[nnf]

Thinking about just how long the earth has been around fascinates me. I read (or listened to, rather) The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen, which was captivating. The audiobook is well-narrated too. We humans tend to think that the planet just "is" the way it is, but this is just how it exists in this moment in which we find ourselves observing it. The earth has worn many faces over the ages.

[nine_k]

Earth has been around for so long that it's exhausted most of the Sun's life-supporting resource. We have barely a billion years to figure out where to go next before Sun overheats earth beyond any habitability; more realistically, just a few hundred million years. No time to waste.

[graemep]

And a few more billion to figure out where to go next after the heat death of the universe.

I think we have more urgent problems.

I very much doubt humanity will be around in a few million years time. We will have died out, or evolved significantly, or altered ourselves. In a billion years there will be nothing even remotely resembling us.

[sandworm101]

It isn't "we" as in humanity. It is "we" as in all life on earth. The bears and the whales will have to do something too, they just don't know it yet.

[amelius]

They will have evolved strong cognitive skills by then.

[gapan]

Except evolution does not work that way. It does not optimize for cognitive skills improvement. Not necessarily at least. Different traits may be more important for different species.

[Nevermark]

Exactly.

Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI.

And mastered the ability to adapt food production and our bodies to off earth environments.

Compounding acceleration by science, tech & econ has anlready initiated the trend toward fully-designed, post-biology, post-evolution life.

Time is now hyper-deflationary. Every succeeding year is worth more than the preceding one.

A multi-system economy is only thousands of years away. A galactic civilization, a few hundreds of thousands.

The earth & sun won’t look much different by the time we are sending probes, perhaps with warp drives, to other galaxies.

[icedchai]

2100 seems highly optimistic. We haven't landed a person on the moon in over 50 years. Space travel is really, really hard, and you're talking about sending probes light years away...

[simonh]

Imagine that for the first 50 years of aviation all airplanes had been single use, and then in the 1960s someone figured out how to make them reusable. Thats what’s happening with space flight. The next 75 years are going to be interesting.

I do think 2100 is a stretch, space is hard, but we’ll likely have all the basic elements of that proved out by then.

[Nevermark]

I think the biological difficulties of human space travel, and its unprofitably so far, have given us a very poor perspective on how fast thing progress from here.

Old bottlenecks are evaporating.

Reusable systems, cheaper faster rocket production, & the loss of dependency on traditional pilots are just three profound bottlenecks we have passed in the last few years.

Machines are getting smarter (not even talking about general AI) and smaller, launch costs are collapsing, demand for resources accelerating, and systems for refueling, communication, etc. are bifurcating.

The last & only BIG bottleneck left now, is simple recognition of relative economic profitability. Just as there has been an explosion of satellites, there will be an explosion of resource extraction the moment it becomes relative net profitable, on a forward predictive basis.

(I.e. shareholder returns for demonstrated viability relentlessly accelerate investment, long before positive cash flow is required.)

Human lunar & Martian bases are just a distraction, however intriguing and likely. They are not a brake on the Solar System resource economic loop, any more than the continued inefficiencies of biologically manned orbital stations held back the explosion of communication satellites.

[chgs]

That’s only 75 years away, same time since the first work on developing orbital rockets.

But by 2500 sure. And likely by 2500 some form of self sustaining asteroid with propulsion will leave the solar system.

I used to think ince that happens for a few thousand trips, humanity will survive enough that our descendants will last billions of years. Not the same biology, certainly not a single culture, but once the technology exists nothing can stop the spread.

Then I read about the “light cage” concept.

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/empiremap.php#ligh...

[DaoVeles]

It really does feel like this is 'The Great Filter century'. Either we make it through to a Star Trek society, or the gravity of our externalisations catch up with us.

While I am more on the side of decline and fall (not absolute doom!), I do not rrule out that we overcome a lot of our issues.

[graemep]

> Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI.

Except that we have thought similar things before.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union people (in the west) thought that we had been through the great danger of nuclear war, and were set for a peaceful and prosperous future. SO much so that the idea of "the end of history" became extremely influential.

IMO that is why the west is finding it so hard to cope with the world turning out to be a dangerous place.

> The best starting point would be what does interest him and what is he most likely to focus on.

