What would a setting look like if it was set 500 million years in the future when the sun has begun expanding...

Then the sun wouldn't be expanding.

Assume that, for some inexplicable reason, the sun is still expanding, but human technology has only progressed to what it realistically would 500 years from current day. What then?

I wonder if the title of this album was a reference to Ergo Proxy.

We'd have FTL and it wouldn't be a problem.

humans would live on craftworlds like the eldar

people would drink sunscreen instead of water

all glasses would be sunglasses

you could never touch a seatbelt

FTL only 500 years from now? Are you sure?

Yes.

We would just die then, i know its a boring answer but there's not much to say, the moment the sun starts expanding the earth will burn, so yeah the setting is dead on arrival

Stars dont fucking expand, they burn up silly.

If there are really explodey stars out there its obvious we got some crazy aliums doing it.

There would probably be a few planets in the solar system colonized, but obviously travel between them is a massive commitment and it's still no real getaway from the ravages of the sun.

There's probably either dystopian or anarchic situations going on across the countries as people become desperate for survivability and comforts. Larger governments trying to come up with plans to ensure longterm survival for mankind when the sun truly gets bad, huge projects to be sure.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, I read a sci-fi story about a future Earth where the sun was expanding and cooking the planet. From what I recall, a lot of people had already left, and the ones that remained knew that they were going to die soon.

The parts that really stick in my head are:

>The main characters were a teenage boy, a teenage girl, and the girl's mom. The story was set in the girl's house, and the mom used the last of her sugar and other baking ingredients to make the kids a cake.

>The boy touched the wall behind the couch and it was so hot he had to pull his hand away.

Anybody here know the title of the story I'm talking about?

>captcha is School SCHOOL

Strip mine good old mamma earth for everything she has, build giant fleets of colony ships and the best of mankind would putter their way to the nearest star in hopes of a decent rock to hole up on.

Assuming the emp drive we have TODAY works we could do it if humanity had the willpower. We could also build the space rollercoaster (fuck that space elevator bullshit) to shoot shit into orbit with our current tech.

There would be no fancy hibernation chambers, the grandchildren of the generation to take flight would never see a planet. There would be mass conscription and eugenics planetside, every ounce of manpower would have to go towards mankinds impotent ejaculation into the abyss. Everyone would probably die, but when you're fucked a long shot doesnt look so bad.

Its a short story from Asimov IIRC

While the Sun's radiation increases by almost 10% every billion years which does heat up the planet, its expansion won't be a problem until the late red giant phase, in about 6 billion years.

I like how you or your source just pull numbers out of your ass.

It could happen.

possibly less than that.

...

Not OP, but these are the sorts of answers I was interested in. Thank you.

This nigga gets it

Vodalus did nothing wrong. Death to the Conciliator. Death to the New Sun.

Just open any astronomy textbook discussing stellar evolution or the faint young sun paradox.

atoc.colorado.edu/~vanderwb/5810/sol.html

no, it's stupid.

>hubble has been operable for ~30 years
>Hurr durr muh billions of years

...

So what you're saying is the Sun can't be billions of years old because the Hubble was launched in the 90's?

The golden era of scifi right there.

Could be, or it could be trillions, or just hundreds of thousands.

Are you aware of the various types of radiometric dating of Earth rocks, Moon rocks and meteorites that all give roughly the same age of 4.5-4.7 billion years, the acceptance of the nebular hypothesis of the solar system (which states that the Sun formed at the same time with the planets) among the scientific community, and that the Hubble among other telescopes can be used to observe the traits of main sequence stars in various stages of their lives, including their age-dependent luminosity:mass ratios, thus providing further evidence for modern theoretical models of stellar evolution?

Bunch of space adapted posthumans living on a dyson swarm made out of the asteroid belt and whatever bits of rocky planets they've been able to shepherd into higher orbits via gigantic solar sails?

The Night Land?

