Solar system future: John Baez timeline

[Martin]

==quote Baez latest TWF==

 

* In 1.1 billion years the Sun will become 10% brighter than now, and the Earth's atmosphere will dry out.

 

* In 3 billion years the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with our galaxy. Many solar systems will be destroyed.

 

* In 3.5 billion years the Sun will become 40% brighter than today. If the Earth is still orbiting the sun, its oceans will evaporate.

 

* In 5.4 billion years from now the Sun's core will run out of hydrogen. It will enter its first red giant phase, becoming 1.6 times bigger and 2.2 times brighter than today.

 

* In 6.5 billion years from now the Sun will become a full-fledged red giant, 170 times bigger and 2400 times brighter than today. The Republican Party will finally admit the existence of global warming, but point out that it's not human-caused.

 

* In 6.7 billion years from now the Sun will start fusing helium and shrink back down to 10 times bigger and 40 times brighter than today.

 

* In 6.8 billion years from now the Sun will runs out of helium. Being too small to start fusing carbon and oxygen, it'll enter a second red giant phase, growing 180 times bigger and 3000 times brighter than today.

 

But then, about 6.9 billion years from now, the Sun will start pulsating, ejecting half of its mass in the form of solar wind! It'll become what they call a "planetary nebula". Eventually only its inner core will be left. In "week223" I quoted Bruce Balick's eloquent description:

 

' The remnant Sun will rise as a dot of intense light, no larger than Venus, more brilliant than 100 present Suns, and an intensely hot blue-white color hotter than any welder's torch. Light from the fiendish blue "pinprick" will braise the Earth and tear apart its surface molecules and atoms. A new but very thin "atmosphere" of free electrons will form as the Earth's surface turns to dust. '

 

==endquote==

 

Lots more here:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week252.html

[Spyman]

Milkomeda

 

Computer simulations by Cox and Loeb suggest the Milky Way and Andromeda will make their first close pass in about 2 billion years. The two galaxies, currently separated by about 2.2 million light-years, are rushing towards each other at about 310,000 mph (500,000 kph). One light-year is equal to about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

 

During that first close encounter, the two galaxies will circle around each other a few times and their stars will begin to intermingle. The Sun at that time will still be a hydrogen-burning main-sequence star, but it will have brightened and heated enough to boil away the Earth's oceans, other studies predict.

 

The new computer model finds there is a 12 percent chance that during this first brush between Andromeda and the Milky Way, the Sun will be pulled from its present position into a "tidal tail," a streamer-like cluster of orphan stars stripped from their parent galaxies.

 

After the galaxies circle each other a second time, there is a 3 percent chance our Sun will be more tightly bound to Andromeda than the Milky Way.

 

In 5 billion years, Andromeda and the Milky Way will have completely merged to form a single, football-shaped elliptical galaxy.

 

When the two galaxies finally merge, the Sun will be an aging star on the verge of inflating into a red giant. According to the new computer simulations, the Sun and its planets will get pushed out to 100,000 light-years from the center of the new galaxy-4 times farther than the current 25,000 light-year distance.

 

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070514_milkomeda.html

[astro-boy]

yeah...but every stage in this Timeline may not be correct...

 

eg. During the Red Giant Stage (second, probably), the first 4 or 5 Planets may be engulfed by the Sun...at least, the Earth will certainly be engulfed...and although I have read many articles saying that the Sun will become a Black Hole, it is very unlikely...seeing that it may not attain a mass of 8 Solar Masses which is required for a Black Hole. Hence, it will most probably become a White Dwarf.

[Spyman]

None of the two timelines presented states that the Sun will become a Black Hole or that planets will not be engulfed when the Sun enters a Red Giant stage.

 

But yes, The Sun will not likely become a Black Hole and depending on different models Earth and/or Mars can become engulfed.

[jackson33]

Martin; since you slid a perceived Republican viewpoint, where is that time line will the tree huggers of the world, admit THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO, become a realization???

[Martin]

...admit THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO,...

