Still a few billion years? We'll turn it into a junkyard way before then.

Even that isn't going to necessarily help.

When the sun depletes all of the hydrogen in its core, gravity becomes the dominant force once again and it starts collapsing. Eventually, the temperature and pressure increase from that collapse will ignite helium fusion, but in the time between those two events, the core will have built up some amount of inertia, which means the collapse continues and overshoots the new equilibrium point. This means the temperature and pressure further increase, adding even more helium fusion to counteract it until the pressure generated from that fusion overcomes that inertia.

But this rebound will also be an overshoot, but this time pushing outwards, followed by a reduction in temp/pressure, reducing fusion, then another collapse once gravity overcomes that inertia, and it'll oscillate like that for some time.

The science isn't exactly certain about what specifically this will look like but I'd be surprised if it isn't "strip the atmosphere from the earth, even if it's already in the new goldilocks zone for once the sun eventually reaches equilibrium" levels of violence, possibly on each outward oscillation after that burst of higher fusion energy.

Oh, there's also still a huge amount of hydrogen in the outer layers that are collapsing with the core, suddenly being pushed on with the force of helium fusion, that can also ignite hydrogen fusion in the outer layers as it oscillates, adding even more energy, though this could act to dampen the oscillations, but it will still be violent in our direction.

My guess would be best case is humanity is forced to live underground for several million years, if we are able to tune energy gatherers properly to keep producing solar power but not get destroyed by those periodic mini novas.

Also, even if we can manage the heat from the increased radiation, the higher pressure solar winds might overcome our magnetic field during the new equilibrium anyways. There might not be a "goldilocks zone" at all, at least not for our planet, unless maybe we can supercharge our magnetic field, which might be possible since moving to another orbit is already a Type II civilization kind of thing (considering we can't just move our planet and expect everything to be fine with the rest of them, moving earth outwards will likely require doing something about the gas giants), so the rest of it might be trivial or solvable.

But it's fun and interesting to think about the details :).

Insert picture of Big Bird in front of a circle of sitting kids with wide eyes and a speech bubble: "... and after it swallows our entire planet whole, it will destabilize the outer planets, swallowing some of them and hurling others out into inter-stellar space where they will become rogue planets. It doesn't matter how many vegetables you eat or chores you finish, this eventuality is inevitable, which is today's word of the day!"

I think either way it's just speculation how things will be affected. Like space is big but it's also going to be chaotic af and remember that both galaxies have inner cores containing supermassive black holes and a higher density of stars, as well as both galaxies have satellite galaxies with their own cores that can join in on the chaos. Those black holes have high energy jets that they shoot off perpendicular to their accretion disc, which could get messed with as matter starts coming from all directions instead of generally falling in from the galactic disc.

Currently, the stars in both sets of galaxies have relatively stable stellar orbits and are moving together. The collision will affect those stellar orbits, not just increasing the number of rogue planets flying around out there but also the number of rogue solar systems, including a non-trivial number that will be flung from both galaxies.

No idea what would happen to us if our solar system was one of those. Do we need a galaxy or would it just make the night sky more boring to not be in one?

is that going to take longer than 30 years?

You're looking at 3 further drops of that magnitude for it to have any meaningful impact on anyone alive today. But if we do have 3 then yes, it's absolutely time to go apeshit.

Humanity will probably either wipe itself out in the next couple hundred years or last for a long ass time

Either we're going to get our shit together and start being caretakers of life, or we're going to end up like Venus

Even if modern society gets destroyed and we started over technologically, the easily accessed fossil fuels are significantly depleted. We might redevelop in a greener way by necessity, or even just find stability as preindustrial societies

Or we just get our shit together. We're going to have to do some terra forming if we want to return to comfortable Holocene conditions, we'll need to change how we live, but we're going to have to make some big adjustments soon no matter what we do. Hopefully we take that opportunity to grow as a species

Didn’t they say in the episode that humans had long since left and it was preserved “as it used to be”. I would assume if they had a space station that could survive a supernova they’d have a way to make things fine on the surface.

Obviously though? Like that's entropy, it's fundamentally built in.

Nope. One more downgrade like that and the collapse of the solar system will be 88 billion years in the past. It'll collapse before it even formed, and none of this mess will have happened in the first place. Come to think of it, that doesn't sound so bad. Since it precedes the big bang, that might help with damage limitation.

We're all going to die!

There goes my dream of living 100 billion years...

entropy, baby.

Fuck. We have a lot less time than we thought.

Our sun is expected to become a red giant in 5 billion years, so that should help.

It's like my doctors say about various chronic conditions I have: "Don't worry, something else will get you before this becomes a major problem."

I can get behind Accelerationism if it means we cause an integer overflow

The Buddhist belief that nothing lasts forever has gained even more supporting evidence.

No way! The Universe will one day not exist anymore? That's sick bro, you should tell some astrophysicists, they'd be shocked!

Even if it was balanced wouldn't the orbits of the planets eventually decay anyways?

Oh yeah, everything will succumb to entropy one way or another

Where does the 250 million number come from? Also, did they move the date on red giant state up from when I was a kid?? I thought we had 2-3 billion before then.

Greenhouse effect will make the planet too hot for us to survive way before then. The seas will boil away way before the red giant consumes the planet.

Huh, I never realized how late to the game of Earth habitability humanity was.

Promise?

But all my stuff is there!

Where are those Accelerationists when you need them?

What about your wife and kid? (TFS reference)

Attaching rocket thrusters to small moons, probably.

Am I just stupid? They reference this study then go into the origins of life on earth and completely ignore mentioning the study again. What the fuck is this article?

Ah, I see it now. What a surprise, absolutely nothing has changed besides what we think will happen when the sun collapses into a white dwarf.

Sensational clickbait trash.

Not under this sun at least

You know, I think you're right to call out my pessimism. Perhaps I should look into being shot into being shot into outer space in a cryogenically sealed coffin so I can spend 100 billion years circulating the galaxy without worrying about such things.

I hadn't either! over 4.3 billion years to manage sapience and we only have 250 million years of habitability left. We basically did this:

Finally some good news

Getting awful close to cosmic margins of error there

Yeah wtf. I had the same experience as you. Shitty article on shitty site apparently.