Life on Earth, forever?

qraal

Nicely put Radrook. There is a physics point to this sort of discussion IMO, in that defining the likely life-span of Observers in cosmological terms tells us something about our present situation. Similarly discussions about the apparent "Cosmological Coincidence" that the mass-energy density and lambda/Dark-Energy are observed to be similar in size. In both "early" and "late" cosmological epochs this isn't necessarily so, which poses the conundrum as to why we observe the current near-unity of their ratio.

According to work by Greg Laughlin, Fred Adams and Peter Bodenheimer, stars should continue shining in the Galaxy at roughly the same observed level for the next ~trillion years. Low-mass stars, as they go off the Main Sequence, brighten significantly and experience a period of luminosity comparable to the Sun for ~5 billion years, enough time for Observers to evolve around any planets at ~Earth-like distances. As red-dwarfs are the most common stars in the Galaxy, then why don't we observe ourselves on one during its late-life blossoming? Why are we still in the "early days" of stellar evolution in orbit around a relatively high-mass star?

These are all valid questions, leading to fertile investigations in astrophysical processes, as evidence by the papers by Laughlin, Adams & Bodenheimer, for example. Late-time "speculation" is like any other astrophysical gedankenexperimenten and thus well worthwhile.

Ryan_m_b

I'm not sure I have an answer to that, whilst it's amusing to discuss presupposing whether or not humans will even exist in hundreds of millions of years and then asking what they might do at that point really doesn't make much sense. We could ask "what could we conceive of now if we had to deal with the issue now" but that is different to "what will we do in hundreds of millions of years."

Radrook

We differ in our definition of what constitutes the meaning of the word "senseless" in relation to discussions. So I guess we will simply have to agree to disagree on that point.