...does the bulging from the tides between the Earth and the Moon end up with the Moon moving farther out?

I got about 1/3 through that article and had to check the header to se weather I'd accidentally clicked on that red top nightmare's website by the same name as our mother star.

Generally I do like the style of theregister over it's crap rival /. and the over stiff silicon.com. But sometime, just sometimes, I think you go to far...

Anyway, at least in the light of Bellfields prosecution you didn't announce that this week is BLONDES WEEK...

Please avoid becoming too much like the current bun...

What!!! Oh my God! Oh, wait a minute, I thought you said 7.6 million years. Whew!

The planet being enveloped by the sun as it grows.

The moon wandering away from us causing the earth to wobble on it's axis.

Huge lumps of rock hitting us from space.

Global warming causing floods.

Ice ages causing the water to retreat.

A massive volcano erupting and filling the sky with ash, smoke, and noxious gasses.

Tidal waves wiping out coastal communities.

and now we have to contend with the planet doing a nose dive into the Sun!!! Great.

Part of the point of researching this is to see if we can then spot it happening to other stars "now" (or then, as it were) which then allows us to start working out other stuff. What that other stuff might be is anyone's guess, but something will come of it sooner or later. I mean, lets face it, back when Newton finalised the theory of gravity it was great... in principle, but what practical application was there for knowing how fast something would accelerate toward the earth? At that point, very little. It was information for information's sake. Now it's an absolute necessity in physics. Or if you want to be more abstract, why bother finding out that the earth moves around the sun? There was no particular reason for knowing it; seasons were already predictable, the sun rose and set like it always did, so why spend the effort when it doesn't actually make any difference?

Have these people got nothing better to do with their time, like helping find a cure for a disease... oh wait, we're all going to die anyway, why bother... ffs.

/Grumpy Old Man.

I'm sure George and the good old boys in the Pentagon will come up the as solution.

Operation Solar Storm, to defend the free people's of the world from the threat of solar terrorism.

My Coat, The one with the UVA filter built in.

"Information for Informations sake is UTTERLY worthless."

Well, no, curiosity is still a valuable trait.

And often something good comes out of such studying things that aren't immediately of practical importance. E.g., we only have modern mechanics at all because someone worried about such esoteric and useless (at that moment) as what rotates around what in the sky, whether the sky can change over time (it was previously thought that other than the planets, everything else is basically a texture rotating around Earth), or where does a cannonball fall after all if you drop it from the mast of a moving ship. I mean, from a pragmatic point of view, why would you want to? But it all furthered our undestanding of how things work, and had practical applications much later. Plus, as an even nicer side-effect, it brought down the edifice of Aristotelian "science" based on nothing more than thinking about how things should work in a nicely designed universe, and replaced it with the proper scientific method.

Is this calculation equally important? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows, we might eventually find out that some practical observation contradicts such a calculated result, and end up with some better science as a result. And in turn, if we ever start having interstellar travel, we might actually have a use for better understanding the forces and phenomena at those scales.

It's useless to worry about it, but that's an entirely different thing.

That said, I do find it funny that some people do worry about what will happen in 5 billion years, or indeed 100 billion years. There was for example this thread long ago on Slashdot about how in 100 billion years other galaxies will be too far away to be observed, and people were genuinely worrying about how to pass that piece of information to the people living 100 billion years in the future. 'Cause, you know, otherwise they might end up with a theocracy or something.

"After a billion years or so you've got an Earth with no atmosphere, no water and a surface temperature of hundreds of degrees, way above the boiling point of water. The Earth will become dry basically. It will become completely impossible for life of any kind to exist. It's a pretty gloomy forecast."

Don't want to get too picky, but should he not have instead said, "It will become impossible for life as we know it to exist."?

How do we know that there isn't some life form out there that we don't know about that thrives in that kind of environment.

The truth is out there ...

We all know that the earth will survive the sun getting all big and bothered because we've seen it in Doctor Who; and when the super-duper magnetic things that stop the earth being swallowed up get turned off, there'll be a bunch of blue people watching it from a special observational hotel in space.

At least when it does go off, nobody'll mind that they spent money on a HD-DVD player.

Anyway, why can't the scientists spend more time on the things that affect us here and now, like itchy nipples?

... I guess Sun will take over the entire earth at some point in the future, but achieving that in 7 million years is not the sort of business plan that's attractive to your average investor.

Average lifespan of a mammalian species ~3 million years.

Contrary to what most of the geeks on here will "understand" most species die out NOT in cataclysmic events, but just cos they get out evolved.

This is an interesting piece of science, but to tie it somehow to Homo sapiens "fate" is (stupidity x sensationalism)^2 in other words the Daily Mail reporting index.

P.S. That does not make this sort of science "worthless", the spirit of scientific inquiry often will lead us to many dead ends and "useless" facts. But that does not mean that we should decide to give bat and ball back and not play anymore.

...my plan was to get on the housing ladder in 7.7billion years time. Is there no hope!

...but this is a question of life and death for vampires!

Hi, On behalf of Reg Readers everywhere... I was just wondering if there was any room on your couch, as soon (on the cosmic scale) we're all going to be homeless...

"Have these people got nothing better to do with their time, like helping find a cure for a disease..."

I eagerly await the cure for cancer you are obviously working tirelessly on.

Paris, because her competency describes her industry, just like the rest of us.

When Lister returns to Earth some 300 million years since leaving it he finds the human race much as he left it, although they're all a little bit shorter.

But seriously, with the current state of humanity do we have even a millenium left?

Have a nice day.

/pessimist

I have a few trances of land left remaining on the Saturn's moon 'Titan'. It's a bit chilly at the moment, but should warm up in time for the exodus from Earth. All enquiries to PO BOX 99, London W1.

Nice.

But I thought I'd read somewhere that we're supposed to be on course for a cosmic collision with the Andromeda galaxy, which is supposed to happen *before* the sun kicks out its last fateful photon?

As it is 15 degrees below zero where I am, the sooner the better I say.

The flame icon because I'll doing anything for a bit of warmth.

... virginmedia will only just have cleared it's amassed debt by then, and I'll miss out on my payrise.

...is fine, provided that is acurate - other wise the mice will be furious.

And it probably costs less than the greenhouse cap and trade systems...

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/earth_move_010207.html

But with existing technology, some advance planning and a little orbital energy, courtesy of a redirected asteroid, Earth's distance from the Sun could be increased by 50 percent in just a few billion years.

> The Earth actually exerts its own (modest) gravitational pull on the Sun

The gravitational pull the Earth exerts on the Sun is exactly the same (except in the opposite direction) as that the Sun exerts on the Earth. It's just that the Sun is so much more massive than the Earth (F=m.a and all that).

</pedantry>

to welcome our coming photospheric overlords.

PH because.

"Information for Informations sake is UTTERLY worthless."

Me stay in cave, grunt. Stupid worthless monkeys, humpf, out rub sticks, hit stones, grunt. Useless, worthless waste time, grunt, me stay in cave picking lice, grr. Might write VB code if bored, humpf.

...To figure out how to reverse the death of the sun?

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

I thought this was going to be about us having to use Solaris. Oh well, I'll stick to Linux