This is it kids! All media and end-of-the-world prognosticators tells us 2012 is to humanity what the eraser is to the chalkboard. The forecast calls for cloudy skies followed by long periods of immeasurable suffering. Leave the umbrellas at home ’cause where we’re rumored to be heading you won’t need ‘em.
Now we’ve all heard the various scenarios—an object striking the earth, or some kind of geo-physical cataclysmic event like the magnetic poles shifting their positions . . . even dark whispers about solar maximum. Whatever it may (or may not) turn out to be I thought a little cosmic perspective might be in order.
The things you are about to read are, in fact, going to happen. Chances are beyond excellent that mankind will not be around to witness them, the very nature of their occurence dictates that. But it must be understood up front that these awe-inspiring events won’t happen for at least five billion years. So relax and enjoy the rest of your day at the happiest place on . . . well, Earth.
Marshmallows
If you don’t have any in the pantry go ask your neighbor for some. Or, if you’re the type with a strong imagination you can play along in your head. If all you have are the small ones, grab yourself a couple small handfuls; if you have the jumbo kind you would melt between a slab of chocolate and two graham crackers then resist the temptation to do so and grab about six.
Take those marshmallows and cup them in your hands, then enclose them between your palms by bringing your hands together by forming the best possible sphere two human hands can create. They may press against your palms, that’s okay. For our needs here I’d like you to imagine your makeshift globe as the Sun, your hands being the surface and the marshmallows being the interior or core.
Got it? Pretty simple so far.
Give a moments thought to a couple of simple physical properties at play here: there is heat being generated by your body and radiating into your marshmallow ‘core’, and there is also pressure being applied all around that same core, right? Again, pretty simple. If you apply enough heat and pressure the ‘core’ will begin to alter. In our case the marshmallows will begin to soften, which should lead to (besides sitckiness) the slightest of downward pressure from your closed hands.
Still with me? Here’s the fun part . . .
Now begin squeezing thoe palms together, as equally as you can, nice and slow. What should happen, in some fashion, is white stuff should ooze or protrude from any crevice it can find—as you compress your hands you increase the pressure inside and that matter inside wants to get out. We both know you’ll wind up mashing the stuff into a glob of sticky goo, but that’s all part of the illustration, as you’ll see.
Toasted! Marshmallows And Everything Else
Remember I told you to imagine your cupped hands as the Sun? Here’s why:
We all look up in the sky and see the sun as a bright ball of light. Nothing new there. Have you ever considered what creates all that energy? At its core is a process of nuclear fusion going on where hydrogen protons are being fused into helium protons—that takes a staggering amount of heat to accomplish, but at around 15-million degress the Sun pulls this off.
Before I get too far along we should be aware of the Sun’s sheer magnitude. First consider how big our Earth is. Don’t just sit there and nod your head saying “Yeah, it’s pretty big.” I mean look out to the horizon all around you and then think about how really small that vista is compared to what is covering the rest of our planet. That’s awesome, right?
For comparisons sake, wrap your head around this: The Sun is approximately 108 times the size of the Earth. This means the Sun, from a volume standpoint, could hold somewhere around 1.3 million Earths. That’s scary awesome.
Now, back to what’s going on inside the sun. As hydrogen turns into helium the sun creates enough pressure to keep the forces of its own gravity from causing it to collapse upon itself. That’s cool, until all that hydrogen runs out . . . and it will. That sounds very bad, doesn’t it? I can’t say it isn’t, but consider that now the Sun has a core of nothing but helium. There’s gotta be a way to get energy out of that helium to keep the Sun burning bright, right?
Of course! We just need more heat, because 15-million degrees ain’t gonna fuse nothin’ now. For the whole solar system’s sake we need to seriously stoke the furnace and do it fast. But check this out—the Sun has a way of doing that on its own, a mechanism for ratcheting up the heat to the next necessary level; it’s called loss of equilibrium. It’s pretty simple, really. Once all that hydrogen is gone then there’s far less matter to keep the Sun’s gravity from forcing the star to collapse in on itself. Which is precisely what it begins to do.
This is what was happening when you began to squeeze and compress all those marshmallows between yuor palms. That compression was creating more heat to be concentrated into a much smaller mass. Makes sense?
That same thing is what will happen to our Sun. Tht gradual collapse will eventually crank up the internal heat to around 100 million degrees. At that temperature the helium protons will be able to begin fusing into carbon.
So the Sun is going to shrink?
Only the ‘surface’. Think about the process for a moment—if more heat and more pressure are being created, and as a result there’s a whole new batch of energy from this new nuclear fusion of helium into carbon . . . then where will that energy go?
