Putin is at war with the U.S. and NATO

 

• A prominent Russian TV presenter says Moscow's war in Ukraine will extend to Europe and the world.
• The Kremlin is already starting to wage a "de facto" war against NATO countries, he said.
• "Ukrainians alone are no longer enough," Vladimir Solovyov said, in a clip posted by The Daily Beast's Julia Davis.

A prominent Russian TV presenter said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is approaching a "new stage" in which Moscow will find itself at war with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — and by extension, the entire world.

"I believe the special military operation is entering a new stage. Ukrainians alone are no longer enough," said Vladimir Solovyov, according to the translation of a video clip tweeted on Thursday by The Daily Beast's Julia Davis.

In the widely shared clip, Solovyov noted that NATO countries have been supplying weapons to Ukraine. "We'll see not only NATO weapons being drawn into this, but also their operators," he warned while speaking on his show "Evening with Vladimir Solovyov."

Solovyov, a prominent state media figure and supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has often repeated and amplified the Kremlin's pro-war rhetoric on the state-owned channel Russia-1.

In the clip, he noted that Russia was "starting to wage war against NATO countries."

We'll be grinding up NATO's war machine as well as citizens of NATO countries," Solovyov said. "When this operation concludes, NATO will have to ask itself: 'Do we have what we need to defend ourselves? Do we have the people to defend ourselves?'

"And there will be no mercy. There will be no mercy," he added.

Echoing Putin's call for the "de-Nazification" of Ukraine, Solovyov said: "Not only will Ukraine have to be denazified, the war against Europe and the world is developing a more specific outline, which means we'll have to act differently, and to act much more harshly."

His comments come as several NATO member states announced they would provide Ukrainian troops with advanced weapons and heavy artillery and training on how to use the equipment.

For instance, the US is now sending hundreds of tank-busting "Switchblade" drones designed to crash into targets and explode and dozens of long-range artillery systems called howitzers. The UK has also said it would provide 120 armored vehicles and anti-ship missile systems.

Solovyov's recent statements on the war align with what some military analysts and Putin critics have predicted: That the Russian leader seeks control of regions beyond Ukraine, particularly Eastern Europe.

"We must understand that, in his head, Putin is at war not with Ukraine," exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky told CNN on April 4. "He's at war with the United States and NATO. He said this more than once." 

From Business Insider, MSN

 

Excessive Napping Linked to Increased Alzheimer's Risk

 

Older men and women who take long or frequent daytime naps are at increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, and increased napping frequency and time becomes more common in people with early Alzheimer’s disease

Those are the findings from a recent study that tracked more than 1,400 seniors for up to 14 years. The increased frequency and duration of napping was independent of how well someone slept at night and suggests that Alzheimer’s may affect parts of the brain that affect our sleep and wake cycles.

“We found the association between excessive daytime napping and dementia remained after adjusting for nighttime quantity and quality of sleep,” said study author Dr. Yue Leng, of the University of California, San Francisco, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Napping and Alzheimer’s disease “seem to be driving each other’s changes in a bi-directional way,” Dr. Leng added. The findings were published in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia.

For the study, researchers at UC San Francisco and Harvard Medical School looked at data from 1,401 older men and women who were part of an ongoing study at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago. Their average age was 81.

Every year, the participants wore a watch-like activity monitor that tracked their movement throughout the day for up to 14 days. Periods of extended inactivity from 9 in the morning until 7 at night were regarded as a nap.

Participants also underwent annual tests of memory and thinking skills. At the start of the study period, about three-fourths of the participants were free of memory problems or symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. About 20 percent had mild cognitive impairment, a brain disorder that sometimes precedes Alzheimer’s, and 4 percent had a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

With increasing age, all the seniors tended to take more naps — an average of an extra 11 minutes a day each year for those without cognitive problems. But those with mild cognitive impairment napped an extra 24 minutes a day each year, and those with Alzheimer’s napped an extra 68 minutes a day each year.