The Sun won't began its path to a red giant until about 3.75 billion years (liquid water will be impossible by then). Andromeda and Milky Way will collide and merge will collide in about 4 billion years. There's a 50% chance that our solar system is swept out three times farther from the galactic core than its current distance. There's a 12% chance that we are ejected from the new galaxy entirely. Chance of the new galaxy becoming a small quasar, and kills most live on the galaxy with its radiation unknown.

It won't happen. Post-humans will turn the sun into a red dwarf, stripping away the hidrogen by starlifting, to make its energy output more efficient, longer lived, and have enough reserves of hidrogen for quadrillions of years.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_Earth_(subgenre)

My terminal autism requires me to correct you. The sun will 'burn up' by running out of hydrogen to fuse, at which point it will transition into a super giant, and indeed expand so that the radius is about 1 AU.

The sun will not have expanded anywhere near enough to make the earth uninhabitable in 500 million years.
So take some inspiration from the future is wild if you want to come up with some wildlife.

My brother of excellent taste.

Assuming the world doesn't go to hell, it will probably be by the end of the century or early next... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White–Juday_warp-field_interferometer

>Alcubierre

You'll get killed by the hawking radiation from a black hole behind the ship and a white hole in front of it.

i couldn't read it tho because I'm not native english speaker and I stumble over that syntax

FTL travel is not necessary to go to other stars.

Fun answer: post humans living in orbitals around brown dwarfs. Perhaps something like biological humanity is preserved as a backwater curiosity in a galaxy filled with superintelligences.

Realistic answer: nothing we can relate to is alive to know or care what's happening on earth

That's because it's being written in the style of the 1700s by someone in the early 1900s who wasn't very good at it.

There is Night Land Retold that fixes this.

>i couldn't read it tho because I'm not native english speaker and I stumble over that syntax
Apparently there's a modern rewrite that doesn't pretend to have been written in Ye Olden Tymes.

Geology student here!

500 million years from now the earth will already have become uninhabitable due to the gradual diminishment of volcanic and geological activity (modern estimates range from 155 million years to 200 million years from now), essentially becoming a dead world like mars.

so, I'd guess you would have to use space Habitats to keep the human peeps alive.

My guess would be that you would have to make them organize all the nations that formed after earth became uninhabitable and make some sort of Ark to escape all the shit thats about to hit the fan

>modern estimates range from 155 million years to 200 million years from now
Can you provide a source for this?
The ones I'm familiar with give much longer estimates.

I'm interested too.
Wikipedia say 1.1 billion years based on geologic activity but their citation for this says nothing of the sort.
What a dog shit website.

That could be another great filter for the development of intelligent life: It never develops in most planets because life becomes extinct once geological activity ceases in smaller planets.

There's no way we aren't well on our way to type 2 civilization in that time. Meaning we should be able to force planets into geological activity if we want to.

Sorry, I am a dumb. By what mechanism do we all just die if volcanic and geologic activity stops? I thought the problem with mars and life was the lack of liquid water.

every 10 years seems to be rapidly slowing down in terms of progress. i think humanity is entering another 500 year period of technological stagnation much like the 900s to 1400s AD.

i expect feudalism to return, and the average person to become a serf to whichever corporate conglomerate owns the land-air-water-space zone they are situated on. people will hire themselves as resources in exchange for water/air purification and access to food and reproduction and life-extension drugs. the entire race will be sterilised to prevent overpopulation. the political system will be marxism with a central AI command and control structure off planet, beaming down instructions to an army of drones, servitors and bio-clones.

probably by the mid 2500s the cat people will rise up and overthrow the AI tyranny. by then i expected unmodified genome humans to be hundreds of years old and in a small minority (maybe 20-30 billion on a 1 trillion soul planet).

No magnetic field, bombarded with radiation, solar wind takes much of the atmosphere.

Ah, that. Makes sense, thanks.

>every 10 years seems to be rapidly slowing down in terms of progress.
>period of technological stagnation much like the 900s to 1400s AD

Ow, my brain. That's some weaponized tier retardation right there.

