Question regarding the sun and earth.

[Cloengaa]

Hey all.

Just a question. The suns surface is around 5000 C right. What would happen to us if lets say the sun ramped up the surface temp. to 5100C or 6000C ?

Would 100 degrees raise be enough to make trouble for us ?

[alanjgreen]

I read somewhere that in a billion years the sun will be 10% hotter than today and that will probably be enough to end life of earth.

[ScottS]

I read somewhere that in a billion years the sun will be 10% hotter than today and that will probably be enough to end life of earth.

Maybe life will evolve over a billion years to compensate.

[ronin]

The sun is getting hotter, in about 1.5 billion years the earth will be too hot to have liquid water. We will not make it to the sun going red giant or bumping into Andromeda. We will be roasted well before that happens :grin: . The habitable zone is moving outwards, about that time Mars will be warmer and nicely in the middle of the habitable zone also but with no atmosphere, water or magnetic shield. So we ain't going there.

Equally it means that a few billion years ago the sun was cooler, meaning Mars was cooler, more so then now.

[ollypenrice]

We're doomed!

But we knew that already!

lly

[Alien 13]

We're doomed!

But we knew that already!

lly

For organic life its goodbye but if we can develop self replicating intelegent hardware in the next few hundred years then evolution will do the rest in a very short space of time.

Alan

[Kiwi Kev]

For organic life its goodbye but if we can develop self replicating intelegent hardware in the next few hundred years then evolution will do the rest in a very short space of time.

Alan

Sounds a bit like the Mass Effect computer games :-P.

[Cloengaa]

Well I am not talking about evolution of the sun in the future.

What I meant was lets say next year the sun produces more heat and it raises its surface temp. about 100 or 500 degrees C. just because it maybe gets hotter that year.

Would that be devastating to us or ? Would we feel such a great difference in temperature that it would annihilate us ?

[jnb]

Hey all.

Just a question. The suns surface is around 5000 C right. What would happen to us if lets say the sun ramped up the surface temp. to 5100C or 6000C ?

Would 100 degrees raise be enough to make trouble for us ?

To a first approximation the Earth's temperature would be proportional to the Sun's surface temperature(*) so an increase from 5000K to 5100K at the Sun would raise average temperatures on Earth from about 300K to 306K, which might be survivable. Raising the temperature from 5000K to 6000K would raise the Earth's temperature from about 300K to 360K which would probably not be  survivable.

(*) They can both be modelled as blackbodies following a Stefan Boltzman law. So power =∝ T⁴

The power at the earth is proportional to the inverse square of the orbit radius

So P(earth) = P(Sun)/(Earth orbit / Sun radius)2 = which is about 1/50000 of the suns power

So earth temperature is sun's temperature / 50000^1/4 which works out at about 330K so for a back of envelope calculation it's plausible

Follow the numbers through as they change and you will see that the temperatures are in proportion to each other. So the simple model above is reasonable first approximation.

[Ronnie67]

I would comment on that, if the Earths temperature did rise to 5000k, it would prove devastating for life on earth, but I wouldn't go as far as extinction, the earth would somehow evolve in a way which would probably adapt to this heat and we would also, probably start living under ground, but hopefully if this did happen we would be long gone from this planet, itt would probably be barren

[jasonspaced]

Hey all.

Just a question. The suns surface is around 5000 C right. What would happen to us if lets say the sun ramped up the surface temp. to 5100C or 6000C ?

Would 100 degrees raise be enough to make trouble for us ?

Torquay's tourist industry would benefit from this, as would the palm trees.  I'm all in favour.

I don't really see the point in worrying about this though, as if it were possible for a change like this to occur suddenly, the fact that we (and all life) are still here after hundreds of millions of years is evidence enough to alleviate concern.  So I'm saying if this did happen, it would not be the first time it has happened and life endured in spite of it.