Transformers Multiverse

zlee & boo 💜

Yes, actually, voting consistently for the next several million years could theoretically help stop this, and I’m not being funny. I’ll explain.

The natural evolution of the sun being referred to here is that as the gases in the sun burn, they convert to other gases in a chain reaction, which causes the sun to grow in both heat and size.

Lab experiments have shown that on the kind of small scale that can be reproduced in a lab, that chain reaction can be altered in ways that—if extrapolated to the entire sun—would prevent that from happening and keep the sun at its current size and heat. So with sufficiently advanced technology, it is actually possible for us to stop the death of the sun.

How does voting come into this? Well, because if you want the funding for the projects that study the life cycle of stars and the chemical makeup of our sun, you need to vote for science-minded candidates. Scientific studies don’t just grow on trees, especially when you need stuff like the LHC to make these studies happen. And figuring out how to remove waste gases from the sun (and perhaps how to use them, as well) is the kind of thing that will take centuries of scientific innovation. There’s no question about that. In sci-fi some dude would discover the magical 200th element impossibilium and in like ten years flat the problem would be solved, but that’s not how real life works. So yes: you’d need to vote for people who want the time and money devoted to this.

BUT WAIT! You say. Wouldn’t it be easier to just. Move to another planet, rather than trying to delay the inevitable by a few billion years?

I see no reason not to examine both possibilities, but let’s look at that option! In order for humanity to thrive on a planet with a younger, more hospitable star, we need: 1) food we can eat, 2) water we can drink, 3) an oxygenated atmosphere that protects from cosmic rays, 4) a 24-hour day, and 5) gravity similar to earth, along with 6) a way to get there.

Honestly? The easiest way to achieve all this is probably making an artificial planet, I’m gonna level with you. Even if we found a magical perfect fit in terms of size/distance from sun/atmosphere, we’d have to figure out how to get plants and animals we can eat—along with everything THEY eat—to that planet. Synthesizing water wouldn’t actually be too hard, but everything else? Oy vay. That’s gonna be more centuries of scientific research and innovation. And in the process we’re either going to have to figure out how to make gravity-shielded multigenerational ships to get humanity to that planet, or we’re going to have to invent FTL travel. More science! Which means…more research! And more money needed! Which means NEEDING PEOPLE IN CHARGE WHO TAKE IT SERIOUSLY!

So yes, technically, even on a timescale of billions of years, voting matters. Because it’s not just about you, and never has been. It’s about all of us.

One of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics today is that the forces in galaxies do not seem to add up. Galaxies rotate much faster than predicted by applying Newton's law of gravity to their visible matter, despite those laws working well everywhere in the solar system. To prevent galaxies from flying apart, some additional gravity is needed. This is why the idea of an invisible substance called dark matter was first proposed. But nobody has ever seen the stuff. And there are no particles in the hugely successful Standard Model of particle physics that could be the dark matter—it must be something quite exotic.