FTL travel IS impossible. And even if it weren't it would still take so long to reach any other planet that MIGHT be able to support life that it would most likely also be fucked by the time we arrived.

So, in order to prolong our meaningless existence as long as possible the human race colonized the deepest sea bed. They spend all their time and energy developing a stable and reliable method of interdimensional travel. But even here, in the crushing depths that cradle humanity's final hope, there is strife and open rebellion is not far behind.

Year 500 million and 1 of Donald Trump's presidency.

>FTL travel IS impossible.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

>In 2012, physicist Harold White and collaborators announced that modifying the geometry of exotic matter could reduce the mass–energy requirements for a macroscopic space ship from the equivalent of the planet Jupiter to that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft (~700 kg) or less, and stated their intent to perform small-scale experiments in constructing warp fields. White proposed changing the shape of the warp bubble from a sphere to a torus. Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warp can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more. According to White, a modified Michelson–Morley interferometer could test the idea: one of the legs of the interferometer would appear to have a slightly different length when the test devices were energised.

We're getting there, slowly be surely.

The Alcubierre drive or Alcubierre warp drive (or Alcubierre metric, referring to metric tensor) is a speculative idea based on a solution of Einstein's field equations in general relativity as proposed by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre
>Mexican
lol

Oh, that nonsense was about the core cooling down and solidifying throughout? That's even further away than the 1.1 Ga estimated minimum for tectonics.

White's warp experiments are as sound as his research on he EMdrive. (Neither actually works)

>every 10 years seems to be rapidly slowing down in terms of progress
Uh... as someone who was born in 1980, the world of 2017 is an amazing sci-fi setting.

Instead of going to the library to look something up and being told by the librarian "Sorry, we don't have that book, but we might be able to get a copy in three months for you to briefly peruse before you have to return it", we have the Internet.

Instead of paying an older boy to purchase a pornographic magazine for you and your friends to share, we have the Internet.

Instead of requiring genuine human contact to go through your daily life, we have the Internet.

My first computer was an "IBM-compatible" machine that ran DOS with a four-color monitor. Now I have piece of glass in my pocket that functions as an expert navigator, a video camera, an audio recorder, the entire repository of human knowledge, a flashlight, and a telephone.

Believe me, as a kid I spent a lot of time wishing that there was some way all the computers in the world could be connected together so all the information on them could be searched through by anyone who wanted to know something.

i can defend my claims:

>widespread adoption/refinement of technology is not theoretical progress, it is material progress.

>1. slowing down progress

theory ended for physics in the 1950s. mathematics has been in decline since the 70s. frontier science today is unrelated fields embracing computers, in biology especially dealing with drug research and sub branches of genetics, this means longer lifespans, it does not mean nuclear fusion, wormholes or teleportation. mathematics, physics and engineering from the 1930s which became computing in the 1950s which is approaching a physical limit in the 2020s.

>2. previous stagnation

'the dark ages never happened' is a recent and possible revision of history of the middle ages, but it is well accepted that the renaissance period starting in italy in the 1400s and the sudden burst of creativity, invention and rediscovery in the following 300 year period culminating in the scientific enlightenment of the 1700s is a useful delineation from the previous age.

>900-1400:
the decline of the roman empire, the viking conquests of the british isles, the failed crusades in the holy land, the mongol hordes, the 100 years war. bleak times to be alive, unless you really liked war and carnage. literacy is very low and so is scientific and artistic progress. gutenberg press 1440 changes the world and gives birth to everything we see afterwards from statecraft to a christian diaspora, the age of discovery, rise of the british empire, colonialism, founding of america.

if you could choose to be born 900-1400 or 1400-1900 it's not hard to choose. you could argue 400 AD to 1400 AD is all bad, but fun stuff is happening in china and the middle east preserving previous human knowledge from antiquity.

1900-2400 is likely to be another trash era, with some technological totalitarian system enslaving humanity until a new revolution in thinking is made. i understand this is not a popular opinion.