I am not convinced we are seeing compounding acceleration. I think that era is past.

We are still advancing technologically, but I think it is questionable whether we are doing so at an accelerating pace:

Blog post on that topic: https://pietersz.co.uk/2012/05/innovation-crisis

[dmix]

Interstellar space travel and two way communication between them is the largest barrier. So multi system is going to mean multi planet in our solar system probably for a very very long time. Otherwise it’s just sending cryo pods out into the nether without ever knowing if they made it anywhere for the centuries it takes something to (successfully) come back.

[Nevermark]

We won’t ever send physically natural humans to other systems.

Not because we could never do it, but there won’t be any motivation to.

We will send relatively tiny ships, initially as probes, then as resource extraction & reproduction systems.

With laser acceleration & fusion deceleration (potentially fed by hydrogen collected collected from the target system), travel between systems can happen within 1-10% of the speed of light.

So only ten or so years to the closest systems.

That (propulsion) technology is not far off now. The bottlenecks are the need for further miniaturization, and our economy could not yet support the cost of, nor is it ready to benefit from, that scale of investment.

Whatever “format” our technology/lifeform has evolved to, we will be able to be sent it in extremely compact form, given any thing large can be recreated at the destination.

—-

Ironically though, despite a decade or so sounding very fast to us now, with time deflation (I.e. absolute time translating to higher & higher subjective time as “we” and our ability to process information & act speed up), decades between systems will subjectively Become be aeons of time.

But resource needs will also accelerate, so the necessity will be there.

So space will be deflationary, along with time. A meter & a second today will have much more relative meaning in the future as everything becomes more compact and faster.

Think about how the digital latency around the planet remains a constant, but as computing centers increasingly compactly, and grow in processing power, by orders of magnitudes, distributed computing with any serial or regular merging component will have to become ever more & more local.

Mars is big latency today. In 50 years, cross planet communication will be a relatively big latency.

[icedchai]

Where's "10 or so years" come from? Proxima Centauri is over 4 light years away. At 10% light speed, that's ~40 years minimum. At 1%, over 400 years. We'll ignore any time needed to accelerate and decelerate. It's a long time. I hope someone still remembers the project exists.

[insane_dreamer]

> Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI.

In my opinion, this is wildly overoptimistic.

[JohnFen]

By 2100? Assuming that such a future is a thing that will happen at all, I think the chances of it happening that soon are very near zero.

[aguaviva]

Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI.

Sounds like climate change is already, and major military conflict/genocide very soon will be, basically entirely solved problems in your book.

[Nevermark]

I don’t think they are solved, but not bottlenecks for beyond Earth, post biological life.

They still matter.

How long intelligent life depends or cares about a “natural” Earth biosphere is impossible to predict. “We” will for a while. But for how long?

Wars and any destructive conflict will always matter. They increase existential risk for individuals and collectives, and waste resources.

We are used to casually equating the future of the Earth, the biosphere, intelligence, civilization, humanity, our systems & communities, and each of us as individuals.

But they are all different things, whose trajectories are increasingly separating.

[aguaviva]

Well that's my definition of a "vibrant Earth" -- namely, having those problems solved first, before we go out and start wrecking the rest of the universe.

"A basically fucked Earth, but with the surviving elites continuing to party on as usual" by 2100 is where we seem to be headed on our current trajectory.

[Ekaros]

Military conflict might help a lot. Enslave the population in misery so we can get those off planet resources and weapon platforms to fight better.

[phs318u]

Love the optimism but unless we master ourselves first, WE will be the major disaster.

Right now, all we seem to be doing is putting ever more powerful tools in the hands of the same, barely evolved ape minds. Not a recipe for long term success AFAICT.

[Nevermark]

I agree, our communal lack of wisdom and recklessness is the only real risk. But maybe not as much as we think.

Ironically many of our biggest worries, like climate collapses, extreme pollution, inequality, huge regional wars (Taiwan), population collapses, pandemics, don’t present much risk for expansion into space.

Only a full civilization collapse or extinction event would do it.

So definitely a long term optimistic outlook for “life”.

But the specific ways things play out could still be catastrophic from individuals perspectives. The rate and nature of changes these next decades will be profoundly disruptive & challenging to every aspect of our existence, all at once.

