Earth's Future

This week on The History Channel's The Universe, the show examined the opposite of history-- the ultimate fate of Earth as the Sun cycles through its evolution to the white dwarf stage and beyond. Using the opportunity to examine the life cycles of stars no doubt had some value-- that topic is interesting enough to a science-oriented viewership to stand on its own-- the program went through various ways Earth might meet its demise, complete with neat computer depictions.

For all the computer gee-whiz and all the brainy professors involved in the program, however, it lacked real imagination. The Sun will not enter its final stages for a few billion years, as the program acknowledges. That's an awfully long time, and an awful lot will happen between now and then. To assume nothing much will happen, as the program does, is intellectually sloppy. For instance, the program assumes-- no doubt for dramatic purposes-- that a human civilization will still be on Earth billions of years from now. It's likely, from biology, that even highly successful complex species only last a few million years before evolving into something else or dying out. It's likely from our increasing mastery of genetic engineering and cybernetics that even in a few hundred years, a human will be something quite different from us. The program also seems to assume that the human civilization a few billion years into the future will have mastered interplanetary, but not interstellar space travel. While we're speculating-- just to pick one thing-- why not imagine something of a civilization descended from our own that has spread throughout the universe and had the ability to maintain stars in prime conditions?

Of course, that would have knocked out all the computer-generated images of a boiling Earth, an Earth frozen solid, etc.