Got a link?

No. No the original Night Land can be gotten for free because it's past the 100 year mark.

Night Land Retold isn't that old yet.

Whilst obvious, easily comprehensible breakthroughs in the sciences are past for now, it's been a continual progression of gains. There's no decline at all, shit just keeps going.

All historical the shit you listed did fuck all to retard technological progress unless you only look at western europe, and even during that time there were steady advances in everything from the design of ploughs allowing for greater crop cultivation that made the roman-era methods look like shit to metallurgy making huge advances in the amount, quality and size of pieces of metal capable of being crafted. Even the bubonic and pnemonic plagues did fuck all to slow technological advance.

The whole concept of the renaissance as as sudden burst of innovation has been out of date for decades because it's simply revisionism and ignorance of the advances that were continually being made. It's as useless a concept as the dark ages; that shit ain't dark and has not been for ages because research happened.

Your understanding of history is ludicrously outdated and limited.

> because it's simply revisionism and ignorance

Eh...sort of. I mean, it is, but in fairness it's revisionism that was cooked up by the Europeaners themselves at the time. To the 1400s European mindset, Rome was the pinnacle achievement of mankind, even if all of their achievements had properly speaking been long surpassed (for example, Roman engineering was held as the best even though buildings like the Sistine Chapel or Notre Dame were far and away better than anything the Romans themselves could have built).

>theory ended for physics in the 1950s. mathematics has been in decline since the 70s.
So by your logic, getting to the last chapter in a novel means that you're losing the ability to read? Because you seem to be saying that "increasing breadth of knowledge" is synonymous with "progress", which obviously isn't true.

>All historical the shit you listed did fuck all to retard technological progress unless you only look at western europe, and even during that time there were steady advances in everything from the design of ploughs allowing for greater crop cultivation that made the roman-era methods look like shit to metallurgy making huge advances in the amount, quality and size of pieces of metal capable of being crafted.

I feel like this would be a great thread to post the Hob Gadling story.

i will add that the things you mention are in a sense betraying your world view, and undermining your argument. shallow surface level material pleasures mean an increased addiction cycle and a decrease in tolerance for challenging or difficult situations. self-control now decreases, social norms including basic civility (which has become a pain in the ass to you) break down to the point of open conflict and violence.

>Instead of requiring genuine human contact to go through your daily life, we have the Internet.

most people throughout history would consider this isolation a living hell.

>spent a lot of time wishing

major companies and governments rely on this platform and will continue to encroach upon it in order to insure themselves against systemic failure.

perspective is important. in the early 1900s most educated people could quote you some aristotle, shakespeare, give you some latin, geography, world history, and basic arithmetic. this was considered standard 6 years of education, and people were proud to read the newspaper and had informed political opinions based around basic rights, class struggles and self-interests.

in the 21st century most people are educated. they can tell you about celebrities and sports and political figures and world events. they have a wide range of hobbies and passions, they work a complex job with interesting tools and might even be very articulate and verbose in their dialogue.

but they are stupid. shallow. materialistic. hedonistic. depressed. alone. afraid. people without a clear understanding of the past facing an uncertain future balanced on a hair trigger, ready to explode.

i don't disagree with you, so what's the problem? thin reading comprehension? i greentexed my entire point in one sentence, you didn't even need to read the whole post.

no, they need new theories. the novel has no last chapter.

>most people throughout history would consider this isolation a living hell.
I think most people would have been able to extract the intended humor from that statement.

>people in the past were better because they knew Latin
Oh, I see. You're one of those types that thinks learning to write script is important. Good luck with your new buggy-whip startup company!

Look up Now And Then, Here And There.

the number of patents filed per year is constantly rising.

i know it's fun to get old and bitter and say "nobody ever seems to invent anything cool these days, i wish kids were useful human beings like i was!" but you're objectively wrong.

