Eight minutes and some-odd seconds ago, our Sun abruptly turned off due to a little-known physical law. We’re just about to find out.
How long until the Earth becomes too cold to support life? Granted, most plant life would die off pretty quickly, so an ecosystem would be too much to ask for… but how long until the surface of the Earth becomes uninhabitable?
IAN qualified to answer this but that won’t stop me from taking a shot at it.
Based on how the temperature falls off after sunset in the dead of winter in Winterpeg, I don’t think we would have very long.
On the outside, less than a week. I suspect it would be closer to a couple or three days. Of course, some of the fires presently burning could be sustained for a while (coal fires, nuclear generators), the fact that everything else dies out would make survival impossible.
With some quick adjustments, humans could delay the inevitable for another week/month(?). But without transportation, local food stores run dry fast.
This has been done any number of times, the most recent seemingly being What will happen to Earth when the starnappers strike?
Far be it from me to be the first nit-picker, but just what to do mean by ‘turned off’? Does the sun absolutely cease radiating any heat or light?? (That’d be one heck of an undiscovered physical law.)
Just asking because, say, if nuclear fusion suddenly stopped taking place anywhere inside the body of the sun, it’d still take a long time to cool down. That baby is HOT!! 
If we wake up tomorrow and the sun is just gone, most people will be dead in a week. The oceans will certainly be frozen over within a month, based on how quickly the north pole ices over in winter. Within a week at least we’re down to 60 below everywhere except active volcanic sites. If it’s 60 below you can at least keep your house warm by running the furnace full blast…but what are you going to do once the oxygen in the air starts freezing out? When your fuel oil tank turns from liquid to jello consistancy?
If we had a couple of years warning we could build some nuclear powered biospheres that could keep a couple hundred or even thousands of people alive for years and years. But…if the sun is going bye-bye, how do you get people to work on building the arks unless they think they’ve got a pretty good shot at being on them? I would imagine order would break down pretty soon, you’d have to have guards who will shoot to kill to protect the site, and how many guards will you need, and how many guards are gonna get a bunk in the ark, and how many guards are you going to find who are willing to guard the ark even though they’re guaranteed to be left outside to freeze to death? Tough problem. Best plan is to have an “A” ark and a “B” ark, and you promise the guards a spot on the B ark. Which turns out to be made of rotten apple cores and chinese newspapers. Or you have a secret cadre of guards who will execute most of the other guards once the sun vanishes. And then another secret cadre to get rid of those guys.
Precisely that. The Sun goes dark. No heat, no light, but it’s still there, keeping us in orbit. It doesn’t even blow up or anything. Heck of a thing, ain’t it? You’d think all those pesky scientists would’ve spotted that a while back.
I’m curious as to how insulating our atmosphere would be- I mean, the Earth’s a big, round rock, and it’s got a lot of heat stored up. It’s also still geologically active, so there’s another source of heat.
Now, let’s say we decide that freezing to death won’t be a lot of fun, as it’d make next season’s Survivor pretty damned depressing. Sure, we could set a lot of fires, to try to keep us nice and toasty- and after that, maybe some nuclear heating. How long do you think we could keep going?
The atmosphere doesn’t have a lot of heat stored in it compared to the earth’s core. And the reason the core is still hot after 4 billion years is that it’s a very slow process to transfer that heat from the molten core to the relatively frigid crust. Think how cold the north and south poles get after a few months of no sunlight…and thats with some transfer of warm air from sunlight parts of the earth.
Setting off nuclear bombs to heat the earth is pretty silly…almost all that heat is going to get radiated out into space pretty quickly, or absorbed by the crust. You’d probably not even be able to detect the difference. Besides, you need to save the uranium in the warheads for reproccessing by the nuclear plants that power the arks. And then there’s food. No more plants growing, ever, except in nuclear heated and lighted underground hydroponic farms. And unless you have some advance warning you’re not gonna be able to build those farms. Maybe some nuclear power plants could last for a long time…but they’re likely to run out of food pretty quickly.
If all the fusion reactions stopped, it would take something like 10[sup]7[/sup] years for the sun to go out, IIRC from my undergrad Astronomy & Astrophysics class.
If you somehow sucked all the heat out of the sun, it would take something like a half hour to collapse, again IIRC.
Not unless your furnace and the electrical grid or fuel supply chain in your area are designed to deal with that sort of thing. I used to live in the DC suburbs, and prolonged subzero temperatures often made your furnace not work properly, especially if you had a heat pump (like we did). Wikipedia says that some heat pumps don’t work so well when outdoor temperatures go below -5 to -10 C. Where I live now, a lot of houses (especially older ones) aren’t terribly well insulated, for the same reason that houses built on the east coast aren’t designed to withstand a 7.0 earthquake. The electrical grid gets quite strained when the temperatures get into triple digits in the summer and everyone uses their air conditioners, so I’m pretty sure it couldn’t cope with all the heater usage (and many of us do have electric heaters) if it were 60 below.
True. So ironically, the people at the research bases on Antarctica might be the last people to freeze to death, since their heating systems are already designed to deal with extreme cold.