Study participants who napped more than an hour a day were at 40 percent higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease compared to those who napped less than an hour a day. And those who took a daily nap were 40 percent more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than those who napped less frequently.

Daytime naps are common in older men and women, and in some cultures, napping is normal and happens daily. And taking naps doesn’t mean that you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Indeed, naps have been tied to improvements in mood, alertness and performance on cognitive tasks.

Furthermore, the study’s methods had some shortcomings. People who were inactive during the day, for example, may have been watching TV rather than taking a nap. In addition, some people may have removed their activity trackers and forgot to put them back on.

But the findings add to growing evidence that Alzheimer’s disease and sleep are closely linked. Earlier studies have shown, for example, that aging men and women who said they often felt very sleepy during the day were nearly three times more likely than those who were not sleepy to have brain changes typical of Alzheimer’s disease.

Diet, exercise and engagement in cognitively stimulating activities have increasingly been recognized as important potential targets for Alzheimer’s disease prevention. Sleep is increasingly being recognized as playing an important role in Alzheimer’s disease.

If you didn’t used to take naps and you notice you’re starting to get sleepier in the day, the authors of the current study suggest, it might be a signal of declining cognitive health. Or if people start taking more naps than usual or napping at different times of the day than they used to, it may be a sign of a brain problem. But the results of this and other studies suggest that treating sleep issues, and promoting sound sleep, could play a role in delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

By ALZinfo.org, The Alzheimer’s Information Site. Reviewed by Marc Flajolet, Ph.D., Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation at The Rockefeller University.

Source: Peng Li, Lei Gao, Lei Yu, et al: “Daytime napping and Alzheimer’s dementia: A potential bidirectional relationship.” Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association. March 17, 2022

 

We Are Made of Music; We Are Made of Time... by Maria Popova

 

In her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key, the trailblazing philosopher Susanne Langer defined music as “a laboratory for feeling and time.” But perhaps it is the opposite, too — music may be the most beautiful experiment conducted in the laboratory of time. 

In “the wordless beginning,” spacetime itself was crumpled and compacted into that spitball of everythingness we call the singularity. Even if sound could exist then — it did not, of course, because sound is made of matter — it would have existed all at once. Infinite numbers of every possible note would have been ringing at the same time — the antithesis of music.

It is only because this single point of totality was stretched into a line that time was born and, suddenly, there was continuity. Suddenly, one moment became distinguishable from another — the strange gift of entropy, which makes it possible to have melody and rhythm, chords and harmonies. 

Music — with all the mysterious power by which it “enters one’s ears and dives straight into one’s soul, one’s emotional center” — is made not of notes of sound but of atoms of time. And if music is made of time, and if time is the substance we ourselves are made of, then in some profound sense, we are made of music. 

That — the physics and neuroscience of it, the poetry and unremitting wonder of it — is what the science-enchanted classical violinist Natalie Hodges explores in Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time (public library). She writes:

                                                        Natalie Hodges

“Music sculpts time. Indeed, it is a structuring of time, as a layered arrangement of audible temporal events. Rhythm is at the heart of that arrangement, on every scale: the cycling and patterning of repeated sound or movement and the ‘measured flow’ that that repetition creates. The most fundamental rhythm is the beat itself, the pulse that occurs at regular intervals and thus dictates the tempo, keeps musical time.

 

“In music, a beat is no fixed thing — it can quicken into smaller intervals (accelerando) and stretch out into longer ones (decelerando), depending on the character of a given musical moment and the feeling or fancy of the performer — but it does remain periodic, predictable, inexorable. Even at the level of pitch, which is really the speed of a given sound wave’s oscillation, we are really hearing the rhythmic demarcation of time, a tiny heart whirring at a beat of x cycles per second.

 

“Yet in every piece of music there are also higher temporal structures at play. Repetition begets pattern, and pattern engenders form, at every scale; thus, musical form itself constitutes a macro-rhythm, a pattern of alternations that move the listener through time.”

