I was beginning to worry about my favorite “cautiously pessimistic Canadian author and satirist” Jeff Wells, but lo, there’s a new, rather recklessly pessimistic, yet delightful post over at Rigorous Intuition.
One thing I do know is that I’m going to miss Betelgeuse. The star has “mysteriously” shrunk by 15% in only 15 years. That’s considerable: a loss of radius equivalent to the orbit of Venus. And it’s quickening. Because modern astronomy is so young – we haven’t even marked the centenary of the embarrassingly late discovery that the Milky Way isn’t the sum of the universe – astronomers can’t be sure of what it is exactly that they’re observing, so what it means remains uncertain. But what it may, credibly, mean is that the star is rapidly burning through its last reserves of carbon and approaching the end its short life, in which case we could see it supernova during our much shorter, yet main sequence, human lifespans.
“Hey hey, we’re the monkeys” Rigorous Intuition 9-3-09
Good bit of G-20 talk in the comments. Enjoy and cuídate.