The physics is fine. The machines are enormous.

            But over all we expect intelligent life to be able to spread to other planets, we expect them (and us) to capture more than their planet’s share of their star’s energy

            But we see no evidence of it happening

            So really there are two options

            • It’s too hard to use enough energy to be seen; or
            • There aren’t other intelligent species in the observable universe, at least none that can reach space
  • holycrap@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    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!

      • holycrap@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        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.

    • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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      9 months ago

      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

      • brckd@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        it won’t explode in 5 billion years if it already exploded in 4 billion years, so i definitely would call that a win

    • livus@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      I think it might be. I still remember it happening to me and that was decades ago.