humans in white dwarf era

[mutleyeng]

this is just for fun speculation. But lets try and keep realistic without bending laws of physics. No mass migration to other star systems.

People seem to think that humanity in the solar system is doomed. The sun will swell, perhaps engulf the earth, and shrivel to a white dwarf and that will be an end to it.

But would it.
Why would humanity not be capable of surviving this.

How long can we keep Earth habitable. As the sun heats up, isnt it reasonable to think we would have the ability to control the suns energy that reaches out atmosphere? perhaps a vast roller blind between us and the sun? If i remember right, we have max a billion yrs before we have either protected the planet, or it will be baked.
so then perhaps we can get a few more billion yrs untill the sun enters its red giant stage.
I seem to recall hearing that the earth may migrate its orbit towards the outer sytem, but it is not certain if it would be engulfed or not.
Its migration out could be amplified artificially by hurling asteroids past it giving it an extra tug. Maybe the earth as a gravity chunk of rock could be saved? it is unlikely that a nice green planet with breathable air would survive, but hey, domes are cool right?
If the Earth cannot be saved, i guess you would want to find the largest chuck of rock you could in the outter system to give as close to 1g as possible. it would be a good idea to have atmospheric pressure too id suppose.
As the sun blows off its shell, we are left with a weak white dwarf, but there will still be plenty of resources around... assuming that we can get the hang of fusion power generation, we can heat and light out cosy domes.
and then theres andromeda. We will be in the mix, but we probably wouldnt really notice much in out quet little system.
i dont really see a good reason why our ancestors wont still be around in 6 billion yrs.
but maybe im missing something...quite likely

[JohnBStone]

this is just for fun speculation. But lets try and keep realistic without bending laws of physics. No mass migration to other star systems.

How does mass migration bend the laws of physics?

People seem to think that humanity in the solar system is doomed.

"Humanity" is doomed. In a billion years intelligent life will likely be as different from what we are now as we are different now from what we were a billion years ago - ie single celled bacteria. Would you call the bacteria we originated from "humanity"?

To answer the question you have to have some inkling of our ancestors will be like in a billion years? What will be our physical form and our biological needs (if any)? How long will the lifespan be? Will we be effective immortals? With backups? ;-) What will be our effective IQ?

Some thoughts:

As the Sun heats up the rate of atmosphere loss will increase - we might want to encourage this. Less atmosphere = less greenhouse effect.

Any engineering projects we could conceive of as being practical with current tech transferred to space are pretty much baseline assumptions for a billion years out.

Space based heat shields, increasing albedo on land on a planet wide scale, large domed arcologies on land, all seem like baseline tech assumptions for the short view - thousands of years not millions.

I speculate we can survive the heating sun with currently perceivable solutions given a much shorter timescale than a billion years.

[ravens_cry]

While it is a fairly common trope, story telling device, to have humanity survive for billions of years in some form or the other, the sheer scale is just beyond comprehension. Even a million years is magnitudes older than written human history, and a billion years is a thousand times that.

[mutleyeng]

oh you are both right of course,
Im sure technology will play a part it what humans become - but my wild speculation would be that technology would also be used to maintain, more or less, our current form. Lifetime extention certainly.
If you look back on the history of life on earth it is absurd to think anything like us would be around in billions of years - but that was without technology. This is now a whole new ball game.
The big issue for humanity i see will be how the technology to extend life will have serious repercussions on population.
The same problem, population, will become an issue when trying to deal with the changing state of the sun.

and yes, engineering solutions will need to be in place within millions of yrs time frame for controling climate.

[eburacum45]

The period immediately after the Sun leaves the Main Sequence would be a very dangerous time. There are flashes, and pulses, and two different red giant phases;
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/...futuresun.html

When the sun is a red giant, the habitable zone would be out around Saturn, if I recall correctly. Perhaps we could all live on Titan for a while.

Later when the Sun is a white dwarf, there would be a long period when it is about as cool as the Sun; the habitable zone would be less than 0.02 AU out, but it could last for more than three gigayears.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.2791

So it could be worth the effort to survive the red giant phase, in order to take advantage of the long cooling down period.

Eventually we would need to move off to a red dwarf - but there are plenty of those, and they'll last a trillion years.