 

I have been watching the search for and discovery of exoplanets for about 10 years and I believe we are on the verge of discovering a bunch of habitable-zone earthlike planets.

 

I predict that by 2010 there will be a growing list of earthlike planets within 100 lightyears of us.

 

I would be interested in our species extending earth-type life to habitable planets where life has not evolved and I believe this can be done using robot probes equipped with genetic information.

 

I think we have the opportunity and it would be shameful and irresponsible not to take it.

 

If we do not solve our population and environment problems, we shoot ourselves in the foot---because surplus resources will not be available for extending life beyond the solar system.

 

We are the artists of our planet and the caretakers of our ocean land and air.

 

If anyone has never felt something like respect and admiration for a tree, then screw them.

 

You get the idea. There is a lot we can do.

[BenTheMan]

Nah. Jesus will come back WAY before that happens.

[theCPE]

==quote Baez latest TWF==

 

* In 1.1 billion years the Sun will become 10% brighter than now, and the Earth's atmosphere will dry out.

 

* In 3 billion years the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with our galaxy. Many solar systems will be destroyed.

 

..........

 

 

On average every 20 million years a NEO strikes earth that destroys alot of life and every 100 million years a NEO strikes earth that would reset the gene pool completely.

 

So thats 55 chances for apocolyptic events and 11 chances for everything to go poof before we have to worry about our atmosphere vanishing due to the sun.

 

But hey, while we are looking way off into the future, in a few billion trillion years the Universe will be either an ice cube or crunched up and poofed....so eh. Its all pointless.

[Martin]

On average every 20 million years a NEO strikes earth that destroys alot of life and every 100 million years a NEO strikes earth that would reset the gene pool completely.

 

I see, and you expect whatever conscious life to passively allow the strike.

 

It's all pointless.

 

What is pointless? Are you just striking a pose for effect?

[Martin]

Nah. Jesus will come back WAY before that happens.

 

LOL

Whatever Jesus is, I doubt it will come back before our species has extended life to a couple of exoplanets.

[theCPE]

I see, and you expect whatever conscious life to passively allow the strike.

 

Or I expect whatever conscious life to worry about first things first, ie worry about NEOs before worrying about our Sun beginning to expand etc....

 

Of course I wont be around so its not making me lose any sleep;)

 

 

What is pointless? Are you just striking a pose for effect?

 

The original post was about the infinite future.....well the even further infinite future is the death of the universe.

[Spyman]

Hmm, I don't think the timelines is political pointed towards fear of the Suns stellar evolution or geared against not caring about NEOs.

 

Not so long ago people thought the Earth was flat, we don't know what our future new models will predict for the further future of Universe. Just because present models predicts a varity of deaths of the Universe, there is no reason to give up and resign to "It's all pointless". One needs to remeber that we are talking about several TRILLIONS of years, nobody knows what we will learn and achieve in that timespan.

 

If I must choose, I would prefer to go down fighting to my last breath, but even hiding like a coward is better than not caring at all, because then you are at least trying and might success.

 

When someone says "THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO" and/or "It's all pointless" because they have a problem, you can tell for sure that, they are not going to solve it either. The attitude to not even bother to try is a pure sign of a looser. Luckily for us, most of us have a more optimistic view, otherwise we would still be back in the stoneage.

 

Progress is made by thinking, trying and learning.

 

Like Martin said, "There is a lot we can do", and we will do what we can or die trying...

[lucaspa]

==quote Baez latest TWF==

 

This is a similar timeline to others I have seen. For instance:

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Lectures/vistas97.html

 

Lots more here:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week252.html

 

I don't understand why you picked solar history out of this. The page is mostly concerned with whether this paper predicting the future of Neptune is accurate! 1) Sloane J. Wiktorowica and Andrew P. Ingersoll, Liquid water oceans in ice giants, available as astro-ph/0609723.

 

According to Baez, there are problems with the projection by Sloane et al.

 

You seem to have missed the point Baez was making and instead focussed on a background hypothesis that both Sloane et al. and Baez are using: the timeline of future events in the solar system.