Our minds structure time through the detection of patterns and the predictive anticipation of recurring elements. But although this cognitive function unfolds unconsciously, it is not mechanistic, not robotic, but a vital pulse-beat of our humanity, vibrating with the neural harmonics of emotion, suffused with feeling — for all anticipation is a form of hope and all hope can be shattered or redeemed, taking our hearts along with it. Ever since Pythagoras revolutionized the mathematical structure of music by composing the world’s first algorithm, musicians have been deliberately breaking the buildup of patterns or triumphantly completing them in order to orchestrate an emotional response — the sorrow of unmet hope, the elated relief of its redemption. 

With an eye to the basic chord progression, rooted in a tonic, and the satisfying resolution of a rondo, revolving around a circular theme, Hodges writes:

“Such patterns, formal and harmonic, relate their components to one another in time. The ear can sense the harmonies to come based on the relative intensities of those that came before, or when thematic material will return by the buildup of a cadence at the end of a development section or variation. It is through this higher sense of rhythm, then, that a simple phrase or a complex form becomes a temporal object: time molded in order to manipulate emotion, putting you through the changes of the present only to bring you back to the past, locating you in a moment that is simultaneously familiar and wholly new.”

In my native Bulgaria, the tonal tradition rests upon a pattern dramatically different from that of Western music and its twelve-tone scale. (This is why a Bulgarian folk song was encoded among the handful of sounds representing Earth on the Golden Record that sailed aboard the Voyager in humanity’s most poetic reach for making contact with the cosmos.) But while these underlying structures differ across cultures and epochs, music’s reliance on such patterns for its emotional effect is universal. Hodges observes:

“The music of all cultures, each with its own unique rules to be followed and broken, both weaves and rends the tapestry of audible time. Our experience of musical temporality, like our experience of the day-to-day, consists of patterns of recurrence and, sooner or later, their violation. Yet musical time differs from the quotidian passage of ordinary time, even as it exists within that passage. Or, at least, it manifests how susceptible time is to our conscious perception, as much as the other way around.”

In a sentiment consonant with Virginia Woolf’s insight into the strange elasticity of clock-time, she adds:

“Duration is not time — that is something different entirely, something utterly dependent on our perception… The malleability of our perception of time is the stuff of music itself. The concept of passage, the way we generally conceptualize time — seconds elapse into minutes, today becomes tomorrow — is of getting through from one thing to another. In music, time is inseparable from sound itself. A piece of music is a multidimensional entity, a creation molded from time’s clay.”

In a passage that affirms anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson’s wonderfully apt word-choice for how we become who we are — by “composing a life”— Hodges returns to the elemental matter of music:

“Time renders most individual moments meaningless, or at least less important than they originally seemed, but it is only through the passage of time that life acquires its meaning. And that meaning itself is constantly in flux; we are always making it up and then revising as we go along, ordering and reordering our understanding of the past in real time. […]

“Form, in music, is inherently temporal. It gives some shape to time, or at least designates the pace and manner at which we move through a particular piece. Where do we fare forward or cycle back; which moments expand, and which contract? Likewise, memory — that most universal and yet individual of temporal structures — lends form and shape to experience in biographical time. We inhabit simultaneous, concentric timescales: the timeline of the past coiled within the immediacy of the present moment unfolding. Memory creates a metonymic congruence between them, melding past with present in such a way that our former selves move forward with us in time.”

Echoing the touching defiance at the heart of Auden’s classic hymn of resistance to entropy, Hodges writes:

“Implicit in time’s asymmetry, then, is the notion of becoming. The universe unspools itself toward a state of higher entropy; its edges fray, its dust is swept into corners, and this process of degradation and erosion is what separates the future from the past. We think of ‘becoming’ as moving toward something final, evolving into a more perfect and more stable state over time. Yet, by proceeding forward in time, that very process must involve itself in the increasing disorder of the universe.

