I went down a bit of a rabbit hole today about the history of life and its evolution, but also the future of life on earth. Things like how the sun will get larger and hotter which will remove CO2 from the atmosphere and drive plants and animals extinct within about a billion years, how the water will be removed by a moist greenhouse effect and how the last prokaryotes will go extinct about ~3 billion years from now.
Supposedly from the first evolution of life about 4 billion years ago until the end of life about ~3 billion years from now, about a trillion generations of prokaryotes will have existed.
Humans have existed for about 10,000 generations. Interesting stuff showing there’s no real direction to any of this. Life started with prokaryotes, and it’ll end with prokaryotes.
Assuming, of course, that we (or some other intelligent species) doesn’t do anything about it. At the very least, there’s plenty of time before Earth becomes uninhabitable to apes for us to travel elsewhere. And on that kind of timescale, given the motivation, it’s even plausible that we could actually move the entire Earth.
Well, OK, moving the entire Earth would depend on us not Somebody Else’s Problem-ing until it was too late. So probably not humans. Still, there’s enough time that some other intelligent species might evolve and do it even if we don’t.
Or it might be easier to pull the nasty heavy elements (like helium, so anything heavier than hydrogen) out of the sun’s core to keep it alive longer. You could also slowly dump in additional hydrogen to keep it running for many trillions of years.
Well, maybe. With hundreds of millions of years of advancement in technology, I wouldn’t be so hubristic as to declare it impossible. But we already know how to move planets, and it’s not even particularly hard if you’re patient enough.
Yeah, intelligence that is capable of technology will change everything about the outcome of life on this planet.
The reason I posted this is because even though I understand on an intellectual level that life is absurd and there is no direction and purpose to it, seeing it written down like that makes it easier to process.
A trillion generations of prokaryotes. Evolving towards nothing, no goal, accomplishing nothing but creating the next generation. Some evolve into eukaryotes, some eukaryotes evolve into plants and animals. But they all go extinct in the end.
And its probably going to happen on various planets. Maybe life will exist for 7 billion years on another planet. Going from protocells to prokaryotes (or something akin to that) to eukaryotes, to plants and animals. Then as the star and climate changes everything more complex goes extinct and then the prokaryotes go extinct too. Intelligent life capable of technology won’t evolve on every planet that has life, so they will be at the whims of the star and planet they are on.
A totally pointless system serving no external purpose or external goal. Sadly I got into religion as a teenager so I have this unconscious belief that there is a purpose to life that I can’t shake, which I hate because I know its not true objectively. I like the existentialism of knowing there is no purpose or goal of all of it, I just wish I could shake the desire to believe theres a goal or purpose.
Supposedly because we evolved in an environment where our environment was basically all plants and animals that wanted to survive, reproduce and not die, we evolved to see intent where there is no intent.