When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?

> It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course.

I don't think there is a clear trend toward this goal at all.

Extrapolating current trends, we are fairly likely to peak in total population as a species long we become space-constrained on earth; more remote living space is pretty cheap in basically every industrialized country right now, and living in a conventional house in the boonies is like ten orders of magnitude easier than making anything extraterrestrial work (neither climate change nor even global nuclear war is enough to flip that).

Sure, people might like the concept of space colonization, but we're not seeing significant amounts of people living on boats in the Atlantic, so I would not expect to see people living on spaceships within the next centuries, either...

You're not capturing usable energy, to slow it down, you're accelerating it the other way, consuming usable energy

Pulling an object "down" (ie towards the gravitational focus) doesn't lower the energy of its orbit, it just changes the eccentricity. To lower its orbit you have to slow it down.

It is only in the last century or two that humanity has reached the technological and economic level that a single standard global year numbering made any sense-before that, year numbering systems were highly culture-specific. And it just happened by accident that Western European-derived cultures were globally ascendant at that point in history, so that culture’s calendar became the de facto global standard. And if history turned out a bit differently, it easily could have been another calendar instead - e.g. the Islamic chronology (AH).

But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now.

I think the most likely way it might change would be (a) if humanity collapsed back to a premodern civilisation, and later recovered; or (b) some new culture/religion became globally dominant which demanded the calendar be changed.

Personally, I’m sceptical (a) is going to happen in the next few thousand years. I think the most likely scenarios are (i) technological modernity survives, (ii) humanity goes extinct completely, (iii) a more moderate collapse in which things get very messy but don’t go all the way back to the premodern era. I think all three are more likely than the kind of complete and extended collapse then eventual recovery which would be most likely to reboot the calendar into a new and different global standard.

I don’t think odds of (b) are high-it would require not just a new dominant culture, but also one which felt very strongly about wiping out all traces of the old calendar. Suppose 1000 years from now, 99% of humans are devout Muslims-I personally think that’s rather unlikely to happen, but anything is possible-would that trigger the current year numbering to be replaced by the Islamic one? I’m sceptical-all Muslim majority countries currently heavily use the Gregorian calendar for business use, computer systems, etc, and they don’t have a theological issue with that, so I’m sceptical they’d feel the need to change even if Islam became the globally dominant culture. And this isn’t a new thing in history-many historical Islamic empires continued the use of pre-Islamic calendars in parallel with the Islamic, especially since the Islamic calendar, being purely lunar, was less than ideal for agricultural use.

> The thing people should rightly dismiss is the idea that human engineering is a minor enough consideration in predictions of the far future that it can be ignored as a sort of rounding error.

Which is not my argument. At all. You’re talking about if we can, I’m talking about if we will. The article—again, rightly—explains what we predict is going to happen according to the information we have. It’s trying to be a scientific-minded article, not a science-fiction article. By your token, anyone could make up any technology to contradict the article, which is not a productive discussion.

> the kind of global agreement you're dismissing as unachievable.

I disagree it’s the same kind of agreement. The difference in magnitude and investment is gargantuan to the point it’s another category altogether. Like a group deciding where they’ll go out to dinner VS deciding which country they’ll all move to. Both require mutual agreement for the same group to advance, but that’s where the similarities end.

> Undoubtedly, if there are still humans after a few hundred million years

Which is a big if. You can’t in good faith flout “just move Earth further from the Sun” as if it was something routine without considering all the very real and very big obstacles which are in our way right now, billions of years before your proposed scenario.

The crux of my point is merely that your criticism of the article is unwarranted. Sure, phantasise about any any possible approaches to the problem you can think of, but acting like the article somehow failed to consider those options is what I’m disagreeing with.

I love this article. Especially the part where, about 2 billion years after the last traces of even unicellular life on the planet has become extinct, the length of a calendar day will have to be officially adjusted, since it will then be 48 hours.

The idea of keeping bureaucracy alive much longer than our planet is human optimism at its best. Death and taxes, come Hell, high water, and the literal evaporation of Earth's oceans due to surface temperatures exceeding 1130 C.

During last year's total eclipse I learned that in the future, and not so far away, there will never be total eclipses again because the moon's orbit is slowly getting further away from our planet. Folks, enjoy those total eclipses while you can and write poetry and make films so the future humans can enjoy with a sad wonder what they could never experience.

Even better:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

The sun going red giant seems both easier to reason about and much more assured than trying to reason about global metabolic processes that have repeatedly changed on much shorter time frames, including in the last few hundred years at our own hand. Hell if there's one thing i'd put money on it's in life's ability to exploit hitherto-unknown chemistries to alter global metabolism. But physics, especially anything involving the energy output of the sun, is much harder to hand-wave away like that.

Not that I don't find that article interesting, of course. And I wouldn't underestimate our ability to (continue) to terraform the earth, intentionally sure, but much more certainly unintentionally.

Eg https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...

I understand that in 500m years luminosity will increase by 5%. By then we should be able to survive that modest increase. Where did you get 500m years?

The human species doesn't matter. Species come and go. The only thing that matter is Life. Life must continue.

The one we have right now is a stochastic - a good one, but it’s not the SCiFi AI, not even close. So I am not sure how an LLM without an operator makes any sense or if it counts as “something” in this context.

We're talking about a much longer period of time than 1000 years. Like, 4.5 billion years. Or at least 500 million.

People who speak Indo-European languages such as English, Hindi, and Portuguese descend from migrants from the Caspian steppe. Do they have strong Caspian steppe affinities? And that's only been about 4000 years.

The Earth is our mother, but we treat her like dirt.

The timeframe of our demise really doesn’t leave much time for us to evolve or create anything.

This entire thread is science fiction

Which makes the moot, because why do we care if X life is in that future reference frame or not. There will be life somewhere.

On a large enough scale of the solar system, if you zoom out just right, planets and stars can resemble interactions you can see on a molecular level inside a human body. Most of the time, it is normal organic operation. Every so often though, something goes wrong and you can see a new virus or cancer form on previously healthy cells. Smith had a point. From that perspective life on a planet doesnt look much different.