We will have the collision with Andromeda Galaxy a few billion years before, so don’t worry :)
Colliding with andromeda won’t do anything. Galaxies are almost all empty space.
What if some alien civilization is watching the whole thing and taking bets
Can’t it mess up our nice solar system if other large objects come even remotely close?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda–Milky_Way_collision#Fate_of_the_Solar_System
Based on current calculations they predict a 50% chance that in a merged galaxy, the Solar System will be swept out three times farther from the galactic core than its current distance. They also predict a 12% chance that the Solar System will be ejected from the new galaxy sometime during the collision. Such an event would have no adverse effect on the system and the chances of any sort of disturbance to the Sun or planets themselves may be remote.
Neat there’s even a video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision
Space is so vast that the Earth and Solar System will survive.
Although the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter. However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much farther from the galactic core than it is today. Source
Have no fear, the sun will not explode. You need about 8 times the mass of the sun in order for a star to explode in a supernova. The sun will expand into a red giant when it finishes fusing hydrogen into helium. When this happens the earth might be swallowed up in the expansion. After the sun finishes burning helium and continues up the fusion chain to iron the fusion in the core will fail and the outer layers of the sun will puff off into a planetary nebula. This won’t be a particularly violent event. The naked core leftover will be a white dwarf which is effectively just a molten ball of mostly carbon and oxygen gradually cooling off. It will take trillions of years to cool off.
Although, it’s just a couple of hundreds of thousands millions of years before the sun expansion brightness makes Earth inhabitable. Not to make anyone freak out, but that’s about 10 times less than 5 billions! Enjoy your life while you can!
Edit: sorry for writing mistakes at 2 am, see various sources below.
No, the expansion will start in about 5 billion years. The subgiant expansion phase will last for about 1 billion years. The earth may or may not be engulfed during the expansion as the best guess is the sun will expand to somewhere between venus and earth’s orbit. The planet will be uninhabitable but again, the expansion won’t start for about 5 billion years.
You’re the second person in as many days that I’ve come across saying the red giant expansion phase will start in 500 million years. Where are you guys getting this info?
I may have confused expansion with brightness, it is increasing steadily and will make our planet inhabitable in that time frame. From astrophysist Paul M. Sutter https://www.space.com/solar-system-fate-when-sun-dies
It’s a few hundred million years, not a few hundred thousand, before the photosynthetic cycle is disrupted by silicate weathering from increased brightness.
Oh, I thought I had written millions as in my source instead of thousands, I shouldn’t write comments at 2 am, two mistakes. I didn’t know about the silicate issue but the estimated remain consistant with my initial source.
What’s scary is that was already a few years ago, so it’s a EVEN CLOSER now!
Tbh I think this shared experience kinda shows to me how we grow selfish as we grow up, we were quite aware that it will not affect us, but the thought of the world where we see so many people living ending one day like this haunted us, now we don’t care, we don’t care about anything that doesn’t affect us or people we know…
Maybe, when we are young, the world (and the universe at large) are part of our identity of self, but as we grow older we reduce our sense of “self” to just our own physical body and mind.
And that’s the reason why we fuck our planet for profit. Climate change? Not our problem, the future generations can deal with it.
Tbh climate change has started to affect all of us who don’t have the luxury to always remain in a climate controlled environment, i am not looking forward to coming home at 2pm when the (feels like) temperature is 50C, and god knows what we will hit this year
Personally I’ve always been into space exploration stories (I mean, Star Wars isn’t always exploration (I read the books, and some are about uncharted stuff a bit, like Outbound flight, and I do like Star Trek too) and kinda hope we’re at that tech by then. I also really enjoy stuff like Schlock Mercenary and videos like https://youtu.be/ulCdoCfw-bY which while showing a bomb, also talks about a way to use black holes to outlive Red and White Dwarves, which normally should be the last source of light and heat in the universe. A colony properly using the energy black holes would still contain could potentially last trillion of years longer than all stars.
There is a certain sort of ennui that comes with the realization that the heat death of the universe is inevitable, and no matter what you do, no matter how much you manage to make your mark on the world/solar system/galaxy/universe or how successful and prosperous your descendants may be, it will all eventually be lost to eternal entropic stasis.
