The Great Escape
is a 1963 Holliwood film about an escape by Allied prisoners of war from a
German Prisoners of War camp during World War II, starring Steve McQueen, James
Garner and Richard Attenborough and directed by John Sturges. The film is based
on a real story of the mass escape from Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Poland, in
the province of Lower Silesia, Nazi Germany.
But our story is
different.
It is based on the paleontological
evidence that shows mass destruction of species in our Mother Earth is a cyclic
process, repeating in a specific time interval. In the last 500 million years
of history of the earth, there was at least five such major mass extinctions
were identified. They are 450 Million years ago, 360 million years ago, 250
million years ago, 200 million years ago and 65 million years ago, the latest
in which whole set of the dinosaurs species were believed to be destroyed. (Read
the ‘Great Dying’).
BUT Man is such a kind of marvelous
animal who can travel back and forth through time. He can make a well defined
destruction plan as well as a survival plan. Such a survival plan had already
made, a plan for the next 10^18 years, or even beyond
University of California, Santa Cruz
astronomer and Science’s leading ‘soothsayer’ Greg Laughlin is the man behind such a plan. He
started making the generous assumption that humans can survive multiple ice
ages and deflect an inevitable asteroid or comet strike. NASA predicts that within
a period of 1 billion years, there is at least 10 chances of hitting the size
of the rock that wiped out the dinosaurs.
But one major problem is that within in
a billion years, our Sun will start aging and will start emitting 10% more
energy. The oceans will boil away and the atmosphere will dry. The temperatures
will soar past 700 degrees F.
Then the Red Planet, Mars, will be a
safety spot. There is enough water stored in the ice caps to submerge the
planet with a 40 feet deep ocean. After 4.5 billion years, when
the whole hydrogen fuel is converted to Helium, our sun will become a red giant,
(A red giant is a dying star in the last stage of the stellar evolution) 250
times as large and 2,700 times as bright as it is now, stretching the vast
space of the solar system and engulfing Mercury, Venus, and Earth and turn Mars
into a molten wasteland. Then we can inhabit to Saturn’s Moon, Titan.
Finally, about 130 million years
after the red giant phase, the sun will go through a final spasm and eject its
outer layers into space, leaving behind a white dwarf.
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White dwarfs are the most stable stage of star
having 0.7 to 1.4 solar mass. This 1.4 is known as Chandrasekhar limit. This
will be an extremely dense star having densities reaching up to 1,000,000 times
that of water. A star that ends its nuclear-burning lifetime with a mass
greater than the Chandraskehar limit must become either a neutron star or a
black hole.
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Then the option is to
successfully colonize planets orbiting Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light years
from Earth or another red dwarf. We can enjoy trillions of years of
calamity-free living. When proxima Centauri perishes, humanity can relocate to
another red dwarf and then another.
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Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf
about 4.24 light-years from Earth, inside the G-cloud, in the constellation
of Centaurus. It is the nearest star
from our Solar System, and is a prime candidate for future interstellar
travel and space colonization mission. Current rockets are too slow
that they would take 100,000 years just to reach the there.
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The serious problem starts, if
the universe is going for a big crunch after about 10^18 years. The only option
is to escape this universe before it chills, rips, crunches, bounces, or snaps
into nothingness. As per the String theory, there are other universes hidden
from our view—as many as 10500. At least one should be suitable for life.
