Date: November 5, 2010
Title: Alpha-Omega Presentation at Dragon*Con 2010
Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Link: http://theastronomybum.blogspot.com/
Description: At Dragon*Con 2010, Richard Drumm visited the “Space Track” of talks and recorded this talk by Richard Jakiel, a research scientist in the Georgia Radiation Protection Program. The title of his talk is “Alpha & Omega – How It All Begins & Ends” and it takes the long view of life here on Earth and the future of Earth itself.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society in Charlottesville, Virginia.
His blog is at http://theastronomybum.blogspot.com/.
He’s the owner of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, an award-winning video production company. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He’s found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored anonymously and dedicated to the memory of Annie Cameron, at the time of NASA EPOXI flyby of Comet 103P/Hartley 0.0.155 AU above Tryphena, Great Barrier Island, New Zealand, located between Betelgeuse and Procyon on the edge of Canis Minor 4 November 2010.
Additional sponsorship for this episode has been provided by Jeanne Jacobs in celebration of her son’s birthday. “Happy Birthday Matthew. As you reach for the stars, know that you have love and support at home. Love Mom.”
Transcript:
Thanks again to George Hrab for that wonderful musical introduction!
Go to lulu.com, CD Baby.com, and iTunes for his book & his great music!
And the Geologic podcast! Don’t forget that!
You owe it to yourself.
So if you don’t get Geo’s stuff for yourself,
then your self will be mad at you,
Then you won’t talk to yourself ever again!
That… That didn’t come out right…
Ahem.
Hello, I’m Richard Drumm The Astronomy Bum in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Back on the first weekend of September I drove to Atlanta to lend a hand at the Astrosphere New Media table at Dragon*Con, which is a HUGE science fiction & fantasy convention.
Since Science Fiction would just be fiction if it wasn’t for science, there is a science track there for fans of science.
There is also a Space Track, a Podcasting track and Swoopy & Derek’s great Skeptrack for skeptics.
It was in the Science track room at the Hilton that I recorded this presentation by Richard Jakiel, who is a research scientist in the Georgia Radiation Protection Program. Which is not to be confused with the Witness Protection Program.
He’s also an avid amateur astronomer, teacher of astronomy & physics and a prolific astronomy writer.
The talk’s title is “Alpha & Omega ‚Äì How It All Begins & Ends”
Ok, um, this talk is a rather interesting talk because it’s very symmetrical. You’ll find that out, that going through what I’m going to talk about today, which is basically the life and death of planet Earth. And we’re getting nearer to 2012 right now because… That’s a little bit silly and I’d say… So the name of the talk is fittingly “Alpha Omega” and that sort of gives you an idea of what we’re going to talk about and go through. Um…
Essentially we’re going to divide up the Earth, the history of the Earth in 3 different phases. First is the beginning phase, the formation, creation of the oceans, the Moon, the atmosphere, the tectonics, all that good stuff. Then we’re gonna jump ahead a bit, talk about the major glaciations, maybe a little bit about extinctions. Then talk about modern day Earth, what’s going on now, what kind of events that can happen. And then we’re gonna go into the far future, uh, up to 7 billion years from, from our own present day. So, things are gonna get interesting, and you will see there’s a strange symmetry.
So the first thing, all begins with a big bang. Well a smaller bang, a supernova explosion, stirs up the junk and the gas. So here we are, Mr. Solar Nebula forming, and, like I said, uh, sort of starts off with a big cloud of gas, it condenses, things start to form. Anyways, things grow. It’s… beginning to say, it starts with fire, and it’s going to end with fire. Uh, collisions with various planetoids, stuff like that. Lot of space junk out there, so we’re talking space junk hundreds of miles across, or sometimes bigger!
Uh, the infamous Big Whack, which is a… they call the Mars-sized impactor. Um, no one knew how the Moon formed. They thought, well, it’s a fission thing, and they thought, well, there’s some other stuff, and then they start doing, and look at the actual lunar chemistry from the, from the various Apollo missions. They started doing, looking at that stuff and they figured out that uh, the Moon, because of its chemistry is very similar to our mantle rocks, ‘cept all the water was pretty much baked out.
Our Earth has too much iron, so the core of this planetoid probably went there. So OK, we get the formation of the Moon, and of course things get worse, uh, basically the iron begins to segregate out in the planet and we have literally oceans of magma. I mean the planet essentially melts from the core outwards. And it takes a while for things to cool down, uh, in the mean time, um, we’re essentially, all the oceans, anything that was like, um, gasses the time, the original atmosphere, it was pretty much gone at this point. Eventually you do get the formation of the atmosphere and oceans.
Um, my background is originally is a geologist and environmental biologist. I got into astronomy as a hobby, but you start reading about these things and you figure out that the… things are very, very different. The early Earth is more like hell than, than Venus is right now. It will take 2 billion years before we start seeing any oxygen at all.
