Recently I was upset to learn the sun is likely to go crazy hot in 5 billion years or so and kill all life on Earth including me. What can I do now to make sure my name survives that?
I mean like a plaque with my initials, like a “Kilroy Was Here” but with the staying power to still be around when our sun goes from yellow to violent.
It can be a diamond or a cockroach or some primordial ooze, or a really well-protected safe-deposit box. I don’t care, as long as my mere initials somehow survive at least another 14 billion years.
What’s the best way to get my initials etched into the future forever?
Hrm. Back to the problem at hand. How about thrusting them into another dimension? Creating an array of complementary novas, each one acting as a pixel in a giant LED of your initials? Or simply asking it nicely?
First, you need to know that the sun can’t go nova ever. It’s a physical impossibility.
What will happen is that the sun will swell into a red giant star. The surface temperature of a red giant is a comparatively low 5000 K. Even that’s high for most ordinary materials and the earth won’t be a good locale for anybody trying to read your initials: it will buried deep within the sun.
If some childhood trauma has left you with a deep-seated need to carve your initials into things to prove your identity, your best bet is to launch them into orbit around Jupiter. If your psychosis means that you can’t give up your clawholds on mama then explore whatever few minerals or composites exist with a melting point higher than 5000K. I have a feeling your options will be limited, but it’s a start.
Put them on a deep space probe. Pioneer 10 and 11 and the Voyager probes are long out of the Sun’s reach. You could put them on paper, if they’re fired far enough away. Shoot them in the right direction and they might get to another solar system.
You recently missed a chance. The New Horizons probe to Pluto contains a CD with the names of several thousand ordinary folks who signed up for it online. No doubt something like this will be a part of every NASA probe from here on, and there will probably be another probe to leave the Solar System sometime in your lifetime, so you’re not out of luck completely.
