I don’t mind being misunderstood. It give me the opportunity to explain it again more clearly!

Nuclear winter of course!

Although I sure don’t want to actually see that happen.

Er .. Return to Snowball Earth conditions anyone?

If you don’t want to be misunderstood, don’t bring up hot-button issues :/

“An asteroid could give the earth an abortion and everybody would get gay married!!!1″ woulda been just as tactful as what you did up there.

http://business.fortunecity.com/soros/98/zukunft.html

There’s a small astronomical error in the 7 billion year panel – our Sun lacks enough mass to ever be a supergiant star but will be a “mere” red giant at that stage instead.

A supergiant is considerably bigger and more massive and *may* end up going supernovae – which our Sun won’t do. (NB. Not all supergiants and no giants *ever* explode as supernovae.) A supergiant also burns elements beyond just Helium and Carbon at its core while our Sun’s core is only massive enough to burn He & C before shutting down.

There’s also more here via space.com :

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/death_of_earth_000224.html
&

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/earth_move_010207.html

Incl. a timeline down the page on that second one as well as a suggested course of action for really “saving the planet” – literally!

Hope that’s helpful & interesting for y’all.

Hears how and when the world ends: 100000000 AD(or CE if you prefer) sun burns all its hydrogen that it has been burning for billons of years and starts burning helium, cools down turning red, expands engulfs Mercury, Venus, Earths surface heats up forests burn, all water boils humans (if there are any) know there is only one thing that will save humanity : get off the planet find a new one, the sun expands and engulfs the Earth and moon humanitys home and place of orgin is gone forever. the suns expansion stops after engulfing Mars, the sun has gone to the next phase in its life : red giant millons of years after it will become a white dwarf and then burn itself out.

Very close but not quite.

I think the prevailing thinking now is that the Sun will render Earth uninhabitable as it warms towards red gianthood and becomes a yellow sub-dwarf star in about a billion years time. Eventually, over thenext few bilion years our Sun evolves further into first an Orange Giant like Arcturus then a Red giant like Mira before its outer layers stream away into space leaving its core as a newly minted white dwarf “stellar corpse” at the heart of a beautiful but evanascent planetary nebula.

As our Sun balloons outwards it will consume Mercury and Venus for sure. However, our Earth is a boarderline case and may or may not survive depending on exactly how the Sun loses mass as it expands and whether or not tidal braking drags Earth into the red hot vacuum that Sun’s outer layers will become. Mars will almost certainly escape destruction but be left along with other surviving worlds a frozen very dimly lit, sterile globe orbiting the white dwarf cinder that used to be our Sun.

The BA goes into detail about this in his Death from the Skies book too – it gets a full chapter (7) from pages 195 to 224.

Assuming we don’t die off first, I’m pretty sure we’ll develop the required technology long before the sun-red-giant scenario becomes a concern.

I wasn’t the one who initiated the comparison (that was a quote at the top of my #27) – and I wasn’t comparing phenomena, but the way people have reacted to them.

The story of AL00667 is instructive in this regard. The asteroid was observed by a professional astronomer who put the data up on the web without realising that it passed through the Earth. An amateur saw the data, realised its significance, and notified various people. The professionals took note, and gathered more data as required to refine the prediction.

The professionals respect the amateurs. They share data with them. They use them as a valuable additional resource – extra eyes on the sky, extra brains looking out for things of interest or significance. It’s quite certain that if the astronomers spotted an asteroid headed for Earth in 100 years that they wanted us to do something about, all the data and calculations would be on the internet, and they’d make every practical effort to make sure that anyone who wanted to see for themselves, could.

And scientists living in such an ethos naturally assume that other scientists work the same way, and that if the professionals in another area express confidence in a particular conclusion, that they’ll have checked it out properly and we can take it on trust – as much as you ever can in science. And so if you ask them, they’ll say they support the consensus in that field, and not worry that they haven’t looked closely at the evidence or details themselves. (I certainly did, for quite a while.)

Astrophysicists may like to compare it to the situation when the scientific consensus was that black holes were impossible, and some young upstart called Chandrasekhar was going round trying to sell the idea that they had to exist. A physicist working in another area, on hearing that Einstein himself had written a paper proving that they were impossible, would not have even bothered to examine the young Indian’s equations. And the fact that the general public were quite keen on the idea explained neatly why people kept bringing it up – mere populism to garner more attention and funding.

Even worse, a few physicists had examined his equations and agreed privately that Chandrasekhar was right, but would not give any public support because they did not wish to antagonise Eddington.

Scientists are human.

So in some alternative history, the idea that astronomers might have declared cometary doom in error, such as I suggest, is not really ridiculous. “100%”? We get hit by big comets every hundred million years or so, but scientists make mistakes every day – which of these, a priori, is the more likely hypothesis?

Anyway, I thought it an interestingly alternative way of looking at it, and the Climategate stuff just an entertaining setting for it. Pete Jackson got there first, though.