The Milky Way and another solar system are going to collide in about a billion years. does this bother you?

Humanity won’t survive to last the next billion years anyway, and since I will be dead by then it doesn’t bother me. Although I do have a soft spot for our little blue planet and it would be sad to see it go.

I think you mean the Milky Way and another galaxy are set to collide. This probably won’t be too much of a big deal, considering how spread apart everything is. It’ll probably impact the shape of both galaxies, though.

If another solar system were set to collide with ours then I could see some problems arising.

In either case, I hope the insurance is paid up.

I don’t mean to be picky, but The Milky Way is a galaxy, not a solar system. The Sol system is our solar system (Sol is the scientific name of our sun). One way or other our planet is doomed, so I think we should do our best to spread life off our planet. Interstellar space travel is the key to ensuring the longevity of the human race.

You are correct. my mistake. my question should have read galaxy, not solar system. i have not had my coffee, yet.

Not at all. I love bumper cars.

If you believe what they are saying now, we won’t be around past Dec. 2012. The 2012 I don’t buy into but the collision I do. I know they say we are on a collision path with the Andromeda galexy. I think that is the one you are refering to.

I don’t think I’d be alive in a billion years, and chances are no human will, seeing the rate of destruction and the downward trend in society man has taken. Hey, at this rate, the world probably won’t last for another century, let alone a billion years for a whole friggin galaxy to go crash into ours.

Anything predicted to happen 80 years and beyond does not bother me at all. In fact it would be a waste of my time to even think about it. . . . tic toc . . . my clock is ticking away

Does anyone put any faith in total destruction of earth on 2012? i have big plans for Christmas that year.

No, I’ll be dead.

You mean the galaxy in Andromeda and our own will collide. And it will be in more like three billion years.
Does it bother me? No. Should it?

I was just trying to plan ahead and to check my calendar for any conflicting dates. a billion years from now would be what year?

I’m pretty sure my dust won’t notice a thing.

No it doesn’t bother me, I only wish it would happen sooner, much sooner.

Dibley…..........why?

@john65pennington Because I don’t want to grow old, I didn’t want to grow to the age I am now and I’m too chicken and useless to end it myself.

I have grown to be 66 and proud of it. you cannot stop from aging. its a fact of life. why the doom and gloom?

Well it didn’t concern me, until SOMEONE brought it up.

Thanks a lot.

Like therapy isn’t already costing me enough. Sheesh.

cprevette…...sorry if i runied your day. i saw this on the History Channel last night and i thought i might need some friends to join me in worrying a little. john

It doesn’t bother me because it doesn’t matter. Fluther won’t be here lol.

well, this is only one small threat we have to deal with. even if our galaxy does collide with the andromeda galaxy, there is no guarantee that it will destroy or even harm our planet at all. we may be destroyed, we may not. there are loads of other problems we have to deal with, such as gamma ray bursts, the death of our sun and many other things that are still to come our way. not forgetting that a back door asteroid could sling shot round our sun and destroy us within the next few months.

at the speed that humans are progressing it really is not a concern at all to me. by the time this happens we will certainly have a way to remedy it.

the main concern to me, is that the universe seems like it is going to keep expanding forever, eventually leaving us isolated in a dead and dark area of the universe. the only way we could escape this fate is by escaping our reality in to another.

if you like this kind of thing, i would suggest you check out this channel on youtube, zuke696. this channel has 100’s of documentaries from evolution, to particle physics, to astronomy to all kinds of other science related stuff. well worth a look.

@john65pennington , the movements of galaxies are not exactly unpredictable. The nearest galaxy to ours is the galaxy in Andromeda. It’s predicted to collide – maybe – with ours in 5 billion years, not 1 billion, unless you have some information I don’t. They will be close enough for their gravities to affect one another in about 2 billion years. That’s at least a billion years longer than we’ve got , but even if we – or whatever species we might become – find some way to live in the solar system after the Earth is gone, there is a good chance we will survive the encounter. Space is mostly – space.

There’s a funny scene in “Annie Hall,” which I still think is Woody’s best film, on this subject. When he’s a little boy, Alvie Singer’s mother takes him to the doctor because he keeps worrying about the universe expanding. His mother says, “What is that your business?”, and the doctor tells him not to worry about it, it’ll take billions and billions of years, so you’ve got to just enjoy today.Alvie is not mollified.