People in the past were equally "stupid. shallow. materialistic. hedonistic. depressed. alone. afraid."
Perhaps if you had a clearer understanding of 'the past' without your rose tinted glasses on, you wouldn't fall into the trap of the argument for modern degeneracy

Anyone have that "Then and Now" image of how in the Middle Ages, everyone was noble and pure, but then in the later Middle Ages, everyone was riddled with vices?

are you sure im the one out of touch with reality? do you think people are particularly satisfied in the present climate? is the rise of fascism and marxism just a passing fad? kids larping as nazis and bolsheviks for fun because hippies are passe?

what about social mobility? we won't need money when we all have food widgets right?

>do you think people are particularly satisfied in the present climate?

I guarantee that if you transported someone from 1817 to 2017 and gave them a while to get over the culture shock, they would enjoy having access to indoor plumbing, forced-air heating and cooling, healthcare more advanced than "leave a window open in the winter to help sick people rid themselves of bad airs", and cheap worldwide transportation.

They'd probably think it bizarre that health care is so expensive only the richest Americans can afford it. And that's lauded as a good thing.

My completely random guess would be that 500 million years is more than enough time for humanity to figure out how to manipulate climates in an extreme sense. The atmosphere will be adapted to continually deflect an ever greater amount of solar energy to keep earth stable until the point where it becomes impossible, and then mankind will move underground, leaving a massive array of solar collection on the surface for energy needs, since there'll be no shortage of solar energy. It will be something like keeping "spaceship earth" alive underground, but 500 million years is a long, long time to figure these things out through massive engineering projects.

Assuming the earth isn't destroyed wholesale by the sun's expansion phase, the trend will eventually reverse, and mankind will eventually return to the surface to rebuild its ecosystem with projects to capture to a now diminishing supply of energy. The only absolute limitation is an inability to create energy from nothing, so earth still dies eventually, but it's a very long ways out even on cosmic time scales.

All us sci-fi nerds talking about FTL and astronomy, and then geology snaps back to reality, oh there goes gravity, mom's spaghetti

daily reminder that FTL is impossible
Or at least you can pick two of Causality, Relativity and FTL.

Not really. Remember, microwave generators create a thrust vector while not acting on any medium at all.

But locality is already a myth? What if causality is too?

>But locality is already a myth? What if causality is too?

Yeah true. The explanation of the FTL problem that made it click for me was on Atomic Rockets, and they have an extract from one of the Xeelee books (?) about how messy warfare is when FTL allows you to fuck with causality

How does the EM drive change anything? Even if it is proper reactionless? It would just be another means of propulsion, it would still be relativistic right?

Wem don't know why it works, user. That's my point. It's reactionless, yet it generates thrust. That's supposedly impossible according to physics as we understand it. So, obviously we're missing some stuff. therefore, you can''s say what is or is not possible. Because obviously, we don't know enough to state that unequivocally.

Just like non-phosporus based life forms are supposed to be impossible, and then someone accidentally creates bacteria that uses arsenic as part of it's DNA instead of phosphorus, proving the entire concept incorrect.

>the number of patents filed per year is constantly rising
This is an awful measure of technological progress.
A much better one is labour productivity since that is what most technology is used for, to help people in their work.
Unfortunately the labour productivity seems to support the other guys side more than yours.
Especially for the last 5 year productivity has been very stagnant.

...

You know how they calculate labour productivity? By measuring how much money it produces.
It's actually a non-measurement. It doesn't count value (because how the fuck would you do it) but prices. This is why a cashier living in Berlin is 4 time more "productive" than a cashier 100 km to the East, in Poland. Not because he scans shit 4 times faster.

>i don't disagree with you,

You absolutely do because you're espousing amazing amounts of bullshit combined with horrifically outdated bullshit to boot.
Seems like you need to work on your reading comprehension. And read some decent history books written within the past 50 years.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men

>But locality is already a myth
WHAT
WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN

>i think humanity is entering another 500 year period of technological stagnation much like the 900s to 1400s AD.
An alternative scenario that actually corresponds to reality is current social problems keep getting worse.