not all that relevant since humans will be long dead before that happens.
Actually, I think Iâm the penultimate generation before the singularity.
Aw, Rob! Do you need a hug or something?
I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but this may be too optimisticâthe article says their conclusions are âbased on our distance from the sun and temperatures at which it is possible for the planet to have liquid waterâ, they may not have considered the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect happening sooner and evaporating away the oceans, the model discussed in this article says this could happen between 500 million and 1 billion years from now. And in wikipediaâs âFuture of the Earthâ article, the Climate impact section mentions the issue that the steadily increasing brightness of the sun makes it easier for silicate rocks to absorb CO2 from the air, resulting in a long-term decrease in CO2 which may cause all plant life to go extinct within 600 million years.
Your days are numbered!
Unfortunately, being a lifeform is like being a casino gambler: youâve been betting against entropy since day one, and entropy always wins.
âAs soon as youâre born you start dying, so you might as well have a good time.â
The 600 million year figure, which Iâve read before, the point where 99% of current-day plants canât survive, is interesting. And after that, itâs pretty much a breakdown to single-cell organisms, before and after the oceans evaporate.
I guess previously I assumed, even though humans will be long gone, thereâd be some form of complex life ready to wave its noodly appendage when the Andromeda galaxy collides with ours, 4 billion years from now, long before the red giant stage of the Sun.
But it seems that Earth is already a senior citizen in the cradle of life department. Of course, a lot can happen in 600 million years. If humanity vanishes tomorrow, thereâs probably time for 2 or 3 more crazy Dinosaur Mark 2, 3, 4 ages, or whatever.
But still, life on Earth is kind of like that movie cop thatâs just got 4 more weeks til retirement. At which point, heâll finally have some time to spend on that boat he bought. âIâm gonna name it FOREVER.â
No, life always beats entropy, locally. Otherwise it would be called death.
Planet Earth will remain habitable for another 1.75bn years, according
to findings published in the journal Astrobiology.
Iâm sure humanity, with all its ingenuity, will fix that.
And it is a very high number.
Obligatory: "Oh whew! I thought you said 1.75 million!"
Theyâre just counting how long weâre in the habitable zone. That ignores dinosaur-killer asteroids, nuclear war, nanotech gray goo, epidemics, anthropogenic global warming, ecological destruction, and similar things that could kill us all off.
You left out dumbasses. Theyâre an order of magnitute more dangerous than all the other stuff. 
Man, I just bought a two-billion year home roof warranty. Boy will I look foolish now.
You are assuming that I am from some pre-Singularity generation. I cannot be sure that I was not actually a genetically-engineered fetus from the future, grown in a last-ditch effort to prevent the planetâs destruction, then DeLoreaned into the 80âs, straight into to my motherâs uterus somehow, born to internet and genetically pre-determined to give the world Singularity lamaze classes by disseminating the dominant post-Singularity musical paradigm, a fusion of dubstep and novelty songs known as The Dubularity, which is less a genre and more a school of thought, founded by Weird Al during his Late Period.
On the one hand, this leaves out all the other much nearer term existential risks the human species faces. Nuclear war, supervolcanoes, meteor strikes, climate change, unfriendly AI, self replicating nanobots, engineered disease-causing microbes, what have you.
On the other hand, if we do manage to survive those challenges, I very much doubt the death of the sun will be a serious problem for the descendents of Earth-originating intelligent life. Maybe we wonât be flesh and blood anymore, and live in space and run directly on sunlight, and this will be a bonus. Maybe weâll have terraformed and colonized other worlds and just move the rest of our people there. Maybe weâll spend 10 million years and petawatts of power pushing the earth into a farther out orbit, while also breaking down silicate rocks to release CO2 in our giant indoor farms where we control the temperature and carefully recollect all the moisture. Maybe weâll live on the moons of Jupiter and keep ourselves warm and lit by matter-antimatter reactors using antimatter generated by tidal forces and Jupiterâs magnetic field.
A billion years is a long, long time. Look how far weâve come in the last 100, or 10,000. I donât know if the universe will turn out to be open or closed, so I canât say if life will still be possible a trillion years from now, but if I am still here to see it all end, it will be because we worried about more important and pressing difficulties first.
Life pretty much never beats entropy locally, it just has very, very, good âshovelling the entropy on to some other suckerâ skills. Like a gambler with a steady paycheck, our ecosystem has the sun, bleeding mass that we might indulge in inefficient chemical reactions. Only Maxwellâs demon actually beats entropy locally. The rest of us export our contradictions.
So⌠we should⌠uh⌠come with you if we want to live?
