Utopia Talk / Politics / The end is near

Jebbebiah Wilkins Member	Wed Mar 03 03:41:14 Forget about corona! Forget about "global warming"! THIS is the real killer: http://www...-of-oxygen-in-a-billion-years/ Most life on Earth will be killed by lack of oxygen in a billion years 1 March 2021 One billion years from now, Earth’s atmosphere will contain very little oxygen, making it uninhabitable for complex aerobic life. Today, oxygen makes up around 21 per cent of Earth’s atmosphere. Its oxygen-rich nature is ideal for large and complex organisms, like humans, that require the gas to survive. But early in Earth’s history, oxygen levels were much lower – and they are likely to be low again in the distant future. Kazumi Ozaki at Toho University in Funabashi, Japan, and Chris Reinhard at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta modelled Earth’s climatic, biological and geological systems to predict how atmospheric conditions on Earth will change. The researchers say that Earth’s atmosphere will maintain high levels of oxygen for the next billion years before dramatically returning to low levels reminiscent of those that existed prior to what is known as the Great Oxidation Event of about 2.4 billion years ago. “We find that the Earth’s oxygenated atmosphere will not be a permanent feature,” says Ozaki. One central reason for the shift is that, as our sun ages, it will become hotter and release more energy. The researchers calculate that this will lead to a decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as CO2 absorbs heat and then breaks down. Ozaki and Reinhard estimate that in a billion years, carbon dioxide levels will become so low that photosynthesising organisms – including plants – will be unable to survive and produce oxygen. The mass extinction of these photosynthetic organisms will be the primary cause of the huge reduction in oxygen. “The drop in oxygen is very, very extreme – we’re talking around a million times less oxygen than there is today,” says Reinhard. The researchers also estimate there will be a coinciding increase in methane to levels as high as 10,000 times the amount in the atmosphere today. Once the changes in Earth’s atmosphere begin to occur, they will progress rapidly: the team’s calculations suggest that the atmosphere could lose its oxygen over the course of just 10,000 years or so. “The biosphere cannot adapt to such a dramatic shift in environmental change,” says Ozaki. Afterwards, life on Earth will be exclusively microbial, says Reinhard. “A world where many of the anaerobic and primitive bacteria are currently hiding in the shadows will, again, take over.” Terrestrial life will cease to exist, as will aquatic life. The ozone layer – which is made up of oxygen – will deplete, exposing Earth and its oceans to high levels of ultraviolet light and heat from the burning sun. The research was conducted as part of a NASA project into planet habitability, and the predictions have implications for searching for life on other planets. Oxygen-containing biosignatures are typically used to identify habitable planets. “Oxygen, in its many forms, is a very important biosignature since it is intertwined with life so fully on Earth,” says Natalie Allen at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. But the new prediction shows that oxygen presence is variable and may not be permanent on a habitable planet. “It suggests that even for planets around other stars that are very similar to Earth, large amounts of oxygen may not be detected in their atmosphere, even if they can support, or have supported, complex life,” says Kevin Ortiz Ceballos at the University of Puerto Rico. Not detecting oxygen around planets doesn’t mean that they are uninhabitable, he says. Ozaki and Reinhard suggest that other biosignatures could be used to search for alien life instead of oxygen. For instance, hydrocarbon hazes in a planet’s atmosphere might provide a more long-lasting signature of extraterrestrial life.
McKobb Member	Wed Mar 03 07:10:23 upwards and onwards
Rugian Member	Wed Mar 03 07:26:33 One billion years sounds about right. Increasing solar luminosity is going to be the ultimate driver of how long Earth remains a habitable planet. Fortunately, human beings are good at exploration and expansion. In a billion years we will be the masters of the Milky Way and will have no need for Earth.
jergul large member	Wed Mar 03 08:07:34 In a billion years we will be a billion years dead as a species. Give or take a few 100d years.
Rugian Member	Wed Mar 03 08:46:08 Ever the pessimist, eh jergul.
Rugian Member	Wed Mar 03 09:09:54 But no, you are not correct. Humans have high levels of intelligence and problem-solving skills, which ensure that the species would be able to survive any extinction-level events that we're likely to experience. -A nuclear war wouldn't kill *everyone,* and the survivors would be able to quickly adapt. -Extreme climate change would make life more difficult, but not impossible. -An asteroid-produced impact winter would take years to kill off most species, giving humans plenty of time to react. -Pandemics have a really poor track record at killing off humans on a wholesale level. Basically we just have to hold out for a couple thousand more years and hope we don't do something incredibly stupid in that time like building Skynet. The second humanity manages to build permanent colonies on other planets, we become virtually unkillable as a species. The second we develop generation ships and attain travel speeds of .1-.5 of light speed, we become immortal, and are guaranteed to survive until the Milky Way itself dies out.
Paramount Member	Wed Mar 03 11:12:06 We will have eternal life within 500 years. The only thing that is stopping us are our bodies. But our mind, our memory and everything we know will move on to something else, to something like a computer and a hard drive, but something much better that we haven’t invented yet. We will basically be transformed into an AI. Maybe an AI that lives in atoms, can take the shape of anything, and that can move and travel with the help of atoms and such. It would basically mean that we (our mind) will be able to travel in space.
Paramount Member	Wed Mar 03 11:21:46 Information storage in the brain According to Forrest Wickman, computational neuroscientists generally believe the brain stores 10-100 terabytes of data. http://aiimpacts.org/information-storage-in-the-brain/ We could easily transfer all content of our brain to some kind storage. If we can find a way to store data in atoms it would be cool.
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