The Sun Has Gone, Imploded And Disapeared, How Long Could We Survive?

[RATTER15]

Apart from being dark and cold, what other effects would we have to contend with?

[emmie]

apologies but have copied this from someone, sure there will be more replies, interesting for all that.

Without the Sun, it would be about 8 minutes before we noticed it was gone.

The Earth would not instantaneously freeze at that moment. Our atmosphere is a very excellent insulator, temperatures would be tolerable for several days, several months if you bundled up.

We also have a lot of climate controlled environments... heaters in our cars, furnaces and fireplaces in our homes, insulation in the walls and attics. Think about it. When it is -30 degrees Fahrenheit, and you turn off your furnace, it takes nearly a week before the temperature inside of your house dips below 32 Fahrenheit.

Many people would survive several months. The major downfall for humans is this event would completely compromise the food chain. Plants need light from the Sun, and soil that is not frozen solid to grow. Without plants, virtually everything we eat, or everything that is eaten by everything we eat, will starve to death.

The last surviving human would be the one that had a cupboard full of non-perishables, rationed them out well, had a good heating system in the home that remained operational, and fantastic insulation in the home. I would say, best case scenario, someone could last a little over a year if everything fell into place just right, during such an impossible event.

Note, some extremeophile bacteria could continue to survive near the ocean floor, near heat vents generated from inside of the Earth.

[emmie]

if it all the same to you i hope it doesn't go, as i am freezing..

[factor-fiction]

Doesn't the sun also hold the planet in orbit?
I can't see how we'd survive- the impact of a massive explosion on the sun would wipe us out instantly i would think

[emmie]

i needed help with this answer

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_keeps_Earth_in_orbit_around_the_sun

[RATTER15]

We could grow a lot of food under cover with artificial heat and lighting but could we grow enough quickly enough and could we generate electricity for long enough or enough of it to meet the demand?

[RATTER15]

No FF we survived the explosion with no difficulty. We have just been left as we are now, with no sun light or heat.

[Old_Geezer]

No light, no heat, no energy except what we can extract from deep underfoot, flying out through space no knowning where we head. Who would want to survive long ?

[emmie]

going on all that i doubt we would survive for long.

[RATTER15]

We could live for a while im sure, im sure that those of us who didnt throw in the towel could come up with some way to sustain us

ourselves, we can generate light and heat, and maybe indefinitely?

Could we survive?

[emmie]

no

[LazyGun]

@Ratter - I admire your never say die philosophy, but really - Absent the Sun humanity would die, and pretty quickly too. That is, if the Earth was not adversely directly affected by whatever made the Sun disappear/implode/explode.

The only way to survive - maybe- would be if you have a bunker, a nuclear power station, hydroponic plant growth - but it would be a miserable life, and not one that would allow for easy expansion or long term existence over generations.

[jim360]

A lot depends on when and how the Sun disappears. Any natural process for its disappearing would surely take us with it anyway, e.g. the Sun expanding until Earth is absorbed or destroyed by the bigger, hotter Sun.

So leaving that aside, could we survive? Not right now -- only if we had plenty of time to prepare and even then you would be talking at best a massively reduced population. I think the answer is in reality a firm "no" unless we were able to up sticks and go to another planet. Hence, maybe in hundreds or thousands of years, if ever. And even then, probably no.

[Clanad]

If you're considering the end result of the natural expiration of the warranty that comes with Sol, you (even if long lived) wouldn't be around to witness the end.

It'll take approximately 13 billion years to complete. But, just to cheer your day... about 1 billion years from now, give or take a few new TV programs (Ooops! programmes)(I'm in the U.S., for which most will excuse me with sympathies) the sun will begin to grow in size. Over the next few billion years it will continue, but all of our seas, atmosphere and spare brown shoelaces (which I'm now in need of) will have been boiled or broiled away.

The enlargement will continue and or surface temperature will exceed that of present day Venus. Continuing, it will engulf Venus and Mercury (or for the more pedantic among us Marcury and Venus) and the outer wisps of Sun's "atmosphere" will even reach the Earth... now just a withered cinder anyway.

Fast forward about 12 billion years or so and nothing will be left of the star once cherished for warming sandy beaches but a cold, very small white dwarf about the size of present day Earth.

But wait! Some indeterminate time later, The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will meet, intertwine and due to gravitational forces beyond our imagination, the remnants of our Solar system will be flung into the empty spaces between other galaxies... awaiting the end of the universe when everything continues to to accelerate away from everything else and matter and time ends with a whimper... not a bang, as it began...

[Bazile]

//awaiting the end of the universe when everything continues to to accelerate away from everything else and matter and time ends with a whimper... not a bang, as it began... //

Yeah, yeah , but what happens after that ?

The creator creates a new beginning doesn't he ?

[AB Editor]

In the version Ratter is describing it might be better to imagine the sun, suddenly, magically replaced with something of the same mass so it provides the same gravitational functions, just not light and heat.

So, assuming this is the case, we'd have some retained heat for a while due to the atmosphere.

And we could produce some food in hydroponic conditions - but this probably wouldn't be enough to cover the (quickly dying) rainforest's production of oxygen.

So can we assume that the atmosphere would thin and maybe disappear? Anyone got any idea how long that might take?

Also, when would earth cool to the point of something like -150-200C? Would it? Or would the core heat keep it above that?

[Teddio]

In a short period of time the atmosphere would freeze out, first as a liquid then as a solid. What would be left above the Earth's surface would effectively be a vacuum.

[bert_h]

No, Teddio, we'd last a lot longer than that. The enormous fission reactor in the earth's core would keep feeding heat up to the surface. Mars is cold because its core wasn't big enough; we'd be as warm as Mars, or warmer, for quite a long time.

[AB Editor]

"The minimum temperature on Mars is approximately -140°C, and the highest is 20°C."

From:
http://www.universetoday.com/35664/temperature-of-the-planets/

Perfectly liveable :) - although we don't know how much of that can be attributed to the sun.

What would be the minimum requirements for a breathable atmosphere on earth be? I read here that:

"Mars is not a total vacuum, but at 1% of Earth's atmosphere, is close enough as far as human survival is concerned."

and:

"Also, the oxygen fraction is only 0.13%"

http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/11161/would-an-unprotected-human-exposed-to-the-martian-atmosphere-be-able-to-recover

Earth's atmopshere is 20% oxygen - could we get away with less? :)

[bert_h]

Well, AB Editor, the highest continuously-inhabited human settlements (in the Andes) are at about 18,000-odd feet, for which some site must tell you the reduced oxygen percentage. I think that needs acclimatisation, but you can go up to 11,000 or 12,000 feet in the Swiss Bernese Oberland without any hazard warnings.

[AB Editor]

So we could chop down half the trees and be alright, probably:

"At 18,000 feet the atmospheric pressure is only one-half of that at ground level. Although the percentage of oxygen is still the same as at ground level, the number of molecules of oxygen in each lungful is reduced by one-half."

http://mhoxygen.com/faq/243-what-every-pilot-should-know-about-oxygen

One thing which might happen when the sun blinks out is mass deforestation as everyone tries to get all the firewood they can.

Thanks for this question Ratter, and everyone else for their answers :)