How long will it take for the moon to drift far enough away from earth that the lunar month extends by a day? Or two days?
Working on a worldbuilding project for a dnd campaign, and want to subtly hint that its super far into the future with the lunar calendar. If you also know of any websites that can generate star charts of what the night sky will look like in millions of years, that would also be great.
How long will it take for the moon to drift far enough away from earth that the lunar month extends by a day? Or two days?
Not positive, but probably never. The explanation is even more weird. Given 50 billion years, the Earth rotation would slow and would become tidal locked so that one side of Earth is always facing the moon. The other side of Earth would never see the moon. However, in only 5 billion years our sun will expand and engulf all the inner planets including the Earth and the moon.
in only 5 billion years our sun will expand and engulf all the inner planets including the Earth
Somehow, this scares me.
/> invents immortality
/> now has to find a way to counteract the heat death of the universeStep 1. Invent immortality
Step 2. Figure out a way to get that to everyone on the planet
Step 3. Hope that if people are given the ability that they can live without consuming anything, they will help get rid of the corporate controls tied to everything and make the world a better place.
Step 4. Now that we’ve got 5 days left to live in peace before the sun gets to close I question, wait… Did i immortal so well now we are all going to have to figure out how to inhabit the interior of the sun. Being that it is hot enough everything melts there are no solids, but we are far less dense than the center of the sun, so we would essentially sink to a level of plasma? That was equal in density to our foot pressure, and then walk around in a liquid state. Much larger than earth.
Step 5. Figure out how we can see anything.
I can’t think of any version of immortality that wouldn’t eventually be a living hell.
Being immortal doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t feel discomfort or pain. Even if you do have a version that doesn’t feel pain or discomfort, you could still be trapped, unable to move, in complete darkness, for all eternity.
Step 3. Hope that if people are given the ability that they can live without consuming anything
If human immortality is widespread to a larger population, its even worse. People stop dying, but resources don’t increase. Some versions of immortality also mean humanity becomes sterile. So the population never decreases because people alive today will still exist, but never another new generation.
Step 4. Did i immortal so well now we are all going to have to figure out how to inhabit the interior of the sun.
An immortal “human inhabiting the sun” will mean a human the enters the outer corona, but never having their flesh burn because of the magic immortality. However all your clothes would be burned off long ago. So it would be a bunch of naked immortal humans slowly descending toward the core of the sun eventually being wrapped around the dense pure-neutron core where the affects of gravity would be 100 billion times Earth gravity. You’d stick to it unable to move a single muscle. Matter would be pressing again you all over your body at that same strength. Eventually pure neutrons would encase you inside the core of the star. you’d be stuck in the solid heart of a star for all of eternity.
If we had a larger sun, you might have had the chance to escape when the sun goes supernova and be cast out into the galaxy, but you’ve got bad luck to be stuck in our solar system and our sun isn’t big enough to explode as supernova. Instead, our sun will eventually become a white dwarf, a small star slowing bleeding its remaining heat out into space. This process will take literally trillions of years. Eventually when that heat is gone our sun will be a black dwarf. We have no idea what happens after black dwarf because none exist because the universe isn’t old enough yet! Our universe has only been around for 13.8 billion years.
So I hope you enjoy your immortality stuck inside the heart of a cooling star unable to move a muscle with the rest of naked humanity mixed in with you.
I’ll be keep my mortality knowing I’ll be happily gone in less than 50 years, thanks.
UQ Holder (a manga) has a part where an immortal character is floating in space suffering endlessly because she can’t breathe but won’t die (her immortality is being unable to go to hell due to a divine curse), she is slowly drifting towards a star and she fears that she will burn and die for eternity when it finally pulls her in.
Pretty cool take on immortality imo
It should but also humans and almost all other currently existing organisms will be long extinct by then if that helps your existential crisis, though admittedly it may hinder it.
We’ve sent probes to other worlds. There’s a very small chance we accidentally introduced some of Earths microorganisms to other planets that would still be around in 5 billion years after the sun. We’ve sent all kinds of stuff to Mars which will still be around when our sun turns into a Red Giant eating Mercury, Venus, and Earth. However Mars will have courtside seats to the sun at that point and be baked in high intensity heat and radiation, so I wouldn’t have much hope of any life we introduced there surviving.
We’ve also sent probes into Jupiter. There its unlikely anything could live we brought, but who knows? Lastly we put a lander on Saturn’s largest moon Titan. Its not very hospitable to Earth life there though. Its our best bet though. The only other chances life from Earth would survive is all of the probes we’ve sent out into interstellar space.
I can’t see anything about the moon’s period lengthening, but wikipedia has this Timeline of the far future which includes:
100,000 [years from now]:The proper motion of stars across the celestial sphere, which results from their movement through the Milky Way, renders many of the constellations unrecognizable.
3 million: Due to tidal deceleration gradually slowing Earth’s rotation, a day on Earth is expected to be one minute longer than it is today.
600 million: Tidal acceleration moves the Moon far enough from Earth that total solar eclipses are no longer possible.
so that’s neat. there’s a lot of other things on that list you might be able to weave in, too
The lunar month is not dependent on the distance to earth by itself. Rather it’s a consequense of the relative positions of earth sun and moon and how they evolve through time. So an adventurer in your campaign would not be able to identify the, say, epoch just by noticing the odd lunar calendar. At least not without more context. Also I’m pretty sure the long term drift of the moon would be towards earth rather than away from it, even if these kinds of extrapolations are not reliable since they presume that things we’ve observed in the last milennia or so will hold true for several many more to come.
What you can use reliably to hint at a distant future using astronomy is the expected evolution of the celestial chart, caused mainly by precession and the movement of the sun along its galactic orbit, or the spectrum and apparent size of the sun, since it will turn redder with time. It depends on how far into the future ou want to go. But then again nobody is going to notice without appropriate context.
Good luck in your campaign! I’m a dm too I love worldbuilding.
In our reality with our orbits, your thinking centuries minimum and millennia easily. It looks like 3.8 centimeters a year, if this website is close to accurate.
@Shkshkshk @asklemmy this has more info than I ever knew about this
https://www.techexplorist.com/tidal-pull-moon-caused-slow-steady-lengthening-earth-day/63772/
