Life According To Science

The Sun will eventually "burn out".

Before that happens the Sun will expand out to about the orbit of Mars, well beyond the Earth.

All planets within that orbit level are doomed and have a time limit upon them. All life on those planets is in jeopardy in the very long run:

Earth's fate is precarious. As a red giant, the Sun will have a maximum radius beyond the Earth's current orbit, 1 AU (1.5×1011 m), 250 times the present radius of the Sun. However, by the time it is an asymptotic giant branch star, the Sun will have lost roughly 30% of its present mass due to a stellar wind, so the orbits of the planets will move outward. If it were only for this, Earth would probably be spared, but new research suggests that Earth will be swallowed by the Sun owing to tidal interactions. Even if Earth would escape incineration in the Sun, still all its water will be boiled away and most of its atmosphere would escape into space.

(Tenet One Basics). The only way out for the human race, according to non-religious doctrine, is to learn space travel.

After that humanity must colonize other planets within the solar system first, then branch out to other solar systems in this galaxy.

In other words find another habitable planet before the Sun destroys us.

To do that the people of the earth are going to have to allow the earth to last perhaps one to two million years. Who knows, maybe more, because it depends on technology and its proper use.

But the earth can't be destroyed or the story is over. The human story will be over.

So the mission for humanity is to survive that long. At the current rates the earth will be destroyed by humanity well before that time. We are headed for that disaster if we don't care for the planet and for ourselves.

To survive we must learn to live together, eventually get rid of the weaponry that would destroy humanity if used. We must have a functioning world order where nations live together in peace like our states live together and let live here in the United States.

The petty, mindless, and doomed wars and fightings while thousands starve each day has got to go. Or humanity has to go.

Noam Chomsky says it is not clear that we will make it long enough to mature.

Perhaps it is natural for species, who cannot develop social skills, to perish.

It looks as if the solar expansion and collapse in the great distance of time is sort of a time limit or the test.

We are very, very, very far from that date ... yet we are considering human survival even now, because we seem to want to beat the Sun to utter human destruction.

That is to say we are underscoring the notion that perhaps we can't make it to that distant date under our current social means and methods. The critical skills are missing.

We need survival skills.

If we were to escape off into space beyond our solar system before we became cosmic, mature, and wise adults, we would only be spreading the disease to another location.

If we did solve our social problems before the solar problem gets us, and did develop the skill of space travel, then we would be spreading social wisdom out into the universe.

We have to decide which side we are on ... destruction of life or survival of life ... then work in that direction.

While browsing I found a David Ho painting that depicts (to me anyway) humanity's current efforts to find a new star. I found it at astropixie, a very interesting blog.

No Need To Shoot In The Dark

Life After People

Imagine a large city on a planet near a star. A star that will be called a nova in a hundred years or less.

The SETI institute and NASA through its Kepler Mission are looking for planets that are, or can be, inhabited. Which means that they are looking near stars.

Some of which will go nova, or destroy the planets near them in another way.

Under current scientific models the stars which have planets near them will destroy those planets at some time. Our star, the Sun, will do so by expanding in size to a point out near the orbit of Mars.

Since we know that, it seems obvious that we will try to leave this planet to find another star with habitable planets. It seems obvious because if we do not do that, we cease to exist as a species.

We can assume that any other intelligent life species that wanted to continue to exist would do the same. They would try to find another home world.

I offer a search technique for consideration, which could fine tune the search Kepler and SETI are doing.

Look for signals from solar systems where the star has gone catastrophic, that is, has gone nova, super-nova, or has expanded out to destroy the planets near it like the Sun is going to to us. If there was any life on any planets there, the looming catastrophe may have caused signal transmission from any intelligent life there, well before the solar destruction.

But when we do the looking, we should look at the record of events before the catastrophe, we should also look back as many years before the catastrophe as possible, in cases where we have those astronomical records in our grasp.

For those systems where there were species who could not develop a way to do space travel to another planet, we might detect a signal for help.

