I mean when you make it as arbitrary as possible. The universe is terminally unstable and will be completely destroyed. Bit of a nonsensical headline without timelines.
FTA:
The estimated lifespan of the outer solar system has been downgraded from 100 billion years to just a few billion years, according to a study that probed “terminal instability” during the Sun’s death.
FTA:
“Newton’s envisioned instability is real after all,” the team. “He was mistaken only about the perpetrator.”
The news isn’t that the solar system will eventually collapse (the concept of entropy isn’t new) but that the mass loss is not predictable and smooth and the impact of the irregular mass loss fucks with their orbit:
The recently measured white dwarf recoil demands asymmetric mass loss that is most readily attributed to discrete, independently directed ejections that impulsively perturb stellar motion.
People are acting like it’s not a problem, but if we have just one more downgrade of that magnitude, we’ll be in big trouble
Yeah, at that magnitude loss one more and we’d only have tens of millions of years left.
does that mean I can quit my job and go on a hedonistic rampage?
I think everyone would be understanding about this today, even.
You’re looking at 3 further drops of that magnitude for it to have any meaningful impact on anyone alive today. But if we do have 3 then yes, it’s absolutely time to go apeshit.
Getting awful close to cosmic margins of error there
is that going to take longer than 30 years?
Nope. One more downgrade like that and the collapse of the solar system will be 88 billion years in the past. It’ll collapse before it even formed, and none of this mess will have happened in the first place. Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound so bad. Since it precedes the big bang, that might help with damage limitation.
I can get behind Accelerationism if it means we cause an integer overflow
Fuck. We have a lot less time than we thought.
Bit of a nonsensical headline if you refuse to read the article smh by head
If an article’s title doesn’t make sense until after you read the article, then the title is meant to ensnare rather than inform. Aka click bait.
Humanity is more terminally unstable, so we win!
Whoever wins, we lose.
Now we compete to rank which humans are most unstable!
I feel like I’m going up the ranks quickly.
This is how you end up with a new Hitler
I think it might already have happened
Humans are terminally unstable and will die within an average of 73 years. More at 11.
Still a few billion years? We’ll turn it into a junkyard way before then.
A few billion years you say? Maybe about 5 Billion?
That episode was wildly optimistic. Earth will be uninhabitable by humans in around 250 million years and the oceans will be boiled away by the sun in 1 billion.
…Unless we destroy it sooner ourselves, of course.
Didn’t they say in the episode that humans had long since left and it was preserved “as it used to be”. I would assume if they had a space station that could survive a supernova they’d have a way to make things fine on the surface.
If we stay around for another million years we may get to the point where we could increase the earth’s orbit, allowing us to stay in the habitable zone for far longer.
True, if we somehow manage to not kill ourselves off it’s possible we could change it or just leave the planet altogether.
250 million years… you sir are an optimist…
As I said, that’s if we don’t do the job sooner.
Where does the 250 million number come from? Also, did they move the date on red giant state up from when I was a kid?? I thought we had 2-3 billion before then.
Greenhouse effect will make the planet too hot for us to survive way before then. The seas will boil away way before the red giant consumes the planet.
Huh, I never realized how late to the game of Earth habitability humanity was.
I hadn’t either! over 4.3 billion years to manage sapience and we only have 250 million years of habitability left. We basically did this:
deleted by creator
Finally some good news.
Finally some good news.
So do I hoard toilet paper?
Can’t make more if there aren’t any trees. Better stock up!
Some 5 year old will hear about this and start panicking.
Right along with quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle
Our sun is expected to become a red giant in 5 billion years, so that should help.
It’s like my doctors say about various chronic conditions I have: “Don’t worry, something else will get you before this becomes a major problem.”
Not soon enough, unfortunately.
entropy, baby.
anyway we have no clue what will happen when we collide with Andromeda galaxy in a few billions year, Maybe nothing, maybe orbit will be screwed, we don’t know. And the sun will go red dwarf or something anyway in a few billions year. We will all be dead
Can’t be bothered to find a source, but I remember hearing (probably from a Vsauce video or something like that) that it won’t really affect our solar system. Even colliding with another galaxy, the space between stars is so ridiculously fucking huge that the chances of a celestial body getting close enough to pull our planets out of Sol’s orbit is functionally zilch. It’ll still be one hell of a night sky though…
yup it would be an absolute beauty to see it!
Am I just stupid? They reference this study then go into the origins of life on earth and completely ignore mentioning the study again. What the fuck is this article?
Ah, I see it now. What a surprise, absolutely nothing has changed besides what we think will happen when the sun collapses into a white dwarf.
Sensational clickbait trash.
Yeah wtf. I had the same experience as you. Shitty article on shitty site apparently.
