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[Heron TSG]

actually, jupiter is 1/16th the size of the sun, if little bear does not deceive.

[Footkerchief]

^^^ in diameter maybe

Reading the exchanges between Footkerchief and LegoLord above reminded me of the two drunken technicians at the beginning.

There are worse things to be compared to, I suppose.

[Belteshazzar]

For I have Tasted the Fungus!

[Sir_Geo]

density and size aren't interchangeable, for example you can have something the size of a pea weigh hundred of thousand of tons (because its really dense) and you can have something the size of a house that weighs a fraction of that (like a house sized chunk of ice)

[numerobis]

A house-sized chunk of ice is about 500 tonnes (assuming a 200m^2 home with 2.5m ceilings).  Just in case you were wondering.

Wikipedia indicates the inner core is about 5,700 K at the moment, cooling by 100 degrees per billion years.  If the core were just cooling linearly for the rest of history, that allows it 57 billion years to live -- far longer than the Sun has left going for it.  Of course the core would start to cool faster as fissile materials stop fissing and the big fusion reactor outside fuses all its fuel (reducing the temperature at the surface, allowing more heat to radiate out).  But also convection would also stop, reducing the transfer of heat out.  So there you go.

What were we talking about?

[Baughn]

Actually, once the hydrogen-carbon cycle stops working in the sun's core, it'll collapse until it can start burning helium, which will make it a lot *hotter*. (The total radius of the sun will increase; the core, not so much)

This is not necessarily a good thing, seeing as it means it will burn that helium a lot faster.. right now the core is at 5700K, which is just about an understandable temperature, and it burns really slowly. Human fusion reactors have to work with several thousand to a million times hotter plasma, so don't be surprised it's been hard to make them work.


Hm. Oh, yeah. My point.


..though I'm not entirely sure how I got here from there... anyhow, long-term, we'll probably dismantle the sun. Right now it'd stop working while still having burnt less than a percent of its hydrogen, and also there's the whole "radiating most of it into space" thing. This might be really long-term, but I'm sure we'll do it.

Which, of course, is actually a good reason to think there are no aliens anywhere nearby.

Planets can be hard to see, but this sort of thing? Not so much.

[Belteshazzar]

Or this means that any aliens nearby are either paranoid (don't want to reveal their position with such obvious solar machinery), finished their projects (if they made a real tight and efficient system it shouldn't radiat much at all to see it by), or are insufficiently advanced (also not a good sign as it ends up working into the Fermi Equation with only a few of all possible civs making it past the all-to-critical phase of interplanetary travel.)

[GenericOverusedName]

For I have Tasted the Fungus!

Yeah, Alpha Centauri was fun. Nothing like a planet-sized semi-sentient fungal mass with the power of a god and the mind of a 2 year old.

[Alfador]

Argh, all these terrible puns that don't even work.
1) Fungi isn't pronounced "fun guy"
Learn your classifications, folks.

...You'd make a better teacher if you told us how it IS pronounced... Seriously, I thought it was "fun guy" too, and now I don't know what the correct pronunciation is...

Fungus is like "Fun Gus", the G being a hard sound like saying "Fun Gas!"
Fungi is like "Fun Jie", the G being a soft sound like saying "Fun Jive!"

Thank you! Now I know! (and apparently already knew the singular correctly)

[Alfador]

siphon hydrogen from a gas giant?  [. . .]  A star is just a fusion reactor, it uses fuel like anything else.

Hydrogen is the primary fuel component in fusion reactors.  And on a gas giant, it probably wouldn't be pure hydrogen form, but that would probably be good enough for a star so hot simple particles can't hold together.  The other thing about the sun is that it can use some other gases slightly larger than hydrogen; that's how we get all the large elements like gold, iron, and lead.

Anything heavier than iron is actually supernova remnants, since normal stellar fusion doesn't go past iron.

[Alfador]

the sun (which will radiate 99.99999% of the energy into space)

Let's build a buuthandi!!

[LegoLord]

the sun (which will radiate 99.99999% of the energy into space)

Let's build a buuthandi!!

I have no idea what that is, but it would be awesome if we could build some sort of lead shell around the sun that orbited in a way so that sunlight and radiation would only reach earth.

[Muno syoan]

The cheaper, easier, more likely alternative to sun siphoning is the Dyson sphere, where you actually wrap the sun in radiation harvesting panelling and/ or electromagnetic fields. But even if we suddenly focused all of our global resources on actual production of one, construction wouldn't start for decades, nor finish for thousands of years.
Really, you're talking about units of time that are impossible to visualize. To us, the weekend is a long way off. I doubt we can all(or even a majority of us can) keep our attention on a singular project for our entire lives, which has to then be passed on to our children so that they can do the same ad infinitum.

All in all, I think we're best off sticking to dwarves.
(and scientific endeavour that can be completed in the estimated survival duration of our species, let alone the planets')

[LegoLord]

Or we can hope things go like they did in Firefly's history and begin constructing one of those Dyson thingies now.

What's this about humans not lasting longer than Earth?  We're too resilient for that.

[Zironic]

The sun will last 10 billion years

well, you bolster that with another tinier sun! - Jupiter.
You might squeek 11 billion years or so. However I doubt we will be a similiar form in 10 billion years.