 

“When we seek to become something or someone else, to change our lives and leave the past behind, we necessarily abandon ourselves to entropy: We scatter old pieces of ourselves, willfully smudge our edges and make a mess of things, strive to break free of old symmetries that we feel can no longer contain us. Or, perhaps, that very instinct to change ourselves is a kind of preemptive embrace of the chaos we know is to come, a sign that we have already begun to spin out of control, that time is passing and taking us along with it and that soon nothing will be as it once was.”

A century after Virginia Woolf was staggered in her garden into her timelessly stunning insight that “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself” — Hodges considers the elemental truth pulsating beneath our experience of music and of our very lives:

 

“It’s a strange feeling, beautiful but also eerie: not only that you can step into time’s flow, but that you are the flow itself. I suppose at the heart of that feeling, too, lies the real trouble with time: the terrifying prospect that if time is so subjective, then we are necessarily alone in our unique experience of it. But isn’t it because time lives in us that we can shape it, sculpt it into phrases and cadences and giros and ochos; still it if not stop it, bend it if not vanquish it. And share it.”

Complement Uncommon Measure — in which Hodges goes on to examine through the lens of music such facets of our temporal experience as grief and creativity — with some symphonic reflections on Bach and the mystery of aliveness, then revisit Nick Cave on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of artificial intelligence and two centuries of beloved writers on the singular power of music. 

 from the Marginalian

We Are Made of Music, We Are Made of Time: Violinist Natalie Hodges on the Poetic Science of Sound and Feeling – The Marginalian

Alla Gutnikova's speech at the Dorogomilovsky court. She is one of the editors of the Moscow student journal DOXA, who are facing prison sentences for "inciting minors to take part in illegal opposition protests.” But the speech is about so much more.

 

I won’t talk about the case, the searches, the interrogations, the tomes, the trials. It’s boring and pointless. Recently I’ve joined the school of tiredness and frustration. But even before the arrest, I managed to join the school of being able to talk about truly important things.

I would like to talk about philosophy and literature. About Benjamin, Derrida, Kafka, Arendt, Sontag, Barthes, Foucault, Agamben, Audre Lorde and Bell Hooks. About Timofeeva, Tlostanova and Rakhmaninova.

I would like to speak about poetry. About how to read contemporary poetry. About Gronas, Dashevsky and Borodin. But now is not the time or place. I will hide my little tender words on the tip of my tongue, at the bottom of my larynx, between my stomach and heart. And I’ll just say a little.

I often feel like a little fish, a little bird, a schoolboy, a baby girl. But recently I found out with amazement, that Brodsky was also put on trial at 23. And in so far as I am also part of the human race, I will say the following:

In the Kabbalah there is the concept of Tikkun olam – the repairing of the world. I see that the world is not perfect. I believe that, as Yehuda Amichai wrote, the world was created beautiful, for the good and for peace, like a bench in a garden (in a garden, not in a courtroom!) I believe that the world was created for tenderness, hope, love, solidarity, passion, and joy.

But in the world, there is a terrible, unbearable amount of violence. And I don’t want violence. Not in any form. Not the teacher’s hands in schoolgirls’ knickers, not the fists of a drunken father on the bodies of his wife and children. If I decided to list all the violence around, not a day, not a week, not a year would be enough time.

In order to see the violence around, you just need to open your eyes. My eyes are open. I see violence and I don’t want violence. The more violence there is, the more I don’t want it. And the greatest and most terrible violence is the one I don’t want most of all.

I love to study. And so now I will speak with the voices of others. At school, in history lessons, I learned the phrases: “You may crucify freedom, but the human soul knows no chains” and “For freedom, yours and ours.” In secondary school, I read “Requiem” by Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova, “Journey into the Whirlwind” by Yevgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg, “The Vacated Theater” by Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava, “Children of the Arbat” by Anatoly Naumovich Rybakov. From Okudzhava, most of all I loved the poem:

Conscience, nobility and dignity

Here it is, our sacred army.

Hold out your palm to it.

No fear for him, even in the fire.

His countenance is imposing and wondrous.

