Saving the Sun
In about 4 to 5 billion years our Sun’s core will exhaust its supply of hydrogen and begin to expand into a red giant. THIS COULD KILL US ALL. Unless… we stop it.
Current technology is not enough to prevent this cataclysm, BUT by the time 4 to 5 billion years later rolls around, or even before then, if we are still alive, we will be MUCH more highly advanced. We will have advanced brain powers, either through nanosynaptic augmentations which increase our brains’ speed and ability by many orders of magnitude, or through a mental interface to a fourth dimensional collective mindspace which allows all humans to share thoughts and learn from each other (not unlike the ‘blogosphere), or something else*. Anyway, with our highly advanced brainpower and technology we will be able to handle many things.
Even a simpleton from 2006 like me can make the simple and obvious calculation that by feeding Jupiter, which is mostly hydrogen, into the Sun, we can get several million more years out of it. And it is not beyond the realm of imagination that future generations will have even more brilliant ideas than me. So, all in all, this “Sun dying and killing us all with it” thing is probably not as inevitable as all these scientists whine about it being sometimes.
kthxbye.
(*please note that this billions of years later enlightened superbrain future is much later in time than the future when the dystopian world government will use time travel to recruit our near future’s retired ‘bloggers to power their Orwellian propaganda machines.)
January 28th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
LOOK OUT SUN JUPITER WILL SLICE YOU IN HALF
March 2nd, 2006 at 10:04 am
Okay, I’ll stop after this one. I think by that point, the phsycial Earth and sun won’t matter much. In the post-human enviroment we’ll probably have enough control over our energy use that the embers of what’s left of the sun will be enough to go for a couple billion more. But in the longer term forecast, recent cosmological research points to “death by ice” for the universe. Everything keeps expanding and cooling until it all runs out. But then there’s the 70% of the universe that hasn’t been accounted for - the dark matter whcih might be put to good use. Whatever.
Check out Alpha & Omega by Charles Seife for a good cosmology lesson based on relatively up-to-date research (two years ago).
BTW: I think Jupiter doesn’t amount to much, mass-wise compared to the sun - there’s a lot of fluff. It’s probably like throwing candy wrappers into a campfire at the end of the night.
March 2nd, 2006 at 10:25 am
1. Heat death of the universe happens much much later than the sun becomes a red giant and is another issue entirely.
2. Jupiter may not be much compared to the size of the sun, thus why I estimated only a few million more years which is not much at all compared to the current lifetime of the sun, but will be a significant amount of time for humans or even post-humans.