Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)

#221

Post by unloco » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

erispoe wrote: post #143

dimitrios1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. For one, Earth is much further away. But most importantly, we have no clue if our current carbon levels are any sort of maxima in regards to what the planet can handle. We just have our own little recent industrialized history, and some charts about the past that are, at best, educated guesses. As George Carlin would say, "The planet will shake us off like a bad cold" Climate change is more important for our spec…

The planet might be ok after us, but still might not be able to birth another potentially space faring civilization, dooming earth life to extinction. Look at how: - no other earth based space faring civilization has evolved before us. - other intelligent species do not seem well equipped to do so, as it's hard to evolve tools without hands / prehensile organs (cetaceans), or when your lifespan is short or you're not…

> no other earth based space faring civilization has evolved before us.

needs citation

Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)

#222

Post by samatman » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #28

samatman wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's practically guaranteed. Eventually, the Sun will expand so much that Earth's atmosphere will boil clean off. A mega-civilization with enormous power could move Earth, buy some time, but nothing lasts forever.

Why move earth when you could just throw up some shade? By then things would be so different it's impossible to imagine what humans might do or be capable of our interested in - if we're still around.

That's why I made reference to a generic "mega civilization".

We're talking hundreds of millions of years from now, the only safe bet is that "humans" as we understand them won't be around. That would be as weird as the vernacular language of a people being an English we would understand, in 100,000 years!

Our descendants might be a mega-civilization. Our creations might be, or rather the descendants of our creations. We might get wiped out by an alien von Neumann probe, get wiped out and then get von Neumann probed, or ordinary colonization, or, maybe we'll uplift the rats and they'll overthrow us, or dolphins will come back on land and grow thumbs!

It's a lot of time, is what I'm saying.

Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)

#223

Post by PeterisP » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 7:08 PM UTC

protoman3000 wrote: post #156

fogihujy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've had life for about 500 million years on earth. Somewhere from 3.5 to up to 4.5 billion years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms You're right though; our time here is very short and if we want to ensure survival of Earth-based life then we need to start considering panspermia, first to other planets in our own planetary system (assuming they don't have native life already -- we're not ent…

4.5 billion years until by the laws of physics a state emerged, where macrobodies consisting of billions of cells, fueled by exploitation of energy from chemical reactions, are using movement devices that employ triggered explosions, and are constructing machines which assemble elements on atomic level in such way to make apparatuses which enable the harvest of information by the laws of logic. I don’t know, people.…

On the ther hand, it implies that if at some other place these processes happened 1% more quickly, or started 1% earlier, then that civilization would have had tens of millions of years head start to us; they'd have rocket launches back long before Earth had its first primates

It indicates that if we ever meet someone, it's extremely unlikely that they'd be of remotely comparable tech level, more likely they'd be millions of years behind in evolution (i.e. pre-intelligence) or millions of years ahead in technological development i.e. something that's hard to imagine, our fantasies are mostly about extrapolating a millenium of actual novel development.

Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)

#224

Post by gverrilla » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

paulz_ wrote: post #206

gverrilla wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a very interesting thinker in the 18th who wrote that eventually the Earth would gain a planetary ring. He talked about how everything changes, even though our lifespan is so short we don't see it. And he was particularly speaking about society: afterall, he was a very progressive member of the generation that indeed abolished slavery, even though a lot of people said before: "Slavery's been going on for 80…

Any books or writings of his you would reccomend in paticular?

I love almost all his work tbh - actually I've been translating a compilation of some of his writings from spanish to portuguese and I also contributed to his page on portuguese wikipedia :)

You can dive in from wherever, and you will be able to know his cohese and wonderful universe of thought - it really doesn't matter, because it's a single entity, so you can start from his thoughts about family, work, slavery, astronomy, architecture, higiene, urbanism, politics, religion, sex, tolerance, women, commerce, law, philosophy, love, etc

I should warn you to beware of the translation because there are bad ones - he's a guy coming up with words and concepts and always playing with language and meaning, so you gotta be able to read between lines. I wish you a good reading, if you can find them because they seem to be kinda rare, and mind = blown! If you'd like to exchange some ideas about it later, feel free to get in touch!

Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)

#225

Post by thaumasiotes » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

bregma wrote: post #170

thaumasiotes wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it kind of weird to have a different word for the same object depending on where it is. As I understand it, Jupiter would be a brown dwarf except that the presence of the Sun disqualifies it.

