The last survivors of the end of the world

What kind of "life" would be possible on the Sun? I don't think basic life form - even the rawest form you can think of - can survive at those temperatures. It's hostile even to complex chemistry.

"harsh" environments on Earth, such as the depths of the oceans, are still quite life-friendly compared to places like the Sun, Venus or Jupiter.

Nobody is dismissing the possibility of life on the Sun, Venus or Jupiter... it's just very unlikely. I would personally rate more life-friendly places such as Europa or Titan. The oceans of Europa could be thriving with sea-life and it's so exciting to have that possibility right in our own solar system.

>I don't understand why everyone immediately dismisses the possibility of "life" on planets like Jupiter, Venus, and even the Sun.

Indeed, why would anyone immediately dismiss life on the Sun!

Dr. Peter Venkman: Ray, pretend for a moment that I don't know anything about metallurgy, engineering, or physics, and just tell me what the hell is going on.

Dr Ray Stantz: You never studied.

Jupiter and Venus are much more plausible than the sun.

There are just simply no available building blocks in the sun. The sun's gravity is so strong that it sorts out it's elements by atomic weight almost perfectly. Hydrogen, Helium, and then some heavier ones. At that point... we're just out of building blocks. What would we build the life with? Swirls of Hydrogen? Hydrogen can only bind to itself, one at a time. There's no way to make any structures.

As someone with a biochem degree (which is admittedly biased towards earthling life): my understanding of life is that it's fundamentally about selectively letting certains molecules in to create energy and chemical gradients. It's about separating one's inside from the surrounding, so the inside can be manipulated.

The insides of cells are a very different solution than outside--- and along similar lines of homeostatis, the blood of dolphins is very different from sea water.

I just have a ton of difficulty seeing how a uniform pool of plasma could hold life.

> (cooking by fire to walking on the moon and nuclear power in under two centuries),

I really don't know what to make of this. You surely can't think that "cooking by fire" was the height of technological sophistication in the year 1813?

I Agree. The sun is also just another star. Humans may have colonized lot of other star systems in a billion years, so the loss of a single one is not a threat to mankind and the species that originated on earth.

It may be sad to lose the home planet, with all its historical importance, but maybe then we are routinely terraforming other planets and moving them around.

If by then we have the technology to refuel the sun, we'll probably also have the means for interstellar travel. I'm betting we leave this joint for somewhere more hospitable.

that technology and progress are going to keep going forward in a more or less linear pattern for thousands of years, after only a few hundred years precedent is a _huge_ assumption. The number of ways progress can slow, be stopped, or reversed, are many - asteroids, viruses, calderas, wars, catastrophic scientific accidents, severe climate change, and of course the influence of governments, both repressive or ineffective, or lack thereof. I sincerely hope progress continues forward but at the same time when I think of "1000 years from now" I can't help but think the planet might be a dystopian wasteland by then.

I suspect moving the earth would be easier than regulating the sun.

>This article is based on the assumption that we won't figure out a way to manage and/or refuel the sun, even in a billion years. Given the incredible technological progress since the industrial revolution (cooking by fire to walking on the moon and nuclear power in under two centuries), I am highly skeptical of this assumption.

You shouldn't be. Basing your argument on "incredible technological progress since the industrial revolution" and "a billion years" passing is mere extrapolation.

Extrapolation of this form is like saying "I ate 1 burger on Monday, 2 on Tuesday and 4 on Wednesday. Given this rate, I'll be eating billions of burgers by next week".

For one, early discoveries, when science started its' pacing were easier. They are "low hanging fruit". We got the most basic stuff in 2-3 centuries (electricity, magnetism, gravity, modern math, evolution, boolean algebra, sets, engineering), refined them in another (relativity, quantum physics, computing, DNA). At some point you reach a plateau. We are not increasing anywhere near the same pace as in the start in breadth and quality: mostly in volume (more research into various aspects of stuff) and detail (more detailed results).

Second, there are other limits. For example, handling stuff below or above some natural limits requires (by the physics of the thing) enormous energy -- and we either don't have that or couldn't use it without melting earth.

There are also limits to our resources -- the very stuff we use to make our tech. From minerals to water. And then there's social limits. We could have been wiped out from a WWIII style thing several times during the cold war -- and could be even worse going forward, if on top of the usual greed and diplomatic expansion games there's also something like a fight for natural resources (draught, famine, etc).

It's much easier to move Earth to a higher orbit than it would be to refuel the Sun. In fact, we should de-fuel the Sun to prolong its life and move the Earth closer to it. One could move the Earth with a collection of bodies orbiting the Sun pulling the Earth in the right direction with gravity. Those bodies could obtain their own momentum from solar sails. It's not fancy technology beyond major bruteforce work (we'd need to disassemble the Moon, at least)

Remember the timeframes involved are of many million years. The Sun will change very slowly until the very end and moving the Earth any faster would create climate problems of their very own.

BTW, we'll have some problems before that, when the Milky Way merges with Andromeda. I imagine lots of stars will gain excessive mass from fast moving gas clouds and may decide to go nova/supernova in the millennia it will take for both galaxies to pass through each other.

Yes, this is basically a "What would happen if intelligence never evolved" story.

It’s not so much evolution he is predicting, but the biological and geological future of the Earth based on several known long-term effects.

The rate of cooling of the Earth’s interior, the gravitational interactions with other objects, and a steady increase in the Sun's luminosity is well documented.

The sun is just another star, and the basic of star phases is good understood. The sun will eventually burn up most of its fuel and enter a red giant phase that destroys the Earth if we don't intervene [0].

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Life_phases

Evolution requires natural selection pressure, which we've largely eliminated. I don't think our species will evolve much more unless we deliberately start selectively breeding.