Dedicate to him your humble age:

Maybe you won’t become a victor,

But you will die like a man! [from Sacred Army – Святое воинство]

 

I studied French at MGIMO and learned a line from Edith Piaf: “Ça ne pouvait pas durer toujours” (“It couldn’t last forever”). And from Marc Robin: “Ça ne peut pas durer comme ça” (“It can’t go on like this”). At nineteen, I went to Majdanek and Treblinka and learned how to say “never again” in seven languages: never again, jamais plus, nie wieder, קיינמאל מער, nigdy więcej, לא עוד.

I studied the Jewish wise men, and most of all, I fell in love with two bits of wisdom. Rabbi Hillel said: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” And Rabbi Nachman said: “The whole world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid at all.”

Then I entered the School of Cultural Studies and learned a few more important lessons. First, words have meaning. Second, you need to call a spade a spade. And finally: sapere aude, that is, have the courage to use your own mind.

It is ridiculous and absurd that our case is connected with schoolchildren. I taught children the Humanities in English, worked as a nanny, dreamed of being a part of the ‘Teacher for Russia’ programme and going to a small town for two years to sow seeds of reason, kindness, and the eternal.

But Russia – through the mouth of state public prosecutor Tryakin – considers that I involved minors in life-threatening actions. If I ever have children (and I will, because I remember the central commandment), I will hang a portrait of the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, on their wall so that the children grow up to be decent people. The Procurator Pontius Pilate standing up and washing his hands – that’s the kind of portrait it will be.

Yes, it is now life-threatening to not be indifferent in one’s thoughts and way of life. I don’t know what to say about the essence of the charge. I am washing my hands. But now it is the moment of truth. The time when the books are interpreted. 

Neither I nor my male and female friends can find a place that is away from horror and pain, but when I go down into the metro, I do not see tear-stained faces. I do not see tear-stained faces.

None of my favourite books – neither children’s books nor books for adults – taught indifference, disinterest, or cowardice. Nowhere have I been taught these phrases:

We are insignificant.

I’m a simple person, everything is not so clear, no one can be trusted, I’m not really interested in all this.

I’m not into politics, this does not concern me, nothing depends on me, competent authorities will sort it out. What could I do on my own?

On the contrary, I know and love completely different words.

John Donne, via Hemingway, says:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

 

Mahmoud Darwish says:

As you prepare your breakfast, think of others

(do not forget the pigeon’s food).

As you wage your wars, think of others

(do not forget those who seek peace).

As you pay your water bill, think of others

(those who are nursed by clouds).

As you return home, to your home, think of others

(do not forget the people of the camps).

As you sleep and count the stars, think of others

(those who have nowhere to sleep).

As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others

(those who have lost the right to speak).

As you think of others far away, think of yourself

(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).

 

Gennadii Golovaty says: The blind cannot stare in anger, the dumb cannot cry out furiously. Those without arms cannot hold weapons, those without legs cannot take a step forward. But- the dumb can stare in anger, But – the blind can cry out furiously. But – those without legs can carry weapons. But – those without arms can take a step forward.

Some people, I know, are scared. They choose silence.

But Audre Lorde says: Your silence will not protect you. In the Moscow metro they say: Passengers are forbidden to travel on trains going to dead ends. Lao Tzu says via Tarkovsky: The main thing is that they believe in themselves and become helpless, like children.

Because weakness is great, and strength is nothing. When a person is born, he is weak and flexible, and when he dies, he is strong and hard. When a tree grows, it is tender and elastic, and when it is dry and hard, it dies. Brittleness and strength are companions of death. Weakness and flexibility express the freshness of existence. Therefore, what has become hard will not be victorious.

Remember that fear devours the soul. Remember the character in Kafka, who saw “how they set up gallows in the prison yard and mistakenly thought it was for him, and he escaped from his cell in the night and hanged himself.”

Be like children. Don’t be afraid to ask (yourself and others) what is good and what is bad. Don’t be afraid to say that the king has no clothes. Do not be afraid to cry out, to burst into tears. Repeat (to yourself and others): 2+2=4. Black is black. White is white. I am a man; I am strong and brave. I am a strong and brave woman. We are strong and brave people. Freedom is a process, in the course of which you develop the habit of being insusceptible to becoming enslaved.  

