| Life’s Future in the Cosmos |
| Tuesday, 03 August 2010 15:59 |
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Speaking at a Long Now Foundation seminar Monday night, Royal Society President and Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees said that because of our unique position in the history of the lightcone as the first (or one of the first) intelligent species, we tend to get a distorted view of history as a long, boring past during which nothing much happened, and then a very short period of rapidly accelerating change leading up to the present. In reality, however, the future of the Hubble volume is a lot longer than its past — the Sun isn’t yet even halfway through its life cycle, he pointed out.
Despite that, people who predict things “a million years from now” are considered to be talking about the unimaginably distant future, but a million years is only a few dozen clock ticks of cosmological time. We as humanity are responsible for the future of not just the next few thousand years (the timescale on which civilization has so far existed) but for “spans of time six or more orders of magnitude greater than that” — and since, in space, time and distance are equivalent, volumes of space six orders of magnitude greater than that containing the stars we see at night, he said. |
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| This Jan. 29 panorama of much of the East Coast, photographed by one of the Expedition 30 crew members aboard the International Space Station, provides a look generally northeastward: Philadelphia-New York City-Boston corridor (bottom-center); western Lake Ontario shoreline with Toronto (left edge); Montreal (near center). An optical illusion in the photo makes the atmospheric limb and light activity from Aurora Borealis appear "intertwined." Image Credit: NASA... | ||
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