Terry Blanton <hohlr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sol will become a red giant and collapse into a white dwarf blowing off > the surface layer. The earth will be consumed in the red giant stage. > Sigh. So what's the point of doing anything, right? We're doomed. The good news is that Bertrand Russell was wrong when he wrote: "That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins . . ." Nuh-uhh. No debris. Fire, not ice. He wrote that in 1903 when they knew about entropy but not solar evolution. Oh, and don't say we'll just go to some other star. See Asimov "The Last Question" which somehow ended up here at Case Western University: http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm . . . "You're thinking we'll switch to another sun when ours is done, aren't you?" "I'm not thinking." "Sure you are. You're weak on logic, that's the trouble with you. You're like the guy in the story who was caught in a sudden shower and who ran to a grove of trees and got under one. He wasn't worried, you see, because he figured when one tree got wet through, he would just get under another one." "I get it," said Adell. "Don't shout. When the sun is done, the other stars will be gone, too." - Jed