—

If we don’t reflect the universes non-human created resources as a joint inheritance, in a legally and economically explicit way, there is going to be a great culling of some kind - there is no way around that.

We need formal recognition and a societal structure supporting that, for a shared ownership of raw natural resources in some way, to have a soft transition.

I don’t see this as a violation of capitalism, but as a completion of property rights under capitalism.

It accomplishes what communism tries to do by mistakenly socializing production, instead by joint shareholding of nature’s original undeveloped resources as a gifted asset nobody created. And allowing capitalism to do its job of maximizing that value for all of us.

Bidding to extract resources, rental of limited shared resources (land) etc can continue unchanged. But everyone will be compensated for their part of raw resources as they are privatized or used exclusively.

[oceanplexian]

A billion actually seems weirdly tangible.

I can imagine a billion dollars or a billion bits. Working with computers we deal with units of a billion pretty often. I also know how long a year is and as I get older they feel pretty short. Obviously we won’t personally be around to see it but it does feel like the clock is ticking.

[gffrd]

Let me see if I can un-tangible that for you …

Let's say you live to be 97—quite old!!

1 Billion years is … 10,309,278 of those 97-year lifetimes, if strung end-to-end.

[chgs]

So the combined lifetime of people in a large city.

[roywiggins]

One reference point is that about billion years ago the Earth had just invented multicellular life.

[lm28469]

200 years of industrial revolution and we're well on the way out don't worry about what's coming in a billion years

[FredPret]

"On our way out"!? If you believe this, why? Who told you this? Do you actually think 8 billion people are about to drop dead?

On the other hand, if you're deliberately spreading hyperbole to get people to act, please stop - it's backfiring.

[Cthulhu_]

The Roman Empire took 250 years to collapse, yet in hindsight we still consider it to have just stopped at one point. Likewise, we look at mass extinction events in the geologic histories as if they were one off blips, but e.g. this Hangenberg Event I just googled spanned 100K to several hundred thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangenberg_event

But we're living a mass extinction event if you consider biodiversity and populations in non-human species has plummeted; bug populations have halved in a decade, with that bird populations have taken a hit, ten billion crabs starved because of a heat wave (https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/research-confir...), etc.

No, 8 billion people won't drop dead, and life will continue in many ways, but in our lifetimes we'll see worsening food scarcity because of climate change (already happening), consequent famines, mass migrations, wars, etc.

But for a lot of people it mainly means food gets more expensive and the relative wealth of food choice we've had will be reduced, and houses will be built differently depending on the new climate trends.

That or the gulf stream will stop and the northern hemisphere gets covered in a mile of ice again. But that too won't happen overnight.

[thom]

A thousand years after the fall of the western Roman Empire, the eastern empire fell. Five hundred years after that, a rocket named for the Roman god of renewal helped put men on the moon. I wouldn’t write us off.

[onlypassingthru]

>bug populations have halved in a decade

Which will have a direct impact on the price of food as the pollinators disappear. Professional pollinator might be a high growth career in the coming decades.

[goatlover]

So humans aren't on their way out, it's not even clear global human civilization will collapse as opposed to adapting and mitigating before then.

[JohnMakin]

It’s extremely difficult to reconcile posts like this with the clear historical examples of silly supply chain issues due to minor disruptions.

I don’t believe “civilization” is as resilient as you think. The late bronze age collapse, and all the mystery surrounding that event, did indeed take place over hundreds of years in a vast “global” society. I very much doubt anyone in that society could have predicted such a spectacular collapse. It’s not really a disputable fact that civilization has collapsed many times before and probably will again before we have to worry about these silly “billion year” concerns - maybe let’s just focus on the next 200 years?

[roamerz]

>>Do you actually think 8 billion people are about to drop dead?

In no more than 100 years or so, yes.

[bruce511]

For those who missed the point of this concise note;

There are 8 billion people alive today. A few handfuls of whom will be alive 100 years from now.

Everyone dies.

Will the birthrate drop? Likely yes. Will resources become more scarce? Some, definitely yes. Will life be easier or harder 100 years from now? That's harder to predict.

[FredPret]

Which resources will be scarce, and why?