[Swift]

If you look back on the history of life on earth it is absurd to think anything like us would be around in billions of years - but that was without technology. This is now a whole new ball game.

BAUT has had these discussions before, and we are all just speculating, but I think it is not possible to know if technology will keep intelligent beings with any resemblance to current humans around for a billion years. And if somehow our decendents are still around, and are intelligent and users of technology, I don't think they will closely resemble us. But if all that does happen, or there is another intelligent, technological race still around (I wish the intelligent cockroaches all the best), I suspect they will find a way to survive, whether it involves protecting the Earth, moving it, or moving around the solar system.

[eburacum45]

I should point out that moving the Earth into a significantly different orbit would require much more energy than moving the population of the planet to a nearby star.

[mutleyeng]

but you need somewhere to go - and its not just the total energy required, but the logistics of achieving it.
in this highly speculative scenario - i would think moving around the solar system would be easier than trying to migrate to another star.
I understand the argument of evolution, but i find i am unable to concieve of why humanoid descendants wouldnt be capable of surviving billions of years. I think the biggest unknown is more how they would think compared to us than how they would look compared to us.

[Selfsim]

The idea that we can control the humanoid-life sustaining parameters of the external environment, to within the tolerances necessary for survival, strongly shapes our present day visions of the future, and may not be valid.

The idea that biological evolution is solely dependent on these external environments, is also not valid.

A more interesting conversation would be about how one proposes to constrain such prior perceptions, in order to visualise the physical reality of the future.

[ravens_cry]

It wasn't set quite this far in the future, but a webcomic idea I had, among other things, aliens who liked pretend to be humans as a kind of mourning/homage/worship/cosplay.
Some changed their physical form while others their psychology, with varying degrees of accuracy for both.

[eburacum45]

The idea that we can control the humanoid-life sustaining parameters of the external environment, to within the tolerances necessary for survival, strongly shapes our present day visions of the future, and may not be valid.

The idea that biological evolution is solely dependent on these external environments, is also not valid.

A more interesting conversation would be about how one proposes to constrain such prior perceptions, in order to visualise the physical reality of the future.

I am not entirely sure I understand you, but if you mean that it may prove difficult or impossible to sustain humans in their present form on other worlds and at other times in the deep future, I am sure you are correct. Both natural and artificial evolution will probably change humanity significantly within a few thousand years, let alone a few billion.

One remote but non-zero possibility is that the civilisations of the deep future retain data banks which contain information about our current era; such things as digitised human DNA, literature of many kinds, even media files, could be preserved for extremely long periods of time with very little data loss (thanks to error-checking systems). A far-future civilisation could reconstitute humans and our culture (after a fashion), and allow representatives of our race experience the long slow cooling off of our Sun.

Whether they would ever actually want to do that is a completely different question.

[mutleyeng]

i reckon if the horseshoe crab can be around for almost half a billion years virtually unchanged, humanoids with technology could do the same....the unknown is whether they would wish to change what they are.
humanoid means a head atop of a torso with two arms and 2 legs - what uncontrolable evolutionary pressure would change this

[Swift]

i reckon if the horseshoe crab can be around for almost half a billion years virtually unchanged, humanoids with technology could do the same....the unknown is whether they would wish to change what they are.

But if you compare the number of species that have survived for such a considerable length of time, versus those that didn't, the odds are against that happening. According to this presentation from San Jose State University, the average time a species spends on Earth is 1 to 10 million years.

I am just speculating, but I am unconvinced that technology changes that by multiple orders of magnitude. One might argue, by giving us tools that literally can reshape or destroy the environment on a global scale, or give us multiple other means to kill ourselves off, that technology might actually shorten the length of time humans spend on Earth. It certainly is a toss-up, IMO.

[mutleyeng]

but surely those statistics are a consequence of enviromental changes and natural disaster, which is precisely what technology can isolate you from

[ravens_cry]

Even if we last that long, whose to say we will not decide to put our own hand to the tiller and make funky changes at whim?
Some might decide to stay resembling baseline humans in appearance, perhaps even the majority, but even then that doesn't mean they are the same 'under the hood'.

[mutleyeng]

i can quite easily see us diverging into different (multiple) species - they will always fall on the hominans tree though - i think thats the point.

