6 points

let’s feed it more hydrogen!

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5 points

That’ll make it worse, unless we combine it with removing heavier elements. Basically if we figure out how to strip-mine the sun one day we’ll make it last much longer

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1 point

it won’t explode in 5 billion years if it already exploded in 4 billion years, so i definitely would call that a win

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5 points

DON’T PANIC!

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34 points

We will have the collision with Andromeda Galaxy a few billion years before, so don’t worry :)

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11 points
3 points

5 is a few

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31 points

Colliding with andromeda won’t do anything. Galaxies are almost all empty space.

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16 points

We’ll see.

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5 points

What if some alien civilization is watching the whole thing and taking bets

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3 points

Imagine if the last thing we saw before colliding with another planet was another alien race on that planet looking hopelessly right back at us.

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11 points

No. We will not.

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4 points

It could set if a wave of supernovas, though, which would be bad for anything living in either galaxy. AFAIK our understanding of the process isn’t good enough to know.

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4 points

Can’t it mess up our nice solar system if other large objects come even remotely close?

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5 points

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.

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2 points

There are actually a bunch of stars that will pass by very close to the solar system in the far future (tens of thousands of years) and they could possibly increase the number of asteroid and comet impacts drastically.

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3 points

But it will be beautiful to watch!!

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2 points
*

Nah, we will build a stellar engine prior and move ourselves wherever we want. We will have colonized all the Milky Way and most of Andromeda. It’ll be like a brother and sister finally meeting near the washer.

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1 point

The sun is also slowly increasing in energy output. Earth will be too hot for complex life to exist in about 800 million years.

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1 point

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

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28 points
*

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.

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-2 points
*

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.

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2 points

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?

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2 points

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

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1 point

It’s a few hundred million years, not a few hundred thousand, before the photosynthetic cycle is disrupted by silicate weathering from increased brightness.

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1 point

Source?

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1 point

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.

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8 points

Not to worry. Before it explodes, our sun will expand into a red giant much larger than the orbit of the Earth.
No one on Earth will be around to witness the explosion. So we have that going for us, which is nice.

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