The Moon at this point is much, much closer. 16,000 kilometers, 12,000 miles away. If you go down by the ocean, if you can find land for one thing, there’s not much land at this point, you go down by there. What do you think will happen with the tide? [Laughter] Yeah, uh, the tide, this is not… you ever see Deep Impact? That’s one thing that’s right. The tide is gonna look like that. Thousand foot tides coming in. This is how… the Earth’s rotation at this point is only about 6 hours, so it’s very, very fast. The tidal influences will slow down. And the Moon is gonna go farther and farther away. This is key, because it’s gonna keep on doing it, it’s doing it right now.
Rise of life, uh, they think life on the planet Earth probably started several times. And probably was sterilized several times. All right, now, we’re gonna jump ahead. So we’re playing mostly, with the last, next few thousand years, hopefully no hypernova in our range, and certainly no supernova right now. We think our closest other may be Betelgeuse, but even that’s not gonna kill everything, it’s just, cause a lot of cancer and whatever, but, uh, ah well, you can live with cancer. [Laughter}
Uh, so here we are now, Sun’s gonna get warmer, and then it’s gonna get really big and bloated, and then bad things are really gonna happen. Actually bad things will happen long before that, but… If we’re, if there’s a planet still here, that’s the end of the planet. Anything close is gone. So, tectonics. So here’s future world, of course plates are moving, you notice that Africa’s gonna collide with Europe, get the formation of the super Alps, uh… We also notice that, uh, the Atlantic Ocean is probably gonna be the largest ocean at that time. There’s gonna be new trenches being formed. There’s actually some starting right now, um… But eventually the continents will actually converge, and we’ll get the formation of a new supercontinent. Um, plate tectonics, uh, one of the things you do need, though, it seems to be that, uh, to help it out a lot you do need water, uh, in the rocks and stuff. And there’s a problem with that, because it’s not gonna last forever.
All right, the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has been decreasing with time. And plants are set up to use carbon dioxide at a certain level. It gets too low, it becomes difficult for certain types of plants. You will find out that the, that the best time for Earth in terms of life, we’ve already passed it. We’re already in middle age, older middle age right now, in terms of life, so… The high time was back in the dinosaurs, so… Like it or not, that’s the way it is. Um, this is gonna go down lower and lower and lower, and eventually if the trend holds, 5‚Äì6 hundred million years from now it’s gonna get very bad for plants.
So, planet Earth is slowly warming up, and even with the down draw of CO2, fact (is) it’s warming up. We’ve got this other greenhouse gas, much more effective, called water vapor. And um, it’s gonna reach a point where the water vapor, it’s gonna, it’s gonna get so warm on the planet that it’s gonna break through the natural trapping of the tropopause and upper layers of the atmosphere, with the clouds you see right now, and it’s gonna get into the upper atmosphere. Once that happens, bad things will happen. The oceans will be eventually destroyed by good old ultraviolet.
This is about a billion years now, we’re talking way in the future. We’re gonna come back a little bit, talk about life, but, um, 500 million years from now, as I said, CO2 is gonna continue to drop, and then things are gonna get bad for plants, the… We’re not talking evolution. Evolution can probably keep up with this for a while, drag this out a while longer. Almost certainly that will happen. Ah, but there will become a point where there’s too, too little CO2 to be used, so most plants will die, unless stuff around smokers and things. Most animals will die, probably except for the oceans, and we’ll return to what we had in the beginning, which is bacteria, algae, and maybe fungi.
So, ah, 2 and a half billion years from now everything has died down, the Earth has been uh, parboiled, roasted, barbecued, everything is dead… What could happen next? What about our galaxy? Well we were talking about the solar system and that, but what about the Milky Way? Well, Milky Way is gonna have a date. [Laughter] With a bigger, meaner, angrier galaxy. They’re gonna wrestle and tousle each other and eventually they will merge into one.
So while that’s happening, the Sun’s getting warmer and warmer, and eventually, sooner or later the Sun, it’s gonna run out of hydrogen. When it runs out of hydrogen it’s gonna contract, the core is gonna re-ignite, and we’re gonna burn helium, we’re gonna turn helium into carbon and oxygen. So yes, the red giant phase. It’s gonna get quite large. It’ll expand, out to the orbit of Venus the first time around, get over 2,000 times brighter, all this mass is gonna be thrown off, um… The um, Sun’s gonna expand, it’s gonna get very unstable, it’s gonna run… It cannot burn helium forever, it’s gonna run out of helium. It’s not dense enough or large enough to produce, uh, to burn the carbon or oxygen, turn them into higher elements. [Cell phone ringtone] And so you get the planetary nebula phase, the outer layers sorta get blasted off, thing heats up, pulsates, and everything gets incinerated in the inner solar system.
Well thanks, it was fun, uh…
[Audience members: “Thank you! Thank you!”]
[Applause]
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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