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john65pennington's avatar

Can man and animals exist on earth. without the sun?

Asked by john65pennington (29268points) January 14th, 2010

God promised to never flood the earth again. but, what if the sun ceased to shine. could man survive the darkness and the cold? would there be no more food to be grown for our existence? the sun shines 24/7. what if the sun ran out of gases to display sunshine for us? is this possible?

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32 Answers

Dr_Dredd's avatar

Nope. We’d be dead as doornails when the planet and the atmosphere froze solid.

willbrawn's avatar

We would be dead.

Life cannot exist without the sun, it would get a tad chilly.

Also it won’t run out of gas, if I remember right the next phase for the sun is to become a super giant in like 4 billion years.

MissAnthrope's avatar

No sun = no plants = no animals or people.

Blackberry's avatar

Nope, the sun is the closest thing we have to a god, its literally the reason we’re alive.

john65pennington's avatar

I am amazed that our sun does not run out of fuel. i gues this is just one of the mysteries of life that God does not want man to know.

Smashley's avatar

Currently, no, but it would most likely be possible to pull it off in the future. Of course, since all of our energy comes from the Sun, we would have to have another, equally massive source of energy in order to sustain life on Earth, which would most likely be some other star.

@john65pennington – We do know why the sun doesn’t “run out of fuel”. It’s not a particularly big mystery.

Nullo's avatar

Man could swing it for a few centuries, provided that he had time to prepare. Nuclear power and hydroponics and all. But in the end we’d be goners.

Sandydog's avatar

I dont think there will ever be any substitute for the sun.

ragingloli's avatar

I suppose Humanity and some ‘useful’ animals and plants could survive for some centuries in insulated underground shelters powered by geothermic energy. But the vast majority of life on earth would be eradicated by the near -270° temperatures. (Provided we are not all incinerated by Sol going nova.)

JLeslie's avatar

@Smashley Don’t we need the gravitational pull from the sun to keep us in our orbit? I think that is probably very important.

nikipedia's avatar

All life on earth is powered by the sun. We get our energy by eating plants, which are directly powered by the sun through photosynthesis, and animals, which are indirectly powered by the sun by eating plants. We are absolutely 100% dependent on the sun and we would not survive very long at all without it.

Also I want to disagree with your statement that the sun’s continuous fuel supply is a mystery. We seem to have a pretty good grasp on it.

The sun is powered by a nuclear fusion chain reaction called the proton-proton chain reaction. Two hydrogen atoms fuse, generating deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen (and some other byproducts). Deuterium can then fuse with another hydrogen atom to form 3He, a light helium isotope. From there, the reaction can proceed along one of four paths to form normal helium. One of the byproducts of each step of the reaction is the release of energy, yielding a net of about 27MeV. The sheer number of times this happens each second are what generate the massive amount of energy the sun gives off. Wikipedia says it better than I can:

The proton-proton chain occurs around 9.2 × 1037 times each second in the core of the Sun. Since this reaction uses four protons, it converts about 3.7 × 1038 protons (hydrogen nuclei) to helium nuclei every second (out of a total of ~8.9 × 1056 free protons in the Sun), or about 6.2 × 1011 kg per second.[36] Since fusing hydrogen into helium releases around 0.7% of the fused mass as energy,[37] the Sun releases energy at the matter–energy conversion rate of 4.26 million metric tons per second, 383 yottawatts (3.83×1026 W),[36] or 9.15 × 1010 megatons of TNT per second.

So why doesn’t it run out? Because the sun is just that big. And we understand this so well that we can predict roughly when it will run out of fuel and what will happen to the sun then. Again, borrowed from wikipedia:

The Sun is about halfway through its main-sequence evolution, during which nuclear fusion reactions in its core fuse hydrogen into helium. Each second, more than four million metric tons of matter are converted into energy within the Sun’s core, producing neutrinos and solar radiation. At this rate, the Sun has so far converted around 100 Earth-masses of matter into energy. The Sun will spend a total of approximately 10 billion years as a main sequence star.[87]

The Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova. Instead, in about 5 billion years, it will enter a red giant phase, its outer layers expanding as the hydrogen fuel in the core is consumed and the core contracts and heats up. Helium fusion will begin when the core temperature reaches around 100 million kelvins and will produce carbon, entering the asymptotic giant branch phase.[26]

So yes, someday the sun will run out. But not for a very long time.

john65pennington's avatar

Great and infomative answer. thanks. john

CMaz's avatar

Good question. Lets do an experiment…

Go in the closet with your dog. Hold your breath and see how long you last.

JLeslie's avatar

Reminds me of the Ray Bradbury story All Summer in a Day. I would be suicidal without the sun. I guess we could develop sun domes?

Dr_Dredd's avatar

There was a great “Twilight Zone” episode about a woman who dreamt that the planet was moving closer and closer to the sun, when in reality it was actually moving farther and farther away.

Sarcasm's avatar

I can.
I don’t know about the rest of you, though.

Dr_Dredd's avatar

@Sarcasm, are you a vampire? :-)

Sarcasm's avatar

Nope. I’m one of the Reptilians as David Icke prophecized.

Nullo's avatar

@JLeslie
The sun keeping us in orbit only really matters if you’re trying to stay within the so-called Thermally Habitable Zone. With no Sun to provide heat, we would have precious little use for our orbit.

JLeslie's avatar

Well, the question asked without the sun, so I was thinking the star itself, and not just the light from it. Of course you are right.

ultimateego's avatar

i can. i’m immortal, of course. unfortunately, i can’t say the same for any of you.

arnbev959's avatar

Man and animals? No way. We’d be toast.

But I wonder if there are some forms of bacteria that would at least be able to stay alive for a while. Seems possible.

Smashley's avatar

@JLeslie – I didn’t say that the sun isn’t immensely important to the planet we live on, I was asserting that, with the proper technology and energy resources, life could be sustained on any hunk of rock floating through space. Earth without a sun would probably not spontaneously generate life but it would be habitable to any sufficiently advanced species.

mattbrowne's avatar

No sun = no life is not necessarily true. Shining stars make evolving life on nearby planets more likely. There is a second source of energy coming from the interior of some planets. Life probably got started on Earth in this way. Using photosynthesis or burning oxygen is not the only way for exothermic reactions to work.

Theoretically simple life could exist on a rogue planet in interstellar space.

Nullo's avatar

@mattbrowne
Because we’ve seen that evolving-by-starlight life on sunless worlds.

JLeslie's avatar

@Smashley I think you are right.

Smashley's avatar

@Nullo
We haven’t seen examples of how life began on earth on other planets either, that doesn’t make it impossible. He said “theoretically” and he is correct. If there is a source of energy, sun or not, life could possibly arise.

ragingloli's avatar

@Nullo there is microbial life at the bottom of the ocean (where the sun never shines) around underwater volcanoes. And there are microbes deep in the ground that literally eat rock. We know life can exist without sunlight, so it is entirely possible and expected that life can arise without it as well.

Nullo's avatar

@ragingloli
We obviously are not reading the statements.

mattbrowne's avatar

Ultimately a star is always responsible. But sometimes in an indirect way. Geothermal energy is a combination of residual heat from planetary formation and radioactive decay. The latter is a result of heavy elements formed by nucleosynthesis and supernova explosions.

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