Translated by Clementine Cecil

from Portside

“Be Like Children. Repeat: 2+2=4. Black Is Black. White Is White.” – The Last Word of Alla Gutnikova, of the Doxa Four | Portside

From life on Earth to the planet itself, there are four ways our planet will actually experience “the end,” no matter how we define it

 

...The Ivy Mike nuclear test was the world’s first thermonuclear device: where fission and fusion reactions combine to create a more energetic yield than a fission bomb alone can achieve. Unlike the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the yield was measured in the tens of kilotons of TNT, thermonuclear devices can reach tens or even hundreds of megatons of TNT-equivalent. (Credit: “Ivy Mike” atmospheric nuclear test — November 1952 /Wikicommons)

1.) The extinction of humanity

This is not just prophesy; this is an inevitability. Although there are over seven billion of us (and growing) today, humans have only been around in our current form for under a million years, with all of the great apes having existed for only a few million years. Evolution may be slow to occur in our species on the timescale of a single human lifetime, but over millions of years, it’s inevitable.

As the Earth changes, the pressures on different species to survive will change as well, all while random genetic mutations occur. Some mutations are beneficial to surviving the present pressures, and those are the genes that are most likely to get passed on.

Evolutionarily speaking, human beings — or homo sapiens — have been around for a cosmic blink-of-an-eye: under half a million years. Based on how evolution works, it is unlikely there will be any humans left even just a few million years from now.

Whether those offspring of humanity millions of years from now remain sentient, as we know it, is beside the point; the point is that millions of years from now, even if there are descendants of humans still around, they won’t be human any longer. Humans themselves face pressure from all sorts of factors, including:

• a changing planet with limited resources,
• from other humans (in the form of war, as well as nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons),
• and from the natural world (in the form of disease).

Whether an out-of-this-world catastrophe, like an asteroid strike, occurs or not, the eventual demise of humanity is inevitable. Whether we have descendants that survive or not is immaterial; we will go extinct on this world eventually. On geological and astronomical timescales, this is likely to happen sooner than later, and will be the first “end of the world” for us.

Today on Earth, ocean water only boils, typically, when lava or some other superheated material enters it. But in the far future, the Sun’s energy will be enough to do it, and on a global scale.

2.) The boiling of Earth’s oceans

It’s such a fortunate cosmic coincidence that our planet is the size and mass it is, with the atmosphere it possesses, at the distance it is from a star exactly as massive as our own. Only the right combination of all of these parameters has given us a life-supporting planet with copious amounts of liquid water directly at the surface. If any of these properties were significantly different from what they actually are, the diversity and variety of life that our planet possesses simply wouldn’t be here today.

For billions of years, Earth has been an ocean-covered world, with simple and complex life originating in the seas and only coming onto land relatively recently. Yet thanks to the future evolution of our Sun, our oceans won’t be around forever. As helium builds up in the Sun’s core, the region in which nuclear fusion occurs expands, with dire consequences for us.

This cutaway showcases the various regions of the surface and interior of the Sun, including the core, which is where nuclear fusion occurs. As time goes on, the region of the core where nuclear fusion takes place expands, causing the Sun’s energy output to increase. A similar process occurs in the interior of all stars. 

Over time, as it begins to exhaust the hydrogen available for nuclear fusion in its core, the Sun heats up and expands, becoming more luminous and emitting more power as time goes on. After another one-to-two billion years at the most, the amount of energy the Sun gives off will increase to a certain critical point: high enough that the amount of energy hitting a water molecule in Earth’s Ocean during the day will be sufficient to boil it.

As the oceans boil and the atmosphere fills with water vapor, the greenhouse gas effects will take over, causing Earth’s temperature to rise catastrophically. Our planet will become more like Venus than like Earth today, becoming totally inhospitable to life on the surface. Only, perhaps, a few simple organisms will survive high in the cloud-tops, but life as we know it will end on our world. The cosmic experiment of complex differentiated organisms will have come to its natural end.

