“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

The sun has about 5B years more to go before it turns into a red giant, not 0.5B years...

While it has more time to become a red giant, it'll become more luminous over time and life on Earth will be impossible much earlier. I've seen estimates of 0.5B to 1.5B years.

Earth may become uninhabitable in 1By due to increasing brightness of the sun. In 3-4B years it will be too hot for liquid water on the surface.

In 500 million years, hopefully humans (or whatever humans have become at that point) will be able to modify the Earth's atmosphere to deal with the increased luminosity of the Sun.

We'll put a giant sunshade in the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point.

We might need to do that by the end of this century.

If we are able to harvest the solar system resources it would take by then.

Trial run for the bigger “solar warming” event.

We might be lucky enough to do that, but it could have easily taken intelligence another 500M years to evolve on another planet. First animal fossils are something like 700M years old, so it took 2-3G years to just any animals.

lol 0.5B to 1.5B is a pretty big difference. Sounds like we really don’t know what we are talking about.

Maybe it'll help if you think of it as 5-6.5 billion years instead.

5B more years and we're here for max 100 years. Cruel joke. Life's too short.

The lower end estimate depends on the specifics of the increase in brightness accelerating the weathering of silicates, leading to more CO2 absorbed out of the atmosphere until C3 photosynthesis isn't possible. Some plants use a different method which will continue to work (C4), but consequences of plant life as we know it dying off would be catastrophic for life on this planet - barring of course, whatever adaptations are made.

But it's certainly the mark of "the beginning of the end" for life on this planet - it's a major milestone that we (the species) do need to leave eventually if we want to continue.

See, it all comes together! ^.^

Sadly it is still only a stop-gap measure. The sun is for all intents and purposes, dying a slow death.

Earth is on course to become uninhabitable for human civilisation its current form within a century, with an associated mass extinction.

Even if all industrial activity stopped tomorrow there's now enough CO2 in the system to guarantee a succession of uncomfortable and expensive droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires for thousands of years.

If it doesn't they will become more and more extreme very quickly.

If ocean acidification and warming destroy the foodchain in the seas, collapse on land will happen very quickly.

Every field of study, subject, or problem, or even business cases, -- all have different ranges.

Why does this one in-particular sound like they don't know what they are talking about? It would be just as accurate for me to say in the range of responses, yours kind of sounds like an anti-science bot. Typical of that type of thinking.

Sure, but it may keep Earth habitable for an extra billion years.

Long before death it will expand to or almost to Earth's orbit. I doubt humanity could isolate Earth from that.

Yeah, but if humans exist by the time the sun fails us, they wouldn’t really be the same species as us, and they’d hopefully have progressed to the point that they could escape the Earth.

The difference between .5B years and 1.5B (BILLION) years is pretty staggering in a conversation basically focused around the last couple thousand years. Definitely room for the comment.

Your anti-science bot comment however, is very anti-science.

Yes but the point is that the window in which we have developed this capability is quite short.

Sure, and entropy will end us all one way or another

Did you notice that you aren't wrong because you're not really saying anything at all? "in its current form" - so maybe with slightly different distribution of land use but basically fine and not necessarily as different as today is from 50 years ago? "mass extinction" already been happening for ages for many species. "uncomfortable floods/etc?" Already been happening for all of history. "very quickly" is how quicky? "more extreme" is how much more extreme?

Indeed.

Maybe once day, aliens will drop by and discover what remains of humanity. And stories will be told of how, when the time came, our species decided to bury its head in the sand and hope the problem would go away. Or maybe that we attempted to create god to come rescue us.

Life imitates art. We refused to listen to the scientists.

The problem is that there are just so many planets. Sure, another planet could be 500My slower, but with a billion planets, some of them should be 500My faster instead.

It's possible we are absolutely one-in-a-billion uniquely lucky - after all, someone has to be the first and the luckiest. But every year we find indications that our planet is completely typical.

You're saying we wont maintain tradition and our "humanity"?. I like to be a little more optimistic and believe in us as a species transferring values until the end.

Really? With the age of a star, that is too wide a range for you to accept? To pinpoint something like this. What if I were to say, "really it's 1.3435 Billion on a Tuesday".

Of course, calling someone anti-anti-science. The new 'right'. Using science arguments against science. Yes. Your comment is typical, just spam fud. "look at this huge range, see, scientist don't know what they are doing"

Unfortunately it looks like we are more in the track to human inhabitable earth :(

Why do you think aliens will drop by? If aliens were visiting every planet in the universe, don't you think we would have noticed that by now? I mean, why didn't they visit the solar system and colonize it (and everywhere else) aeons ago?

You're assuming we make it out of the industrial age while we backpedal on all of our climate commitments.

According to this Timeline of the Far Future [0], we only have 500-600 million years.

(warning, this is one of the most depressive pages on Wikipedia)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

> so maybe with slightly different distribution of land use but basically fine and not necessarily as different as today is from 50 years ago?

No, probably very much more different than that, more like rolling back on industrialisation and globalisation. Closer to 500 years than 50, without the same hope of "progress" that we had back then.

> "mass extinction" already been happening for ages for many species.

Yeah, we all learned about dinosaurs when we were little kids, but if humanity collapses there's no guarantee of anything similar developing after us.

Someone has to be the first.

So, your theory is aliens are abundant, but by extreme coincidence we're first?

Look at all types of mammal that exist, from us to platypuses to bats to whales. Evolved in a few hundred million years. Modern humans have been here for a few hundred thousand.

In 500 million years absolutely anything could happen (if we survive this century).

We'll have colonized the galaxy in 10 million years. In 200 million years, I'd expect that some future historical society could undertake a project to clean out the heavy elements in the Sun to keep it going.

Nothing a bit of stellar lifting would not fix[1]. Or worst case, move to a bunch of habitats orbiting stellified Jupiter[2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting [2] https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a48d58c84350

That's not the point: if you have capabilities to do stellar lifting, interstellar travel is likely on the table too. Fermi paradox is about the question, why we can't detect any sign of extraterrestrial civilizations out there. One explanation is that while life in general might be relatively abundant, true sentience as in us humans that allows life to spread besides its cradle might be quite unique.

We haven't visited any other planets so we're not the first either.

You confused two things. There is the Sun turning into red giant in 5 billion years consuming the Earth, and the Sun getting too bright for Earth to be habitable in 500 million years.

What gives you an impression that I am confusing these two things? Becoming a red giant is a long process and increased luminosity and radius are parts of this process.