I Agree. The sun is also just another star. Humans may have colonized lot of other star systems in a billion years, so the loss of a single one is not a threat to mankind and the species that originated on earth.
It may be sad to lose the home planet, with all its historical importance, but maybe then we are routinely terraforming other planets and moving them around.
All the other stars are running down at the same time. Although admittedly not at the same rate.
If you're interested in really long term survival, arguably the thing to do is to work out how to store the energy, or to turn the temperature down a bit so you're using less fuel, or to find out how to live on less fuel ourselves. Or all of the above.
Lots of energy going to waste out there - and the underlying point behind the article, I suppose, is that the universe has a limited energy budget. Like cancer - if you live long enough something will get you.
All the other stars are running down at the same time. Although admittedly not at the same rate.
I don't think it works like that. There is no known principle that allows energy to be created or destroyed. So theoretically, the total amount of energy in the universe must remain constant.
So when one star disappears the energy gets transferred as radiation, mass and heat that eventually will be used to create new starts in a process known as "stellar evolution"[0].
As far as I'm aware, so don't take this as gospel or anything:
Its total potential to do work within the reference frame of any given system, which is what we're interested in here, doesn't remain a constant. It's like... if you think of it like water: If you have all your water at the top of a cliff in a big reservoir and it runs down into a turbine linked up to a generator, then you can get a lot of work out of that water. But once it's gone down the cliff, despite it still being the same mass of water, your ability to extract useful work from that water is dramatically less. You'd have to pump it back to the top of the cliff to repeat the exercise (at a loss since the system you're playing with is never going to be perfectly efficient, i.e. the second law of thermodynamics - so there'd basically be no point in doing so.)
What we really want are high concentrations of energy; low entropy sources. We're looking for those situations where the water is still at the top of the cliff. A star is fussing down through the various elements, and in the process it emits a lot of radiation during its lifetime. And it's not getting that energy back. Once the elements have undergone the process you'd have to put energy back into them to return them to their earlier states. But that energy's been leaving the star for years, and some of it travels at the speed of light so it's very far away - so... it's just not gonna happen. Stars do go through life cycles and produce various phenomena but always at a loss of their potential to do useful work, always at an increase in entropy.
Comments
I Agree. The sun is also just another star. Humans may have colonized lot of other star systems in a billion years, so the loss of a single one is not a threat to mankind and the species that originated on earth.
It may be sad to lose the home planet, with all its historical importance, but maybe then we are routinely terraforming other planets and moving them around.
All the other stars are running down at the same time. Although admittedly not at the same rate.
If you're interested in really long term survival, arguably the thing to do is to work out how to store the energy, or to turn the temperature down a bit so you're using less fuel, or to find out how to live on less fuel ourselves. Or all of the above.
Lots of energy going to waste out there - and the underlying point behind the article, I suppose, is that the universe has a limited energy budget. Like cancer - if you live long enough something will get you.
I don't think it works like that. There is no known principle that allows energy to be created or destroyed. So theoretically, the total amount of energy in the universe must remain constant.
So when one star disappears the energy gets transferred as radiation, mass and heat that eventually will be used to create new starts in a process known as "stellar evolution"[0].
However this process may stop in the far further, as the ultimate fate of the universe is currently unknown, but some theories has been made: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#T...
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution
As far as I'm aware, so don't take this as gospel or anything:
Its total potential to do work within the reference frame of any given system, which is what we're interested in here, doesn't remain a constant. It's like... if you think of it like water: If you have all your water at the top of a cliff in a big reservoir and it runs down into a turbine linked up to a generator, then you can get a lot of work out of that water. But once it's gone down the cliff, despite it still being the same mass of water, your ability to extract useful work from that water is dramatically less. You'd have to pump it back to the top of the cliff to repeat the exercise (at a loss since the system you're playing with is never going to be perfectly efficient, i.e. the second law of thermodynamics - so there'd basically be no point in doing so.)
What we really want are high concentrations of energy; low entropy sources. We're looking for those situations where the water is still at the top of the cliff. A star is fussing down through the various elements, and in the process it emits a lot of radiation during its lifetime. And it's not getting that energy back. Once the elements have undergone the process you'd have to put energy back into them to return them to their earlier states. But that energy's been leaving the star for years, and some of it travels at the speed of light so it's very far away - so... it's just not gonna happen. Stars do go through life cycles and produce various phenomena but always at a loss of their potential to do useful work, always at an increase in entropy.
^^;
You're correct, energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be spread out to the point where there is no differential. Heat death!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe