Originally posted by finnegan
Oh dear, this is difficult to communicate.
Start with the expected life of this solar system, in which we know our sun will go through a series of changes until it is finally expired. In terms of human life (all human life, not just our's) that will be an unbelievably slow and drawn out process. What would be the point at which some generation of human ...[text shortened]... ny sense at all to the history of a galaxy or a universe just seems to me an absurd mismatch.
You have a point. But then, if "humanity" is still around in a million years, I reckon it will be as far removed from present-day humanity as we are removed from bacteria. Thus, in a sense, "humanity" will have long since ceased to exist a million years from now even if it
doesn't manage to destroy itself.
Put in a slightly different way, I'd say that even if humanity is not snuffed out of existence in a single cataclysm (external or of its own making), it will
evolve itself out of existence. "Humans" a million years from now will be altogether alien, perhaps incorporeal and virtually immortal. For such beings a century would be no big deal.* A billion years, though? Still a big deal, yes. As I said, you have a point, and it still stands.
But a civilization vastly in advance of our own would likely have better foresight and be capable of very long-term projects. For instance, it is theorized that, starting in half a billion to a billion years, the extremely gradual heating up of the sun will render life on Earth nearly impossible. What's the fix? As you say, the process would be mind-boggling gradual, but that means the solution, too, would need only be mind-bogglingly gradual.
Here's a possible solution: once every year, the civilization could shepherd an asteroid or comet along a trajectory that causes it to slingshot around the Earth in such a way that it imparts momentum to the Earth's forward velocity, thereby kicking it into an orbit maybe several meters farther from the sun. Each meter would win an extra million kilometers worth of distance from the sun over the course of a billion years, and it would just be a routine, ongoing project. Alternatively a single massive asteroid could perhaps be maintained, with thrusters, at some point in space nearly parallel to Earth's path but slightly ahead of it and outside its orbit. The continuous gravitational tug of the asteroid would gradually pull Earth away from the sun, and as it did so the thrusters on the asteroid would make course corrections to keep the distance between the two bodies fixed.
A billion years can be your friend as well as your enemy. Your suggestion of "death by procrastination" still cannot be dismissed, but I'd say it depends on how "human" future "humans" still are. If faster-than-light space travel is never figured out it's going to be multigenerational "arks" that will spread humans to other star systems.
At any rate I'm probably rather less worried than Humy about whether homo sapiens is still kicking up his heels five billion years hence, or even five thousand years. If we perish, well, there almost certainly are other civilizations out there that are embarking on their own grand odysseys to understand the meaning of it all, and they may fare better. And absent other civilizations, there must surely still be life of some sort, and the stars and galaxies that ever wheel and turn. Wonder is a cosmological constant even if there be none who wonder.
*And for such beings Shakespearean sonnets and Beethoven's symphonies may be held in no particular esteem, and have no more emotional impact than cave drawings have for us.
Higgs Boson May Spell Doom for the Universe
26 Feb '13 01:021 edit
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