Thursday 12 May 2016

How far will we delay our extinction (at max)

99% of all the life forms have ever lived on the surface of the planet earth are not here anymore, they are all extinct. Extinction is much more common than we think, no matter how great the creatures adapt to the environment to survive and develop surprisingly incredible defend mechanisms, just to transfer their genes to the next generation, the extinction somehow has always been the ultimate result for all. There has been always an open point that the living beings could not catch up even though they tried their best, and ceased to exist. Nature is an emotionless serial murder machine and always one step further. Almost all the life forms we are currently observing today will go extinct one day, for somehow reason, no matter what.

What if you try to beat the unbeatable one. That's right, I am talking about us, the homo sapiens. The ultimate design of the nature, can control and transform not its surroundings, but the entire planet at its best. Although our existence is pretty new as a comparison with many life forms who exist and ever existed, and we did not yet being challenged by a real global catastrophe, like the dinosaurs had during the infamous asteroid impact, our abilities and awareness might be something our planet had never witnessed before. Even though we were almost went extinct, we survived toba (a supermassive volcanic activity) during the early years of homo sapiens (the reason why today's entire human race comes from some 5000 people lived in 70 000 BC ) and we successfully adapted the last ice age, and where we come today, with our knowledge, experiences, and most importantly, as we are the most communal and globally organized living being ever that we seem pretty much tough to be destroyed. But as mentioned above, we are pretty new and raised to power so fast that can be overthrown even faster, if we consider the mother nature, the ultimate cruel killing system.

There is even more. Mother nature isn't the only killer around, yet our planet is an open system, and we are faced with all the danger of our universe. As Dr Michio Kaku mentioned, there are three possible types of a universal civilization, and we are not even type one, as not yet have full control of our own planet. So how can we possibly have defence against a universal threat without being extinct?

For the sake of the topic, lets say there is a great, bright future for our species, and we overcome all the possible hazards around (fatal epidemics, cosmic rays, asteroids, zombie invasions, alien invasions, fallouts, artificial takeovers etc. etc. ) But really, how far can we go? Can we exist forever, at least, in theory? Is there an ultimate limit?

The bad news is unfortunately, yes, there is most likely an ultimate limit. And this limit is not for us only, for any life form that will ever possibly exist in the future, not only on earth, but anywhere in the universe. The good news is that if we are lucky enough, at our best, we will continue being around for a long time, even after the death of earth, the planet where we evolved.

Firstly, as our planet exist, if we won't have some extreme conditions, a good chance we will continue our existence. The secret here is having energy consumption faster than the frequency of life-threatening catastrophes (e.g. meteor impacts, ice ages, etc.). If we grow any slower, we are doomed to extinction. ( check http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-extraterrestrial-civilizations/ ). In this matter, we can go something like 1.1 billion more years.

After 1.1 billion years, as sun starts running out of hydrogen as its fuel, the solar luminosity will be 10% higher than at present. This will cause a brighter sun and make significant changes on earth, like evaporation of oceans and killer greenhouse effect. An ultimately, after 5 billion years, sun will go supernova and destroy earth completely with other planets in solar system. But this will not be likely an end for us, as we would left earth long time ago, having colonies on another life friendly planet or planets, orbits another young star, continue colonizing our galaxy and mostly safe from the destruction of our solar system.

In case we survive the next couple of billions of years, we will have some colonies in other solar systems in our own galaxy, milky way, but probably no further.  Unfortunately, the universe is expending much faster than we could reach the other galaxies, there will be absolutely no way to reach them even with the fastest spacecrafts, even know anything about them. In a far future, the far galaxies will completely be out of our sight even with the strongest telescopes could see, the sky will be much darker and perhaps our grandchildren will perceive the universe much smaller and lonely than we do in present day.

In short, when our galaxy will have an end, it will be our ultimate end as well. The fate of our galaxy is actually linked to the fate of the universe itself. We certainly know the universe will have an end, but the question is how, and it all depends on the behavior of the dark energy presence in the universe. If all keeps it up like now, the big freeze will bring an end to mankind. It means we will likely be around after the last star of our galaxy run out of its fuel and disappear, and because of the big freeze, it will literally be, the last star. That star will not be a yellow star like our sun, but a red dwarf instead, which consists of about %70 of all stars in the universe. Since red dwarfs have a much longer average life than any other type of stars (about 10 trillion years, compared to our sun, which is couple of billion years), because they tend to burn their hydrogen much much slower (the reason why they create a red spectrum), they will be our last hope to survive in our galaxy.



For more details about it, check out my previous article; http://homo-curiosus.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/universe-or-multiverse.html

http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c

http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-extraterrestrial-civilizations/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/earth/earth_timeline/future_earth

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