Jupiter is orders of magnitude too small to be a brown dwarf. The "brown" implies IR radiation generated by gravitic collapse. If Jupiter was massive enough to generate its own radiance it's unlikely Earth would be around to observe it. The simplistic solar systems and textbooks in grade school are not just misleading when it comes to scale, but they're really really misleading. Few people really comprehend the scale…

Scale isn't the right thing to complain about here. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf :

> most brown dwarfs are slightly smaller than Jupiter (15–20%)

> Brown dwarfs are all roughly the same radius as Jupiter.

The suggestion that Jupiter is "orders of magnitude too small" to be a brown dwarf is obviously wrong in terms of size, but it's also wrong in terms of mass:

> at the low end of the range (10 [Jupiter masses]), their volume is governed primarily by Coulomb pressure

Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)

#226

Post by Nekhrimah » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 8:16 PM UTC

unloco wrote: post #221

erispoe wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The planet might be ok after us, but still might not be able to birth another potentially space faring civilization, dooming earth life to extinction. Look at how: - no other earth based space faring civilization has evolved before us. - other intelligent species do not seem well equipped to do so, as it's hard to evolve tools without hands / prehensile organs (cetaceans), or when your lifespan is short or you're not…

> no other earth based space faring civilization has evolved before us. needs citation

Anything placed at geosynchronous orbit will stay up there effectively forever. There was nothing up there until Humans placed things there. Therefore, there was no previous Earth based space faring civilisation.

Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)

#227

Post by dimitrios1 » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #137

dimitrios1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. For one, Earth is much further away. But most importantly, we have no clue if our current carbon levels are any sort of maxima in regards to what the planet can handle. We just have our own little recent industrialized history, and some charts about the past that are, at best, educated guesses. As George Carlin would say, "The planet will shake us off like a bad cold" Climate change is more important for our spec…

I’m curious if you’ve read research on this? “The earth cannot become like Venus” seems like a strong positive statement that should come from research. I genuinely don’t think our innate intuition is enough here, even if it aids in comedic punchlines.

This innate intuition comes from the familiarity of the research. Much of science in this realm is essentially conjecture, useful for securing funding dollars and keeping bright minds entertained.

Comedians such as Carlin were highly intelligent, part of what made their genius. His jokes are typically funny because they contain much truth that otherwise few others would say.

Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)

#228

Post by bregma » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 8:37 PM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #220

kuschku wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industrial revolution's beginning is defined by coal mining and the steam engine. I don't understand what you mean about it having been in full swing for a century before that.

The riverfront up and down the Jones Falls in Baltimore is littered with "mills" or factories, which are located there because they needed water power. My understanding is that real industrialization got started with things like the Arkwright water frame, and then the steam engine allowed factories to spread to more convenient locations.

Ironically, one of the first uses of coal-powered steam engines was to pump the water in ship canal locks so goods could be moved to and from water-powered factories.

Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)

#229

Post by caf » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

jcims wrote: post #186

caf wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd be more of a rogue planet with moons.

That's what i was thinking but if it's the size of our solar system and the 'moons' had moons it gets weird. (But i guess our moon could have moons so it's moons all the way down)

Sometimes called moonmoons.

A system the size of our solar system centred on a jupiter-sized object wouldn't be very stable - it'd be quickly disrupted by an encounter with a star.

Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)

#230

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

plank_time wrote: post #185

dredmorbius wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how old you are, but a lot has changed , recently, in our knowledge of Earth, its evolution, the solar system, and astronomy. One of the books I had growing up was a Patrick Moore juvenile book on astronomy, probably Seeing Stars (1970). That had a ... pretty good ... description of the state of knowledge at the time, but it was published only about five years after the 4.5 billion year figure for the ag…

> asteroid hypothesis for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs have passed from wild theory to accepted fact We should NEVER accept a hypothesis as fact because that makes people stop thinking or searching for answers. And there’s no way we can even definitively say something that happened tens of millions of years ago actually happened. I personally think it was an asteroid too, but I never want to be arrogant enoug…

We can of course continue to look for disconfirming evidence, alternate explanations, or Incontrovertible Signs That God Is A Prankster, but come a certain point and the focus becomes one of refining rather than overturning theories and models.