I’d believe that. They probably also store a lot more reserve fuel and food than your typical suburban neighborhood does, too, because you expect difficulties in delivering things like fuel and food to Antarctica that you wouldn’t expect in a typical US suburb or city.
Actually, your hypothetical would be pretty similar if you said the sun just vanished. If it’s not keeping us warm any more, the only short term benefit of being in orbit is tides caused by solar gravity. I suppose tidal heating is a factor, but probably not a big one.
I’m also pretty sure that my car wouldn’t run if it were suddenly 60 below tomorrow. People who live in places where that sort of thing does happen have things like insulated or heated garages and various modifications for their cars to deal with it. I don’t have those things, because there’s no need for them in the normal climate of the Bay Area.
There would be major transportation problems if we got any significant snowfall down to near sea level in the Bay Area, too. Several years ago, the major highway connecting Santa Cruz and San Jose was shut down during the morning commute because there were a few inches of snow on the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains, we didn’t really have the snowplows to deal with it, and people living in Santa Cruz or San Jose don’t typically have snow tires or snow chains unless they drive in areas where there typically is snow. I imagine something similar would happen in other places that don’t typically get snow- your typical city or county just isn’t going to have spent money on things like snowplows if they don’t get significant snow in a typical winter.
OK, so that would get you through the first day. What about when it gets colder still?
Oh no! Not more California ‘‘rolling blackouts’’!!
I have little hope of stumbling across my “soul mate”. I expect to die a little lonely. Not gonna leave little mini-me’s trying to establish some kind of dynasty. shrugs The point is that I would work on the project without needing to think I might get on it. As frustrating as Humans are, there are some good things worth preserving, IMHO.
That estimate is a long-enduring error. The actual time for core photons to make their “random walk” to the surface is somewhere between 10,000 and 170,000 years.
Sans Sun, the Earth would freeze rapidly. We’re not talking about Antarctic winter cold, either, but cold like Triton. The atmosphere isn’t thick enough to provide much of a thermal blanket, nitrogen which comprises the bulk of the atmosphere would turn liquid, and possibly the oxygen as well until the atmosphere achieves a temperature/pressure equilibrium, leaving only a tenuous atmosphere of residual oxygen and nitrogen, maybe a little methane, plus whatever trace gases don’t freeze. (The addition to the ocean would be measureable but not huge; somewhere on the order of 50 feet. So, if your invested in beachfront property or Manhattan real estate, you might want to thing about divesting, but as long as you’re inland and uphill you should be okay.) No moonlit walks on the beach either, and cigarette smokers, careful where you throw those butts; that liquid oxygen will cause easy fires, though they probably won’t last too long as the free oxygen will rapidly combine with any carbon compounds.
The only hope for the long term would be to enhance volcanism in an attempt to produce environmental heat. I’m not a geophysicist, nor do I play one in BadAstronomy.com’s worst SciFi Movie Ever, but I doubt you could get anything like enough heat to keep the atmosphere from freezing, much less make the surface habitable, so you’d have to tap the thermal energy to keep your underground shelters warm. (You wouldn’t want to live on the surface because lacking an atmosphere you’d be at hazard to meteor bombardment and cosmic radiation that is too energetic to be deflected by the magnetic field.)
Basically, we’d be fucked. Sweet dreams…
Stranger
With the accellerated rate of survival of the fittest micro varmits they will outgrow and outpoison us first. The baby lettuce e. coli, and some newly discovered worse varmit. Doesn’t respond to anti-biotics and you’er soon out of the world for good. When all other animal life is killed off till there is nothing left but varmits to poison each other.
This was in a class I took over ten years ago- I could also be mis-remembering the number or the exact conditions the professor was talking about.
The reason the core is still hot is due to nuclear decay, which is ongoing. If it was just residual heat it would have cooled off a long time ago.
I guess you’re implying something akin the sun collapsing into a black hole and the earth continuing to orbit said black hole at the same rate (assuming the sun didn’t get suddenly heavier and simply collapsed under the mass it already had). This is not a possible transition, or at least almost infinitely improbable one but at least the end result is somewhat of a stable system. Hey maybe that’s what all that dark matter is, just solar systems with the stars collapsing into black holes… I’m just kidding don’t hit me.
I’d imagine that being a very survivable vermin and having reached the nuclear age humanity has a slim chance of surviving, at least a small number of us. The outside will not be in any way a livable environment, but a biodome around a nuclear reactor might be viable living quarters while you can keep the reactor running. The problem is - you probably can’t build one if the sun is already out. If by some extremely unlikely chance any of the fission reactors we already have operational might serve as such a makeshift biodome for a few months in the existing configuration, that could possibly be a starting point for rebuilding civilization. That reactor is not going to run forever, and whatever fuel is stored at the facility will have to last you a few years or even decades before you think of something better.
Is that possible? Eh probably not, but I don’t know enough about fission reactors to say for sure. Could you operate them in a low energy thermal mode, as in reduce cooling to account for the extreme environment outdoors yet with almost no load on the turbines? How much fuel would you need for such operation? What really happens to the athmosphere, will it liquify? solidify? separate?