[Swift]

but surely those statistics are a consequence of enviromental changes and natural disaster, which is precisely what technology can isolate you from

Can it? Can technology completely isolate a species from environmental change and natural disaster? You take that as a given, I do not, particularly over the time span of a billion years. I will grant you that it probably helps to isolate you from such changes, but I doubt it gives complete isolation, and I also think it may introduce many new risks (nuclear weapons, biological warfare agents, climatic and environmental changes, just to name the current risks.).

[mutleyeng]

i dont mean to say it is a given, just that it is not too far fetched to think that it could
we may not be able to stop yellowstone from erupting, but we should be able to mitigate the effects on a population.
Im sure there have been populations of horseshoe crabs that were wiped out from a particular location.
when we have computers capable of modeling climate, we can concievably think about controling it
our lineage is at risk for the period we are all stuck in one place, but by the time that changes, the risk of self annihilation should be significantly reduced too.

[ravens_cry]

I know this is completely off topic, and I make my own fair share of mistakes, but is there a reason you don't use capital letters?

[mutleyeng]

its called, being lazy

in my defense, i never use text speak, so i think that mitigates my crime to some degree

[Swift]

its called, being lazy

in my defense, i never use text speak, so i think that mitigates my crime to some degree

And here I thought you were just a big fan of archy.

[Swift]

i dont mean to say it is a given, just that it is not too far fetched to think that it could

Back, sort of, on topic.

No, it is not too far fetched.

A little off topic... I think I get a little riled when people suggest that somehow, for example - because of technology, that humans are divorced from nature and the natural world, in this case, environmental change and natural disasters. I don't think it is true, and I think it a very dangerous attitude, both for individuals and for humans as a species. If we think we are somehow insulated from such things, that we leave ourselves open to being hurt by them. Look at any number of natural or enviornmental disasters for examples.

But I don't want to derail the discussion too much.

[Romanus]

The energy spent on saving the Earth from the Sun could be better spent moving humans (and perhaps the biosphere itself) to another world altogether.

[publiusr]

Something to think about. Yes in billions of years intelligent life won't resemble anything we know--but what if--on a lark, they get bored, and bring back us back as we are now trying with the mammoth? That handful of throwbacks will be in for a nasty shock.

[djellison]

Why would they be in for a shock?

Some new-born human in a billion years will not be born with any memory of today or any expectations for what the world should be like.

That new world that WOULD be a shock to US...will just be normality to a human born at that time.

[publiusr]

Being us earlier models, they will have the evolutionary programming that looks at anything different as a threat. They will be less prepared than us. There are billions of us, so we would cope well enough if facing ET. But imagine waking up with a handful of brothers--and every other entity you see is a machine. Talk about the Matrix! Now maybe they would take that into consideration--that and uncanny valley--and appear to us as did the mecha from the more friendly movie A.I.

But what if we were just something to be stuck into a cage? Now for Magnus, the Robot fighter...

[Paul Wally]

I'm just wondering: How hot will the solar plasma be when the Earth is immersed in it? Could the Earth as a planet (not biosphere) actually survive the red giant phase? Wouldn't there be some kind a drag slowing the Earth down to a lower orbit?

Maybe there is some possibility of living deep underground. Will there still be a liquid mantle by then?

I think these are some of the considerations for technology a couple of billion years into the future. Nuclear fusion technology attempts to magnetically contain the equivalent of solar plasma, but what about doing the opposite: magnetic shielding of plasma from a closed region of space or is that impossible? But is it really worth trying to overcome all these difficulties rather than simply developing interstellar migration capability within a very generous time-frame?

[publiusr]

A post life Earth would be a heck of a thing to mine for all its worth.

[djellison]

Again - you're talking nonsense. Does a baby born in a $10M New York apartment go 'Ooo -that's luck' compared to a baby born into poverty and almost instant starvation in a tent in an impoverished nation in sub-saharan Africa going 'Bummer- this sucks'

No.

[publiusr]

I really don't see how you can believe that. How many commercials for childrens aid have we seen of children with distended bellies? You really think they don't know they're in a horrible shape? How many children have been born in areas where the land is flat and cold--where howling winds can bring one almost to madness as in the plains? Yes Depression era babies didn't know they were poor--but that only goes to a point.