Well that was awesome, I think you might have your next article there. I love that CERN made mistakes calling the LHC the large hardon collider.
It’s possible we won’t die of heat death we could all get killed by the big snap. I think I’ve heard a few different end of the universe scenarios. Seems like being in that state helps your creativity bone some.
I'm gonna make an authoritative statement. I'm willing to be held to it, to the highest level.
We're gonna be extinct, long before the "big rip" would even be theoretically possible. What is something we're pretty confident is that there's going to reach a "heat death." Now, where exactly this is - and it just means matter can no longer be meaningfully able to transfer energy. It's going to be cold - and very long.
We'll be dead long before that happens.
Sometime around the point that is called a heat death, we're not actually sure what will happen.
It could rip. Anyone that tells you what will certainly happen is a liar. They don't know. I know, because I've been waiting for someone to tell me they know - for like 30 years. Trust me, if someone knew for certain - I'd at least get an email. I'm pretty sure someone's gonna call me.
They're probably going to say, "I fucking told you so."
Yeah, humans are destined for extinction. There's fuck all one can do but prolong it. Our whole body works by smashing shit together. We may evolve. We may cause our own extinction. It doesn't matter. We all die in the end. Personally, I say go out with a bang. I'd not want to be conscious throughout the billions and billions of years that are gonna be when matter is so diffuse that you can't even dance with your neighboring matter. That'd be long, cold, boring, and a fate worse than death itself. Fuck that!
Yeah I have to agree humans will probably go extinct long long before any end of the universe type scenario could play out. I'd like to go out with a bang but all the smashing matter inside my body is doing means I probably will the only question is the size of said bang. Living through heat death would suck ass if you could live through it. My bets on life on earth getting destroyed by some means long long before heat death, the sun will go supernova at some point and I'd bet the earth wouldn't survive that even as a rock in space. I love how we started talking about bitchin solos and now its the heat death of the universe.
Nah...
Our star (the Sun) isn't massive enough to go supernova.
;-)
It's maybe worse and there's far more deadly things than our star. But, here we go again.
No, we know quite a bit about star observations and it's something that we're pretty confident in - that our star isn't massive enough to do anything more than get really big.
Here, I'll explain....
As the Sun transfers the energy inside it, some neat things happen.
If I ask you how fast a photon moves, you'd say pretty fucking fast. It takes photons hundreds of years to escape the mass of the Sun - and they speed up as they approach the surface. C is only the speed of light in a vacuum. Photons are also pretty light - so they bounce off shit and will bounce around there for fucking years.
Anyhow, the Sun has a finite amount of energy and that energy is going to be moving in the direction of entropy. It doesn't have enough mass to hold itself together. It's actually a pretty small and insignificant star - and an oddity because there appears to have never been a sister star. Most star systems are binary systems. Not so with us. (Some theories exist that it may once have been but those don't have much confidence.)
Which means the Sun is going to expand. Math tells us that it's going to get almost as large to be able to reach out past the Mercury orbit and somewhere between there and the Earth. There's some debate as to how far. Some math exists that says it will be larger than the Earth's orbit - but that's not something that's well agreed on and most believe it to be smaller.
Doesn't matter....
It's going to cook off our atmosphere, bake the planet, and emit enough radiation to assure we're all well and truly dead.
Then, our star is going to grow cold and dark. It'll become what's known as a Brown Dwarf, as I recall. I'm kinda stoned, but I'm pretty sure that's the name. Our planet will cool and, over time, will no longer orbit the Sun. Even our moon will finally break free of our grasp and be no more. The moon is steadily moving away from us. I think the distance is like 4 to 6cm per year. I'm too lazy to go look.
But, yeah... We're gonna die. It's probably going to be horrible.
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