Big Changes On Our Horizons

With Global Warming, iceburgs melting, and the resulting sea levels rising, we're certainly going to have water problems. Dry land will become more scarce on earth. It will be costly and the rich will undoubtedly force to poor to suffer most. But humanity as a whole can survive this crisis. Climate change is real and our part in it (the greenhouse gasses) seems like the only part we can attempt to control. But there are other factors.

From studying other stars similar to our sun, scientists have learned that our sun is 4.6 billion years old, it should last about another 10 billion years, and it's energy output, like it's other similar stars, increases about 10% every billion years. So, at 4.6 billion years old, our sun is about 46% hotter than it was when our solar system formed. We can't stop that and by the next billion years, earth will be getting too hot for any life on the surface, and earth's oceans will largely begin to evaporate.

For long term human survival, we need to develop our deep space travel technologies and get to a good planet with a younger sun.

For the short term, nations can work together like with the International Space Station to develop solutions to help extend the usable life sustainance of our planet. Undersea and underground living may be part of our necessary changes.

Scientists have proposed that several nations work together to launch into orbit, build, test, and maintain a fleet of orbiting sun shades to block or deflect enough sunlight to help reduce the heating.

Vocanic ash has been known to reduce solar heating while eruptions are active. We might want to activate a few of them.

One of the fears of nuclear war has been the effects from excessive nuclear detonations known as nuclear winter. A calculated and gradual scale-up toward this might allow us to restore the polar ice caps.

No great adventure comes without great , but, when faced with increasing pressures, I'm sure humanity will decide on something worth trying... even if half the people think it's crazy. Oh, and if the viruses don't get us first.

I do hope we can develop a good virus filter or nano-technology that can render viruses inert by the time we need to travel for 10 to 20 generations or longer to reach a suitable new home planet.

Multiple ships, seeking 3 to 5 different destinations with researchers and as much aiding technology as possible seems prudent. No need for us to all go down together in one spot.

I imagine a strange combination of things will make at least one or two groups eventually successful. I only hope the journey is more peaceful and studious than Battle Star Galactica... Space itself may be enemy enough for us to face with a united effort. Only stupidity could encourage us to carry our wars off into space with us. Or, perhaps I am too naive about humanity's actual values and effective level of intelligence... time will tell.

With luck, we probably have about 500,000 to 750,000 years to find a comfortable and reliable way off of this heating rock. We'd better make the most of it or we'll go like the dinosaurs, with nobody after us to remember or wonder about us.

Good luck humanity!

[sciencealert.com]