I was at a talk by astronomer Alex Filippenko, and then went out to dinner with some folks (including Jennifer Hoffman; hi Jennifer!), so I’m too tired to write anything good right now. Instead, I’ll point you to our future.
Although, I have to add: some of the numbers in that video aren’t quite right. But it’s not terribly important. Next year I’ll have a book out with more accurate numbers and descriptions so amazing you’ll want to buy two copies. Three.
In case you’re curious, the music in the vid is from "Total Recall". As a card-carrying scifi movie geek, I have the soundtrack.
October 8th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
I have the main theme song, but I want the soundtrack. What else do you have?
October 9th, 2007 at 12:33 am
Hi Phil! It was fun seeing you tonight, and cool to see some of your work show up in Alex’s talk. Let’s get together again soon. Meanwhile, get back to work on your book! (And send me the supernova chapter if you want; I’ll let you know if it’s something I can intelligently comment on, or else suggest someone else — besides Alex — who could help.)
October 9th, 2007 at 12:56 am
That was bloody brilliant.
Puts global warming into perspective.
October 9th, 2007 at 1:04 am
This is something I’ve never understood too well (mostly because I never knew who to ask). But the 10^23 means that in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years all the galactic clusters will disperse, what exactly does that mean? Is it that there will be no more galaxies, or they will just be really far apart? And barring distance, what’s to keep stars from forming forever? I’m assuming it’s because eventually all the hydrogen would be used up, but I’m not sure.
October 9th, 2007 at 2:30 am
The vid was great, but it gives me the eerie feeling of having skipped to the end of the book for a peek.
I watched an entire semester of Alex Fillipenko’s Introduction To Astronomy course at Berkeley thanks to their awesome webcasts (webcast.berkeley.edu – oh so highly recommended). He’s such a great and enthusiastic lecturer. Maybe even the best prof I never had.
October 9th, 2007 at 7:19 am
10^23 years? Yeah, I should still be around,,,
Cool vid! I’m looking forward to your corrections.
Hope you don’t pull a George R.R. Martin on us(Tales of Fire and Ice). His fifth book has been in the editing process since last year. This is what happens when you become sooo popular you have no time to finish your projects due to public appearances.
PLEASE DON’T LET THAT HAPPEN(or DO. That much popularity might be cool, for a science guy,,,)
Gary 7
October 9th, 2007 at 8:37 am
It seems that they forgot that the sun is already burning for 4.5 billion years or so, among other things.
But I don’t care! They used Jerry Goldsmith’s music! Yeah!
October 9th, 2007 at 9:14 am
The line about clusters dispersing is wrong, sortof. Over time,. galaxies will either merge or be tossed out of the cluster. But that will take billions of years, and in the meantime the Universe is expanding. This makes things complicated; but skipping about 5 important steps in the explanation, it means that the cosmic horizon — how far out you can see — will shrink. For each cluster it will shrink to the size of the cluster itself. So anyone inside the cluster will only be able to see what’s left of it, and nothing outside of it.
This is weird and confusing, and maybe I’ll write it up in a post sometime. I am going to be writing about it for my book in the next few days!
October 9th, 2007 at 9:50 am
awe inspiring!
October 9th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Why are we here?…
Who knows… philosophers have pondered that question for thousands of years. However, we may not know why we’re here but have a pretty good idea where we’re going, and you can see a little presentation here and it’s pretty cool….
October 9th, 2007 at 10:56 am
S&T ran an interesting article on this topic a few months ago. They talked about how the Earth will probably be ingested by the sun once the sun enters its giant phase. But they also mentioned the possibility that the sun might loose enough mass during its pre-giant tantrums to allow the Earth’s orbital radius to increase significantly. This would then allow Earth to survive the sun’s post helium burning fits. The Earth would be scorched beyond belief, but the planet itself might survive.
How about it BA? What are the odds that the Earth might survive to see the universe go dark, instead of being ingested by our sun?
October 9th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Cool.
FYI, there’s a typo on the
+6.9 billion years page — it should read escape its gravitational pull, not escape it’s gravitational pull.
October 9th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
We need to start the “Preserve the Earth” fund *right now*! Okay, I stole the idea from Dr. Who (“The End of the World”). But someone needs to pay for those force fields and you can sure as hell bet the UN, Congress, EU etc won’t lift a finger. I’ll throw down a $20 – anyone else?
October 9th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Mr. Astronomer,
One idea I’ve found exciting since it was proposed in a paper a few years back was the idea that – by slingshotting a small asteroid past the earth in a controlled way thousands of times over a very long period and thus robbing earth of orbital energy – it would be possible to slowly widen earth’s orbit such that it would stay within the sun’s habitable zone much longer than otherwise possible. Have you heard of the idea? What do you think? It might seem silly, but I like the idea of Earth hanging around a bit longer than nature intended.
October 12th, 2007 at 9:01 am
Brian C, if the Earth is robbed of some of its orbital energy, it will fall towards the sun, and thus speed up. I know this is counter-intuitive, but the energy of the orbiting body determines the radius of the orbit. Thus, although Venus and Mercury both orbit the Sun faster a than Earth does, they actually possess less orbital energy. The shorter period of their orbits is a function of the distance from the Sun and the relative masses of the two bodies.
Thus, to raise an orbiting satellite from low-Earth orbit (typically about 200 – 300 km up) to geosynchronous orbit (about 36,000 km up) requires quite a significant boost, even though the lower orbit has a significantly shorter period (about 90 minutes as opposed to 24 hours).
However, I believe that, if the gravitational slingshot is done the other way, the Earth can gain momentum from the asteroid and hence its orbit will widen.
October 12th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Ah yes, thank you. I was confusing energy with orbital speed. I’m impressed humans even came up with the idea, really.
Oh this is entertaining, someone explains why this is impossible!!! with many exclaimation points!!! Looks like the idea has been around since 2001…
http://www.greatdreams.com/earth_orbit.htm
October 19th, 2007 at 12:50 am
Wow. That’s some link. That magnetic-centrifugal balance theory of there’s is the same one that the flat earth society uses on their website.
October 19th, 2007 at 12:51 am
Sorry – should have said ‘their’s’.