After approximately five to seven billion years from now, the sun will exhaust the hydrogen in its core. The interior will contract, heat up, and eventually helium fusion will begin. At this point, the sun will swell, vaporize Earth’s atmosphere, and char whatever’s left of our surface. But even when that catastrophic event occurs, Earth may not be swallowed, remaining a planet, albeit a very different one from the world we know today. (Credit: ESO / L. Calçada)

3.) Reduction to a barren rock

You thought having our oceans boil was bad? How about the prospect of having every atom of atmosphere ejected from our world? Of everything that ever lived on the surface reduced to charred ash; of the record of everything that living creatures left behind turned into dust. With enough heat and energy, that’s exactly what would happen to any world, with Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, being a prime example.

In another five-to-seven billion years, this is exactly what will happen to Earth, as the Sun fully runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core. When that occurs, the core will contract, heat up, and that will cause the outer layers of the star to swell. As it expands, it cools, but also becomes far more luminous, all while the core continues to contract and heat up, on the path to begin fusing helium. As the Sun transitions from a main sequence star to a subgiant, and then from a subgiant to a full-fledged, helium-burning red giant, nothing on Earth will withstand this solar onslaught.

As the Sun becomes a true red giant, the Earth itself may be swallowed or engulfed, but will definitely be roasted as never before. However, if we can migrate Earth away from the Sun prior to this, not only could we avoid being consumed, but life on our planet could thrive for billions of additional years than if we simply did nothing. 

The Sun will swell to almost a hundred times its current diameter and will become thousands of times as luminous as it is today. The Earth will be stripped completely bare, while simultaneously being pushed away from the Sun in its orbit, while the inner worlds, Mercury and Venus, are totally devoured.

Although helium-burning will last a very long time — hundreds of millions to billions of years — eventually the core will run out of helium as well. When this occurs, the core continues to contract and heat up, but no additional fusion reactions will ensue. The Sun will soon die, being reduced to a white dwarf, while its outer layers are blown off into a planetary nebula. If the Earth doesn’t get swallowed during the red giant phase, and the jury is still out on that one, our planet will remain as a rocky, roasted remnant, floating through space in its orbit around a stellar corpse.

Particular configurations over time, or singular gravitational interactions with passing large masses, can result in the disruption and ejection of large bodies from stellar and planetary systems. In approximately 1% of simulations of the next 5 billion years of our Solar System, 1 or more of the inner planets gets ejected due to gravitational instabilities. (Credit: S. Basu, E.I. Vorobyov, & A.L. DeSouza, AIP Conference Proceedings, 2012)

4.) Swallowed or ejected?

Even though it’s been cleared of life, boiled, then charred and evaporated, and finally bombarded with quadrillions of years’ worth of cosmic rays, our corpse of a planet will still continue to exist. It will remain intact, orbiting around our central, stellar corpse, until one of the following things happen:

• An object collides with the Earth, either destroying it or engulfing it, depending on the size and speed of the collision. Our galaxy is a very sparse place, but we’ve got all the time in the Universe.
• A massive object passes close by the Earth, gravitationally ejecting it from the Solar System and the galaxy entirely, where it wanders in obscurity throughout the empty cosmos for eternity.
• Or it remains bound to the Sun’s corpse, and slowly, over countless orbits, spirals into our stellar remnant, where it’s swallowed by the black dwarf that dominates whatever’s left of our Solar System.

·       After the Sun becomes a black dwarf, if nothing ejects or collides with the remnants of Earth, eventually gravitational radiation will cause us to spiral in, be torn apart, and eventually swallowed by the remnant of our Sun. 

·       The world will most certainly end, and that all four of these ends will come to pass is not mere speculation, but the robust predictions of the pinnacle of our scientific achievements. The far future of Earth is known; the near-term future is up to us to create...

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Starts With A Bang is written by Ethan Siegel, Ph.D., author of Beyond The Galaxy, and Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive.

When Will the Earth Come to an End? | Portside