There won’t even be homo sapiens on the planet by then. There will likely be no life forms that would be even vaguely familiar to us. That’s if there is still life on earth. In that much time the earth would likely have been struck by an asteroid or bombarded with radiation from a nearby supernova, killing most life long before the galactic collisions. Of course, we’ll all be long dead even before those events occur (although there is an outside chance of an asteroid collision). So, no, it doesn’t bother me in the least.

I’m deeply troubled by this as the value of my investment property may continue to decline should the surrounding neighborhood suddenly deteriorate. On the other hand who wouldn’t want a lake side split level with a pristine view of impending doom!

It doesn’t bother me because I am not sure we’ll last that long – and by then we’d have figured out some sort of time travel.

There is no point in worrying about it as it is not something I can control and I won’t be here when the time comes. I am concerned about things like global warming etc because humans are contributing to the problem which could lead to our downfall but something like galaxy’s colliding is not something that we are causing as far as I am aware feel free to correct me if I am wrong and would likely happen if humans were here or not!

Well, in 5 billion years our sun will supernova anyway. There is what is known as a potential “death star” in a galaxy only 8,000 light years away, which when it flattens out, could produce a gamma ray blast which would strip our ozone layer, and that could happen within a million years from my understanding. Scientists believe that the earth is potentially impacted by such a ray every 100 million years, and their timeline just happens to coincide with the extinction of the dinosaurs. And we’ve got things in our galaxy like rogue stars which could at any time enter our solar system and drag our planet out of orbit. Plus there are meteors which could plow into us which we might not even know are coming. And if another star came close enough to our sun, it could result in a death spiral of the two stars, which would take about a million years to complete.

I honestly would worry more about the threats that exist right here on Earth, such as hostile nations with nukes and such. The whole astronomical thing seems to me that we live in essentially an infinite universe which is expanding faster than the speed of light, the sheer number of galaxys, stars and planets make it a mathematical certainty that there are other planets (or moons) with climates similar enough to Earth’s that they could be colonized. It’s only a matter of time before humans figure out interstellar travel. How much time? Well, consider that a) pretty much everything modern man knows was learned in a few thousand years time, b) 100 years ago, pretty much nothing we would recognize as an everyday part of life is the same…forget smart phones and the internet, we were just seeing the first cars, telephones, indoor plumbing and electrical hookup….most people 100 years ago didn’t have any of those things and today we can wirelessly stream a movie that was made 100% on computers to our 60 inch televisions while using our telephones to check our facebook pages, and c) computing technology doubles every 18 months.

Consider what people 100 years from now will be able to do. Hell, I graduated high school 20 years ago, and the world is a completely different place than it was then…most of my friends still listened to cassette tapes when we graduated, now I have a device that I carry in my pocket that stores 30,000 songs. We have video games that look real and can simulate realistic looking pictures…when I went to high school, only the rich kids had a Nintendo with Mario and Duck Hunt and it was frickin’ amazing. Hell, if you have a DVR, when’s the last time you even thought about programming a VCR to tape something? When’s the last time you held a videotape, for that matter? When I was in high school, people still rented VCRs and no one owned videotapes, because the cost $90 each…try selling any videotape for 90 cents on Craig’s List today and see how many people send you snotty emails laughing at your greed.

Point is, look back to 30, 25, 20, 15, 10 and even 5 years ago and see what has been learned by humanity in that period of time. And consider what we have accomplished as a species in each time interval. Then ask yourself if you think there’s any chance whatsoever that in 1 billion or 3 billion years, whether our species will not have managed to figure out how to get off this planet if necessary?

Our sun won’t go supernova. It’s too small for that. Eta Carinae is 8000 light years away. It’s expected to explode as a supernova or hypernova some time within the next million years or so. As its current age and evolutionary path are uncertain, however, it could explode within the next several millennia or even in the next few years. It could affect Earth but it’s unlikely to affect terrestrial lifeforms directly, as they will be protected from gamma rays by the atmosphere, and from some other cosmic rays by the magnetosphere. The damage would likely be restricted to the upper atmosphere, the ozone layer, spacecraft, including satellites, and any astronauts in space.

A gamma ray burst would probably not hit Earth, because the rotation axis does not currently point towards our solar system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae

“does this bother you?”

Yes, the question does. :-)

Hope it happens on New Years Eve. Will make for a spectacular fireworks display.

What about our ever-expanding Universe…constantly moving outward? This entire discussion should cause people pause…to reflect upon the larger picture and how insignificant we “hummin’ beans” are.