![]() ![]() Perhaps we won’t even have a physical form. Perhaps we will have merged with our computers. Trillions of years of evolution will have long since transformed us, Laughlin says. Such star-hopping colonists could spread across our entire galaxy before Earth overheats, even assuming no advances in rocketry.ĭon’t picture cave dwellers huddling around geothermal heaters. But future humans might build interstellar arks, giant ships on which generations of travelers would live and die before delivering colonists to a new destination. At that speed, it would take 70,000 years to reach the nearest star. ![]() The fastest spacecraft built to date, Voyager 1, is racing away from the sun at 38,027 miles per hour. ![]() Even with current technology, however, interstellar travel is conceivable on the kind of timescales we’re talking about. Perhaps our descendants will have mastered near-light-speed travel. ![]() The star-hopping eraįortunately, Laughlin points out, there are 200 billion other stars in the Milky Way, most with planets of their own. But the message is clear: Life will be impossible in our solar system. “The exact dates depend on how much mass you estimate the sun will lose and how much planets will move,” Kaltenegger says. About 8 billion years from now, the flaring sun will make conditions intolerably hot all the way out past Pluto. ![]()
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