This new fusion will create much more energy than the old one. This means the Sun’s outer atmosphere will have nowhere to go but out . . . in a big way. The sun’s surface will “cool” to somewhere around 2,000 degrees and will begin to glow red. This event is what astrophysicists call a Red Giant.
All that marshmallow pushing through the spaces between your fingers and palms—that is what is going to happen inside our Sun, without the zero calorie tastiness of marshmallows, of course.
At this point we arrive at our first frightening example of what would factually be the complete eradication of every living thing on Earth.
POOF!
As the Sun’s atmosphere expands it will first enter into Mercury’s orbit — bye Mercury! Everybody wave bye bye to the closest planet to our Sun. The increasing proximity to the Sun will mean lots more radiant energy will begin hammering the Earth. This will be nothing but bad news.
As helium continues to turn into carbon at the Sun’s core its outer atmosphere will enter into Venus’s orbit. Her fate will be identical to Mercury. Guess who’s next on the menu?
The Sun, at this point, will fill at least half the horizon, if we would be around to actually see it. I tell you what, Arizona gets f$!@*%ng hot during the summer, but this new kind of heat would put Hell to shame.
Earth’s atmosphere would essentially be vaporized; the surface of our planet would eventually reach the same temperature as the surface of the Sun. The oceans would begin to boil, quite literally. They would reach a rolling boil and very soon evaporate away. Rocks—entire mountain ranges—would begin to glow white hot. As the Earth entered into the Sun’s atmosphere it would encounter gases that would act as a brake on its orbit, slowing enough to cause the planet to spiral downward. Our home, humanity’s very birthplace and graveyard, would eventually go up in a planetary puff of smoke.
I take consolation from this, actually. Nobody is spared. Politicians, lobbyists, and the obscenely rich (sometimes the same person) won’t be excused—not a damn thing they can do to forestall their own demise with the rest of we little people. So too for the drug cartels, lawyers, gangs, radical fundamentalists, communists, whining liberals and their socialist bed buddies, and Barney.
Man, that feels good, doesn’t it? :^)
When Mingling At A Party Can Be Bad
Mingling at a cosmic party can have particularly undesirable effects.
Consider Andromeda—not the strain or the goddess, rather the galaxy. In galactic terms it’s our next door neighbor. She’s three times the size of our cozy little Milky Way. Yet even as the universe expands Andromeda is coming toward us, and when she knocks on our door it won’t be for a cup of milk . . .she’ll want the whole candy bar (get it . . . Milky Way galaxy . . . candy bar). The melding of two galaxies can be quite messy.
If you’re not sick of marshmallows yet then let’s return to those white puffs. Most of us have, at one time or another, stuck a marshmallow or two on a stick or an unbent wire hanger and held them close to a heart source, like a camp fire or (for you city folk who rarely get to the outdoors) just above the burner on the stove. Depending on how you hold the stick one may be closer to the heat than the other, and subsequently may begin to slide down to kiss, then stick, to the second puff. This is fine, unless the first one is on fire.
When two galaxies collide there is an amazing amount of stellar matter that merges. Surprisingly, there is a lot of space between the larger bodies and, statistically speaking, it is highly unlikely any of these will collide. A collision might be too convenient. Sometimes jumping in the pool is better than testing the water first—you get the shock over with sooner.
Our humble Earth has a certain gravitational affinity for the Sun, a consequence of the two objects comparative masses. But during the collision of galaxies it is entirely feasible that a star or planet of considerable mass could slide between us and the Sun. That would disrupt the pull of the Sun and we could begin orbiting around the new star, giving Earth only her second home star, ever. Sometimes new is good . . . this is not one of those times.
Without an energy source like the Sun nearby the oceans would freeze, all plant life would die, which of course means mankind isn’t going to fare well either. All that without any kind of object impact or collapsing home star. Depending on the mass of the new object and its distance from us we could suffer a mind numbing list of geological catastrophes, the sum of which would easily set us on the path of entering the fossil record just as any large asteroid impact might.
So what about that white goopy mess of marshmallows you created from the built up pressure and heat inside your hands? Well, to get rid of that you’d have to turn up the heat again to convert the sticky mass into something else, some other kind of energy (or foodstuff). The same can be said for the Sun.
When all that helium has been used up all that will be left is a core of carbon. This is where the train pulls into the station. You see, to convert the carbon into some other form of energy for the Sun to use would require far more heat that it could generate by further collapsing. This is the end of the line for our Sun. At this stage, when it can no longer support the processes of nuclear fusion at its core, it becomes a White Dwarf. Nothing left for the Sun to do now but cool for billions of years and eventually go dark.
So the next time you stick a marshmallow on a stick, and thrust it into the fire to toast it, think of our complete extinction!
