To worry that once the sun explodes there will be

[ArtVandeelay]

no intelligent life in the universe. Just vast space. It makes me sad: the slow evolution of man over billions of years; the art; the culture; to go from living in caves to flying to the moon in a blink of an eye.

Billions of years away is an irrelevance to me.

I am more worried about what may happen in the short term, in the next 5-10 years as western democracies collapse in favour of dictatorships and autocracies. The seeds of the next world war have already been sowed and life isn't going to stay the way we have known it.

We are on the same land mass as Russia, Iran and China. All these countries are geopolitically connected. We will be at war soon and in the meantime we only seem to be focusing on net zero and winning the right to individually do as little as possible.

I was trying to find a quote about the Total Perspective Vortex

Do you know what's even sadder? Eventually the very last star will burn out, and the entire universe will be in darkness for ever more (thanks for that Brian Cox!)

But where will all that energy have gone?
And will it restart......

(And will we have a restaurant to watch it?)

I’m more worried about the destruction mankind is making to our beutiful world and which could well lead to its ending.

try and enjoy it while you can, I had a lovely autumnal walk on our local common yesterday enjoying all the different colours. I also think we should all make an effort to be less wasteful to cut down on pollution.

and those in power should stop their wars which mostly affect ordinary people, not them and which are causing havoc to the environment.

but I understand your fears

I agree with this post @HotTopicsWithImogen . I get sick of this too. 'All humans are so vile. We're scum. We're a piece of shit. The earth would be better off without us... la la la.' I hate this anti-human rhetoric, and how some people say this planet would be better off without humans. I just think 'well you first then!'

The vast majority of human beings are good kind creatures who love the wildlife and the fauna and flora and the animals and other humans. It is just really powerful men who are in charge across the planet who caused the problems, not the vast majority of citizens. Yes, this anti-human bullshit really boils my blood too.

This has got to be the most opening post I’ve ever seen on here!

Its not the evolution of man by the way, but of humans, I just hope any alien races don’t have such egocentric males within their population.

Well, the evidence so far, says yes we are, given we have looked a pretty long way and found fuck all :) Brian Cox says we are alone for sure in our galaxy

Our galaxy, but the entire universe is a whole other place. There are endless galaxies in the universe, the chances that none of them have the same ‘Goldilocks zone’ that ours do is quite unbelievable.

And who know, in a few million years maybe it will all start again. We don't remember anything before we are born, we know very little about the earth before humans. When it's gone we will know nothing. Why worry? We can't do anything.

I love this!

Who is it by?

I'm sure we'll have wiped ourselves out by the time the sun explodes. But I am also sure that there is other intelligent life out there. Given our track-record of dealing with people different from ourselves, one of the most intelligent things they could do would be to keep their existence securely hidden from us.

It’s theorised that the Big Bang is just the universe resetting itself over and over. It expands to peak, then inverts itself before exploding and starting all over again. So who knows, we may just be playing on repeat for eternity.

Hard to know what is ' out there ' in space.
Other galaxies like our one might exist , but even with the most powerful telescopes on earth they can't see them. I often watch space programmes on tv and it can blow your mind as to what is going on beyond our own solar system!
Our sun will implode one day I suppose, but it'll be long after we are all gone. It's not worth worrying about to be honest.

You think this planet is the only one that ever has or ever will have intelligent life on it?

actualy, scratch that- You think this planet's got intelligent life on it?

Maybe more intelligent life has found us by using a handy ' worm hole' or four only to discover that we are an awful place to live and there are too many wars and problems to actually comprehend and decided to bin it all off! I can't say I blame them really

Yes this planet has intelligent life, and it’s not just humans. We’ve just decided we’re special because of our level of self awareness and ego. And human imagination is a remarkable thing, but it’s also the cause of a lot of self inflicted damage that will probably be our ruin.

Well yes, thank you. But the joke was that people are a bit thick.

Suns explode all the time. There won't be much left of the solar system (actually there will) but the galaxy and the universe will be absolutely fine.

Universe on iPlayer might be worth watching.

Good grief no. Imagine if there more like us? We should be thankful we are alone.

Okay, so just in our own Milky Way galaxy NASA reckon there are between 100 and 400 billion stars, most of which may have planetary systems of their own, and out there in the wider universe it's hypothesised there are up to 2 triliion other galaxies, each possibly with more billions of stars/planetary systems - except we'll never know because, even travelling at the speed of light, it would take 35 million years to reach the next galaxy along

You'd have to be a pretty ardent creationist to believe we're the only intelligent life among that lot, and anyway our sun's explosion isn't due for billions of years, so if you really want something to worry about I'd stick with more immeediate issues

There's a Law of Thermodynamics which says that energy can't be created or destroyed but can only be transformed into other forms of energy, so presumably there'd be something else to watch from that restaurant?

Then again, even though it was Einstein, it's still a man-made Law so maybe one day it'll be shown to be wrong and everything really will go dark

In which case I only hope someone's saved a few tanners for the meter ...

Every living organism aims to dominate in its own way!
Nature is absolutely brutal.
Not a Disney movie 😂😂😂😂

One of my favourite short poems.

Robert Frost.

I wouldn't know, I don't watch Disney movies. Nature's brutality is just that - nature. Unconscious, uncalculated, it just happens, evolution helps the flora and fauna to adapt around the destruction or potential destructive forces over time. It is not comparable to the deliberate, destructive characteristics and activities that dominate the human condition, and which have altered the planet in dire ways over a very, very short period of time.