[lucaspa]

On average every 20 million years a NEO strikes earth that destroys alot of life and every 100 million years a NEO strikes earth that would reset the gene pool completely.

 

What do you mean by "reset the gene pool completely"? If you mean literally what you said, you are wrong. Instead, we have seen massive extinctions from strikes -- particularly the K-T boundary. But none of them have come close to wiping out even phyla, much less resetting the gene pool

 

But hey, while we are looking way off into the future, in a few billion trillion years the Universe will be either an ice cube or crunched up and poofed....so eh. Its all pointless.

 

Yes, the universe will continue to expand until there is "heat death" -- no energy available to do work (second law of thermodynamics). There won't be a crunch.

 

However, what is or is not "pointless" is a philosophical problem. It's called the Problem of Meaning. I would argue that our lives have meaning irregardless of what happens to the universe (or life on earth) in the far future. Nihilism is not justified.

[TimbaLanD]

I have mentioned this before but I recon we can steer the earth away from the solar system bit by bit to a larger orbit!! Shield up the earth so heat does not escape and then boost up the rockets to steer the earth slowly to a larger orbit and eventually out of the solar system! Technology will be available to sustain the earth and its occupants without the sun I am sure! The earth will become like a massive space ship, just like the Borg sphere! Once out of orbit of the sun we can even slow the earth down to take it in to orbit another star!

 

Umm… This would make a good movie!

[theCPE]

What do you mean by "reset the gene pool completely"? If you mean literally what you said, you are wrong. Instead, we have seen massive extinctions from strikes -- particularly the K-T boundary. But none of them have come close to wiping out even phyla, much less resetting the gene pool.

Here let me help out the sensitive folk....

 

insert "kill the majority of life" for "reset the gene pool completely"

 

Its a moot point of course as NEOs were brought up to point out why looking out too far into the future is ridiculus, first things first and all that nonsense.

 

 

Yes, the universe will continue to expand until there is "heat death" -- no energy available to do work (second law of thermodynamics). There won't be a crunch.

That we know of!

 

However, what is or is not "pointless" is a philosophical problem. It's called the Problem of Meaning. I would argue that our lives have meaning irregardless of what happens to the universe (or life on earth) in the far future. Nihilism is not justified.

 

Sweet.

[lucaspa]

That we know of!

 

No, not at all. The crunch has been shown to be false. It has consequences that are contradicted by the data: such as a slowing expansion.

[lucaspa]

I have mentioned this before but I recon we can steer the earth away from the solar system bit by bit to a larger orbit!! ... Umm… This would make a good movie!

 

It has already made quite a few good science fiction stories. See Larry Niven's A World Out of Time as just one example of moving the earth.

 

James Blish's Cities in Flight novels also involve moving cities and eventually moving a planet.

[lucaspa]

Here let me help out the sensitive folk....

 

insert "kill the majority of life" for "reset the gene pool completely"

 

Better. Those two are different, of course. BTW, do you mean the majority of living individuals or the majority of species? Again, those are different things.

[Spyman]

The crunch has been shown to be false. It has consequences that are contradicted by the data: such as a slowing expansion.

I don't think we can definately rule out a Big Crunch yet...

 

The nature of Dark Energy or the Cosmological Constant is not well known. During Inflation the Universe went through an episode of rapid expansion, in the first moments of the Big Bang. But the Inflation ended, how can we be sure it won't end again or even that the Cosmological Constant will remain positive ?

 

We know that the expansion is currently accelerating, the data and our best models favors a Big Freeze.

 

But we don't know what cind of data and new models that lurks in the future.

[Martin]

...

 

...we don't know what ... new models ... lurk in the future.

 

I totally agree.

BTW thanks for pointing to that timeline---especially the projected location of the solar system in the elliptical formed by Milky-Andromeda merger.

 

I don't take timelines like this as established fact but as scenarios that help define our self-consciousness as a species and as representatives of a planet's life

 

a timeline helps to define the stage on which our species plays its part---possibly it is an honorable role and possibly a shameful one.