Improved technology + greater demand = more resources become economical to mine. (Our deepest mines are ~5km and have actual humans toiling away in them. Heavier - and more valuable - metals tend to be deeper.)

This planet has a ridiculous amount of water, most of it just needs energy to be treated or desalinized.

We get more energy from the sun than we could even think to use, not even mentioning the gargantuan stores of uranium and thorium.

We have enough space to give every human (not just every family - every individual human person) a large house on a big yard. This wouldn't even cover the earth - we could fit all that in just Ontario.

[adastra22]

Touché

[JohnMakin]

Do you actually think they literally meant 8 billion people are going to drop dead? because the meaning was fairly obvious as written - after 200 years of industrial revolution we are left in a situation where the planet we live on may not be inhabitable in a relatively short period of time

[FredPret]

Again, that's a crazy thing to conclude from even the most pessimistic global warming predictions.

[lm28469]

Let's talk about it in a hundred years when we struggle to grow food and have to deal with hundred millions/billions of climate refugees.

You don't need 8b deaths to see we're clearly not on a positive trajectory, ocean acidification, wild weather patterns, climate feedback loops, famines, &c. will be problems we have to tackle by the end of the century and will absolutely destroy our capabilities to develop. All it takes is a major event and we're fucked, something that sets us back even 150 years, and it's game over, we wouldn't have the means to go through another industrial revolution because we used all the easily accessible sources of energy

Come on... mammals exist for a mere 300m years... if you worry about the death of our sun in a BILLION years but not about climate change you're an absolute clown, we'll face a couple of near (or full) extinction events by then

[JohnMakin]

> Again, that's a crazy thing to conclude from even the most pessimistic global warming predictions.

Not really considering the "most pessimistic" predictions have the Atlantic current completely shutting down within the next 100 years (wipes out food supply), tons of countries like bangladesh becoming actually inhospitable from heat/humidity index (billion+ people dead), sea levels rising several meters (massive percentage of humanity lives near a coast), etc. - could go on for a while. Frankly, I don't think you really understand what you are talking about and suspect you're going to turn this into a pedantic "well that won't completely annhilate all human life so you are wrong" kind of back and forth that I don't feel like engaging in so I'll just wish you a good day and move on.

[goatlover]

What does an "uninhabitable" Earth mean? Do you mean less habitable than the Sahara or Antartica, or the Himalayas? Because some people do inhabit those places, and more could if they needed to. There's no scientific evidence whatsoever that all of Earth will become uninhabitable for humans. That's just doomerism.

[pjc50]

I think it was a poor taste piece of pedantry: in 100 years, almost everyone currently alive, 8 billion people, will be dead. It's just that new people will have been born in the meantime.

[cyberax]

> may not be inhabitable in a relatively short period of time

This is pretty much nonsense. Worst climate change predictions do not make the planet "uninhabitable", only some parts of it.

[apetersson]

Because we're juuust about to become an interstellar species, right? Right?

[c-smile]

We MUST, having life on just one planet waiting for the next mass extinction event here is too optimistic.

[AlbertCory]

Why must we? There are other intelligent life forms in the Universe, undoubtedly. What makes us so special?

[vsuperpower2021]

They are also 20 feet tall and wear propeller hats, no doubt.

[exe34]

We're the only ones we've found so far.

personally I'd say don't bother, but I'm a nihilist.

[pandemic_region]

Yes, right after we crack this problem of self driving vehicles. Won't be long hold tight.

[ada1981]

NOTHING CAN STOP WHATS COMING. NOTHING.

[cortesoft]

So only about 100 times the length of time Humans have existed as a species. I feel like we are on a pretty good pace.

[oceanplexian]

We are now but if humans go back to the stone age because of a world war or something, we may not have a second chance. The people after us will have none of the same advantages since we extracted all the easily accessible fossil fuels that made the industrial revolution possible.

[roywiggins]

If you aren't worried about humans per se, a billion years is probably enough time to regenerate fossil fuels and evolve another technological species from scratch. Probably quite unlikely, but still. It's a very long time.

[defaultcompany]

The crazy thing to me is that the Earth has been around for one third of the time the universe has existed.