And in those cases where the species could and did develop space travel, did find another star with a habitable planet, then did thereafter travel to it, we would expect a different signal to find its way toward us.

But remember that, in any search of this type, any signal will in most cases be older than our species, since great distances of space are involved.

Which involves great spans of time for signals to travel through, even at the speed of light.

Any signals received will be very, very old.

The Fittest Stars, Planets, & Species

As it turns out the survival of the fittest does not apply exclusively to biological organisms or to species.

It applies also to non-biological stars and planets in the sense of the evolution of sentient beings who want to become fit to survive in this cosmos.

The tenets of Ecocosmology map out the route or path which the fittest must take in order to master survival instead of becoming extinct.

Those tenets point out that biological evolution only goes a tiny part of the full distance of that route. That aspect of looking forward is focused by a study conducted by some scientists who have done a survey of stars in the milky way galaxy.

They have found that our Sun is of a type of star that only makes up roughly about 10% of the stellar population in our own Milky Way galaxy.

That discovery ends up being very significant in several ways:

The distinction between habitable planets and planets harboring intelligent life is based on the fact that intelligent life requires stars with lifetimes greater than the time required for intelligence to evolve. For example, in the case of this solar system, we could not find ourselves around a star with a lifetime less than 4.5 billion years.

Indeed, sun-like stars seem to have the right balance: They are of high enough mass that they are more likely to host habitable planets, but they are of low enough mass that they live long enough for intelligent life to develop, and are not extremely scarce. Whitmire estimates that 10 percent of the Milky Way's stars might fall into the category they've outlined. This would still leave over 10 billion candidate stars in the Milky Way alone.

(Space). The factor that leaves biological evolution behind on this route toward fitness to survive is the factor that these Suns eventually destroy all the planets in the habitable zone, together with all biological life on them.

Survival of the fittest, which Ecocosmology calls "The Test", requires that intelligent life which develops on any habitable planet must develop competent space travel, must develop the ability to locate other younger stars with habitable planets, then must colonize those planets.

As if that were not enough, the tenets of Ecocosmology point out that those intelligent planetary species must then continue that behavior ad infinitum because all stars die out or otherwise destroy life on their planetary neighbors.

Thus, the greater part of survival of the fittest is in developing competent astronomy followed by the development of competent space travel so as to successfully locate then colonize new home worlds.

The bottom line of this area of science is that we are cosmic nomads until, as tenet 3(f) says, we "morph into a species free from that type of solar/planetary cosmic dependence".

Tenet One Basics

The Sun ("our star") will eventually expand out to about the orbit of Mars, and later "burn out".

All planets within that orbit level, including the Earth, are doomed, and therefore have a time limit upon them.

All life on those doomed planets is in jeopardy in the very long run:

Earth's fate is precarious. As a red giant, the Sun will have a maximum radius beyond the Earth's current orbit, 1 AU (1.5×1011 m), 250 times the present radius of the Sun. However, by the time it is an asymptotic giant branch star, the Sun will have lost roughly 30% of its present mass due to a stellar wind, so the orbits of the planets will move outward. If it were only for this, Earth would probably be spared, but new research suggests that Earth will be swallowed by the Sun owing to tidal interactions. Even if Earth would escape incineration in the Sun, still all its water will be boiled away and most of its atmosphere would escape into space.

(Wikipedia, Astronomy Today, PBS, and Space Dot Com). Exactly when this will happen, or could happen has become more foggy as we observe some stars going through that phase much earlier than the current stellar models allow for that to happen.

The logical behavior and path for the human species, since we are faced with this reality, is to preserve the life sustaining essence of this planet earth while we find another habitable planet within our reach. We have no reach yet (see Tenet 3(b) Basics).

Meanwhile, we must develop a way to travel to that habitable planet so we can colonize it so as to perpetuate the human species.

Tenet One is part of The Tenets of Ecocosmology which this blog focuses exclusively on.

A recent study of the Sun, which raised eyebrows, underscores our need for more study and research so as to build a more solid foundation for solar science.