more idiot science with alicey

March 01, 2005

i found out today that the sun is a star. i taught this to isabel, who ran round the kitchen shouting "the sun is a star! the sun is a star!" which was quite cute, and matt even commented, "your uncle simon would be proud". until ten minutes later when i asked her, "what's the sun?" and she said knowingly, "the sun is the moon".

anyway, the sun's a star, and stars have life cycles and eventually they die.

i told mattgreen about this and mentioned that i was slightly alarmed as this means the sun could die tomorrow, and then the earth would grow cold and the atmosphere would turn to liquid and then freeze and we'd all DIE A BLOODSTAINED DEATH.

mattgreen told me that the sun wasn't going to die tomorrow, and when i asked how he knew, he said because the internet said so.

so i typed into google, "what will happen when the sun dies?"

the answer, apparently, is that the earth will be Bar-B-Qued. only the internet could tell you that.

Comments:
As a lonely teenager, I often hoped that the human race would be wiped out with only the exception of myself and Shakira.
 
Hmm fate of the human race huh, I reckon the whole singularity thing will happen i.e. at some point we will engineer a machine that can engineer a better machine and so on. The result could be some sort of matrix/terminator scenario or could mean the end of scarcity and begining of immortality as the machines think of solutions for everything. First of which will be the complete irradication of everyone who likes marmite as genetically broken. Google the singularity if you doubt me.
 
"i found out today that the sun is a star" - I'm still simultaneously astonished and appalled and envious of all of this, that you've still got huge scientific revelations ahead of you, but it feels like I've run out of most of them now, until they invent some new ones.

How could you get through life without realising the star thing, though? Even if you missed all your physics lessons, doesn't it crop up in random media everywhere? Haven't you ever watched any science-fiction opening credits, or played any games where aliens come from "a star"?

But mm, human race is going to be wiped out by some out-of-control effect of terrorism or misguided eco-activism, within the next few decades, probably. Our food system still seems really fragile after BSE and Sudan-1, that if anyone wanted to do anything intentional, it couldn't be that difficult.

Either that or some random airborne superbug marvelling at the efficiency of our global transport network, anyway.
 
...and this is some of the ways the world can end...http://ned.ucam.org/~sdh31/misc/destroy.html.
 
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