[dehugger]

The simulation was probably on fast forward mode until sentient life developed.

[moneywoes]

did animals fight wars?

[SenHeng]

May I introduce you to the Gombe Chimpanzee War?

>The Gombe Chimpanzee War, also known as the Four-Year War,[3][4] was a violent conflict between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in the Kigoma region of Tanzania between 1974 and 1978. The two groups were once unified in the Kasakela community. By 1974, researcher Jane Goodall noticed the community splintering.[5] Over a span of eight months, a large party of chimpanzees separated themselves into the southern area of Kasakela and were renamed the Kahama community. The separatists consisted of six adult males, three adult females and their young.[5] The Kasakela was left with eight adult males, twelve adult females and their young.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

[kstenerud]

Yes

[bamboozled]

Because through all time and space, sentient life is the pinnacle of it all right? :)God's work.

[lnxg33k1]

I also am fascinated by it, have a look at this simulator, which show the face of earth at some given points https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/travel-through...

[Electricniko]

There are also some cool animations out there that show the drifting, smashing, and more drifting of the plates. I like ones like these that provide some modern landmarks, or showing it in reverse, so you can track individual places through it all:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6bWbDl2ItM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ng6YpxHxU

[shagie]

How about... https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35856820 405 points by ohjeez on May 8, 2023 | 73 comments :: original with comments by author - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286770 )

[nlehuen]

This video puts things into perspective, mapping the whole of 4.5B years of Earth history to 1 hour: https://youtu.be/S7TUe5w6RHo?si=9rkHNaXA2PXXMJjN

[maxerickson]

120 years ago, huge swaths of the US had been recently clear cut and didn't have a lot of forests on them.

It doesn't even take ages for things to change.

It's unfortunate that the public idea of conservation has become so associated with stasis.

[goatlover]

The idea of preserving pristine environments as they were needs to go. There are none, and environments are always changing.

[rexpop]

Bit of a straw man. The ecologists I know of are interested in cultivating biodiversity and preserving habitats from the corrosive influence of development, pollution, and climate change. "Pristine" isn't a term I've heard used much in this context. The language of "virgin" land belongs to the lexicon of settler colonialism, not environmentalism.

[thangalin]

> how it exists in this moment

Follow the orange dot on each page of my book:

https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf

[autokad]

also whats interesting is that 66 million years ago, the continents were mostly where they are now. 120 million years ago Africa was touching Brazil

[ggm]

ie the rate of movement is not a constant, speed of continental drift varies over time?

[autokad]

yeah, they expand faster at first and slow down afterwards until something else happens.

I was looking at the ocean floor and using smooth ocean floor as 'fast moving' and rough ocean floor as 'slow moving'.

South America is moving 3 cm / year. using that with the ocean floors and some guestimation,,, between 120 and 113 m years ago SA moved about 12 cm / year and slowed down to 3 betwen 113 m years ago and now. Assuming no movement from Africa

[ck2]

What I want to see is the Theia collision rendered in realistic 3D

(and if there was enough gas around for sound to carry, that too!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet)

I guess this is close but not like the Hollywood blockbuster it should be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlhlCWplqk

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/collision-may-have-formed-...

[dredmorbius]

Watching the Nasa sim, and others I've seen multiple times before, thought occurs that by re-liquifying much of the Earth after its initial formation, heavier elements which had otherwise been trapped in the crust / upper mantle might have re-mobilised and sunk deeper into the core.

I'm not sure of relative abundance of elements in the crusts of other rocky worlds, though at least generally Mars seems to have a greater prevalence of iron, and fewer of the lighter metals, in its own crust.

See: <https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/a/20711>

Citing:

Arya Udry, Esteban Gazel, and Harry Y. McSween Jr., "Formation of Evolved Rocks at Gale Crater by Crystal Fractionation and Implications for Mars Crustal Composition", Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 123 (2018), Issue 6, pp. 1525-1540. <https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JE005602>

Harry Y. McSween Jr.1,G. Jeffrey Taylor, and Michael B. Wyatt, "Elemental Composition of the Martian Crust", Science 324 (2009), Issue 5928, pp. 736-739. <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5928/736>

(The fact that we now have geological studies of multiple specific regions of Mars delights me.)