Good News for Immortals

By Gregory Mone Posted 09.14.2007 at 9:24 am 4 Comments

Aubrey de Grey and, for that matter, anyone else who plans to live forever, is probably feeling very relieved today. Astronomers announced that they have observed a planet that survived the fiery ballooning of its local star. This outcome is inevitable: Eventually, even our Sun is going to run out of hydrogen and blow up to 100 times its present size, transforming into what's known as a red giant. As a result, scientists figured that Earth has only about 5 billion years left.

Now, though, it appears that our lovely little planet could survive the Sun's transformation. That said, it probably wouldn't be a very nice place to live. Any of our kind who are still around at that point will probably have moved to another locale.—Gregory Mone

(Image credit: ESA)

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4 Comments

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popsci

09/16/07 at 10:50 pm

That would almost make for a good movie.

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popsci

09/17/07 at 7:32 pm

so would the novel ender's game, but as anyone who has been following that, its not going to happen. Science fiction has a large fan base, but not large enough to make a mainstream movie, sadly.

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popsci

09/20/07 at 8:30 pm

"Any of our kind who are still around at that point..."
5 billion years? I'm sure we would not recognize "any of our kind" by that time, it will be something completely different I bet.

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popsci

09/20/07 at 8:31 pm

"Any of our kind who are still around at that point..."
5 billion years? I'm sure we would not recognize "any of our kind" by that time, it will be something completely different I bet.