A cute video, featuring the sun destroying the earth. Time to pack up and find a new one — we only have half a billion years or so.
12 thoughts on “The Solar System”
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A cute video, featuring the sun destroying the earth. Time to pack up and find a new one — we only have half a billion years or so.
Comments are closed.
If a small drop of solar intensity can lead to an ice age, we may not have those hundreds of thousands of years.
I was surprised to learn life on Earth will end billions of years before the sun goes red giant. I thought we might be halfway through, but it turns out life has had 85% of its allotted time already.
Whoa, man, that really had me scared me for a moment. But then I realized had misread Rand’s post. I thought he had said we only have half a million years!
Half a billion?? They’re only off by an order of magnitude.
Hmm, OK, wikipedia (yeah, I know) says one billion. I think the science may not be settled on this point. No need for a U-Haul stampede just yet.
By the way, one of their cites says, “However, well before the planet is left as an arid desert, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be too low to support plant life…”
So drive around the block one more time, to save the Earth(‘s biosphere)!
Al Gore does his part by flying around on private jets.
I read in Astronomy magazine a few years ago that in about 500 million years, the Sun will get hot enough to boil off the Earth’s oceans. This will be long before the Sun becomes a red giant.
It turns out that main sequence stars tend to slowly and gradually burn hotter as they age. So global warming is real; just not like the enviros think.
And it’s kind of sobering to think that life on Earth has largely run its course. Most of Earth life’s history is in the past.
It also makes me intensely curious as to what Venus might have been like two or three billion years ago, when the Sun was cooler.
Venus isn’t hot because of the so called greenhouse effect…it’s hot because its atmosphere is so dense (92 times that of Earth). Assuming the same atmosphere…2 or 3 BYA it was just as warm and toasty as today. I remember discussing this on WUWT some time ago but can’t remember what posting it was.
Yeah, but how did Venus’ atmosphere get that way? It’s about the same size as Earth, but it has an insanely dense atmosphere full of carbon dioxide and Earth doesn’t.
I’m no scientist, but is it possible that Venus could have been covered with life a long, long time ago and all of that carbon somehow ended up in the atmosphere?
Whether that’s the case or not, figuring out Venus’ history is going to be quite challenging.
IANAP, but I think much of the difference between Earth and Venus results from our planet having been macro-renovated billions of years ago and being left with a moon massing far out of normal proportion to Earth’s size. A lot of material that would have outgassed into the atmosphere gradually and been retained might have been lost into space rather suddenly.
It’s also possible that what was retained underwent chemical changes since then that Venus’ atmosphere couldn’t without the catalyst of a catastrophic impact on the scale Earth experienced.
That does sound like a better explanation.
I’m still curious about the history of Venus, though. That’s going to be a tough nut to crack, since even robotic probes don’t last long in that environment.
The question of when the sun explodes is not important. The questions we need to be asking is: how will the inevitable expansion of the sun affect women, persons of color, the transgendered, and the LGBTQ2I community?