 

that's just my take. I don't want to persuade you of my view, Spyman. you have your own take on it, which I respect. But that's mine: there is a lot we can do.

 

the issue of eventual death in whatever form hot-or-cold does not seem even remotely relevant and I dont see why people's attention always gravitates to such an issue.

 

we live in a time when astrophysics grad students and postdocs are making bets among themselves as to how many earth-like planets will be found in the next ten, or by 2020.

 

the question will be, are we going to contrive somehow to plant some form of life on these planets.

 

and meanwhile, is our own planet going to continue beautiful and liveable.

[Martin]

Spyman and anybody else interested. About "new models" that can emerge and change the rules of what to expect....

People have this rigid model often which simplifies the questions down to supposition about "dark energy" or cosmo constant Lambda, or quintessence etc and admittedly so far there is a very good fit to the data if you just say

LCDM with a very small Lambda constant thruout space and time.

 

But that is an effective model which does not say what or why Lambda.

Lambda may be pure fudge with nothing substantial behind it. All we have is a model that fits the observations so far pretty well.

 

an alternative model is emerging: look at this:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.4398

 

it suggests a simple way to get the so-far observed accelerated expansion without putting in anything by hand

further observations of the expansion history in more detail, and going back further, may well rule this explanation out

(with more calculation and numerical work, it becomes testable by available means like supernova and largescale structure observation)

but then again it might survive-----then the acceleration is just a quantum correction to the matter part of the hamiltonian and you do not

need a Lambda or any kind of "dark energy"

 

in the event that this explanation survives testing and serves as a more fundamental explanation of the successful effective LCDM

it should be expected to predict a different future

 

this reinforces what Spyman said----we don't know what models will emerge, and they can make for us a different idea of past and future

 

I think this one emerging right now, while new and still needing to be worked out in more detail (it is just a preliminary sketch so far), is especially nice because there

is nothing put in by hand. It obeys Occam razor. It shows acceleration can arise in some circumstances as an automatic side-effect of a minimalist

quantization of cosmology that adheres closely to the familiar classic version.

[theCPE]

the issue of eventual death in whatever form hot-or-cold does not seem even remotely relevant and I dont see why people's attention always gravitates to such an issue.

 

The same could be said about the issue of the eventual evaporation of our atmosphere in 1.1 billion years....

 

I think if people's attention gravitates toward that issue it is because people are always attempting to see the BIG picture...doesn't get much bigger than that.

[Astrobuff]

Guys, no need to worry about events that may or may not happen some Gyrs into the future. No need to burn out too many a precious brain cell worrying about humanity's future in the ocean of uncertainty that is existence in this universe. For in all likelihood, we humans are more than capable of blowing ourselves into pieces long before any effects from any merger event with Andromeda or with the Sun entering into sub-giant phase.

 

I remember reading from somewhere that the surest sign that there is ET is the fact that they have not bothered to contact us. Does'nt that ring any a bell?

[Martin]

Guys, no need to worry about events that may or may not happen some Gyrs into the future. No need to burn out too many a precious brain cell worrying about humanity's future in the ocean of uncertainty that is existence in this universe. For in all likelihood, we humans are more than capable of blowing ourselves into pieces long before any effects from any merger event with Andromeda or with the Sun entering into sub-giant phase.

...

 

Hello Astrobuff. I think you must be Shaun who commented on Stein's blog.

Good blog isnt it?

 

You may have misunderstood the point of posting JB's timeline.

I, for one, was not worrying about threats to human survival.

I don't "burn out precious braincells" worrying about the sun getting too hot.

 

I'm far more concerned with the immediate threats of war, overpopulation, destruction of land and ocean resources----human stupidity basically.

 

the point of the timeline, whether or not it is factually correct in every detail, is to get a perspective that says "look at the opportunity! we have all this time, if we don't screw ourselves and the rest of life up and miss the chance"

 

the sun going sub-giant is not a threat, it is a TIME-MARK analogous to a land mark, to help punctuate the perspective

 

IMHO if we are not âssholes we will most likely have spread life to other systems long before then