HeatherD

It will be more than a few hundred thousand years until the month and day are equal. That will probably take billions of years. By then the day (and month) will be 47 days long. At that point the moon will stop receding as it can't get into a higher orbit.

In the next few hundred thousand years we will have no more total solar eclipses. The moon will have moved far enough away that it will appear too small to completely block the sun.

lpetrich

A related question I wonder about is when will continental drift stop? It barely got started on Mars before it permanently stopped, and it seems to be barely present on Venus.

Will it stop when the Earth's interior is no longer radioactive enough to supply the heat necessary to keep it going?

Related to that is when will the Earth's continents stop increasing in size. They have been doing so since the Archean, as a result of subducted oceanic plate melting and differentiating, with the Si-Al magma flowing upwards to form the continents. This seems to require water being present, which suggests that no more water means no more addition of continent-style Si-Al material.

However, volcanism may still continue, in the form of big Hawaii-style shield volcanoes.

David M. Payne

So the results of my question are pretty uniform in one respect, it's the end of the earth in 500 million or more years. If humanity is to survive past that, we will need to be able to move out from earth into the outer solar system, and eventually to the stars, or we are toast. It seems to me that advances in technology are our only hope in this endeavor, and the anti-technology bias that some religions have, have the effect of threatening humanities very long term survival, if these religions gain and hold power. This is assuming we survive our self-destructive tendency that long, and the way things are going right now, that’s a very open question.

David

Marduk

"If humanity is to survive past that, we will need to be able to move out from earth into the outer solar system, and eventually to the stars, or we are toast. "



The same fate awaits other stars and planets, the stars within our part of the Galaxy, aren't they more or less the same age as our star? Wouldn't we have to build a permanent space based 'home'. How long would that last without anywhere to go for supplies etc.? I think trying to escape our fate would be futile.
You can run but you can't hide!

Abacus

Yes, it is. But we can try to delay the inevitable for as long as possible.

David M. Payne

Marduck, my understanding is that as old star systems die, new ones form, and are forming right now. So there should be plenty of solar systems to move to, if we can overcome the problems in star travel to begin with. Humanity will have 500 million years to figure how to travel to the stars, providing it can be done, and regressive religions don't hamper the effort with their attempts to stifle the advances of technology. If humanity is to survive as long as the dinosaurs did, we will have to learn to run among the stars.

David

crownboy

I'm just happy we're not having this conversation 500 million years in the future.

However, I think 500 million years is a good amount of time to possibly develop the technology needed to " escape". I doubt most religions will survive another 500- 1000 years, anyway. Eventually, people will figure out Jesus ain't coming back.

Gringo

I'd like to see us colonize the univesrse, but in a google years, when the last stars have long burned out, we're screwed. Extinction is inevitable? Will there be another Big Bang?

David M. Payne

Yeah, I can't believe that religion can withstand the onslaught of education and the way it opens minds. The Muslims aren’t looking for Jesus though, so there is going to be religion to contend with for some time to come after the Christians give up on the return of the Son of God. And it looks like Islam is really trying to control education to a much higher degree than the other religious cults are. Plus there is still the threat of secular authoritarian cults, like Marxism of Fascism re-surfacing in some new configuration. I just hope some secular or religious doomsday cult with the right biological weapons doesn’t come along, and unleash some super bug on humanity before we can get to the stars.

Well, that time is so far away that I'm willing to dismiss the problem for now. (How far away would that be, anybody know?) It's hard enough to speculate about what we'll be like 500 million years from now, let alone the end of time.

David

Non-praying Mantis

IIRC, the time estimate to the end of the universe is on the order of 100s of billions of years, although perhaps longer, depending on what definition you use for "the end of the universe"

NPM