What the Death of the Sun Will Look Like
About 1.1 billion years from now, the sun will begin to change. As the hydrogen fuel in its core is used up, the burning will spread outward toward the surface. This will make the sun grow brighter. This increased radiation will have a devastating effect on our planet. Here’s what that might look like.
The mean surface temperature of the earth will rise from about 68°F to 167°F. The earth’s oceans will evaporate. The planet will become a stark, lifeless desert.
Finally, at the age of almost 1.1 billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen almost entirely. When the sun uses hydrogen to create energy, it changes it to helium. After all these years, the core of the sun will be filled with left-over helium. This helium will become unstable as it begins to collapse under its own weight. The core of the sun will become even denser and hotter. As this happens, the sun will swell one-and-a-half times its normal size and grow more than twice as bright as it is now.
Over the next 700 million years, it won’t grow any brighter . But it will continue to grow larger. It will swell to more than twice its present size. As it does so, it will cool down a little. From the parched surface of the earth, the sun will look like an enormous orange ball hanging in the misty sky.
At the age of about 1.2 billion years the sun will blow off more than a quarter of the mass of its outer surface. With a less massive sun to attract them, the planets’ orbits will change. Venus will become as distant as the earth is now, and the earth will move even farther away.
Eventually, the ever-swelling sun will become a red giant. It will become 166 times larger than the sun we knew. This is almost as large as the orbit of the earth today. The planets Mercury and Venus will be devoured in the flames of the giant star. The mountains of the earth will melt and flow like red-hot molasses into vast, flat seas of lava. A bloated red sun will fill more than half the sky.
While this spells the death of the inner planets, it will bring new life to the more distant worlds.
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![Dutch Architect Plans World’s First 3D-Printed Building
Side Note: As previously mentioned, this sort of venture and combination between design, architecture and technology with the usage of 3D printing would be exactly what’s needed to help people in less favorable conditions of living. If we can, through trials and errors, learn the best methods of 3D-printing on larger scales we could, in theory, start creating buildings on the fly and at low costs.
Of course we’d have to give the technology just a tad more time and investment to develop in such a way that we have 3D printers large enough to assemble the right pieces at a steady pace. With time, It could also be a good excuse to abandon our old methods of construction and style that we implement to our buildings and houses and use a new design, something more modern and thoughtful of the environment and ever changing conditions we live in today. Just a thought.
A Dutch architect is planning to construct a Möbius strip-shaped house using the world’s largest 3D printer.
Landscape House, designed by Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Amsterdam firm Universal Architecture, will contain around 1,100 square metres of floorspace throughout the twisted structure. The 3D printer — which can “print” objects as large as six metres by nine metres using a mix of grinded-down rocks or sand, held together with a liquid binding agent — has been designed by Italian roboticist Enrico Dini.
Dini has been printing huge objects with his printer for a couple of years, but this will be the first building that he’s produced that’s actually designed to be occupied just like any other. For a house that will be a solid whole, without any visible seams, a Möbius strip makes perfect sense as a design shape.
“While doing a competition [in Ireland] for housing in a beautiful landscape we wondered if you could make a building that celebrates landscape,” Ruijssenaars explained to Wired.co.uk over email. “We didn’t win the competition, but moved on with the design to further explore it. The essence of landscape, we thought, was that is is continuous. The earth is round, valleys transform into hills, oceans into land but it is one thing. So we looked for a building form without beginning or end.”
They worked with artist and mathematician Rinus Roelofs on the design, but they soon realised that “when making physical small models we always had to make a cut and paste in the material — with lead or paper you have to start or finish somewhere”. They used a small 3D printer to make a model out of potato flour, though, which was one continuous structure without beginning or end, just like they wanted. Roelofs had worked with Dini before to produce 3D printed art, and the three of them then started working on how to print the Landscape House. RIght now that means constructing giant sections and connecting them together, but theoretically the printer can be adapted to move along the entire structure and print one continuous building.
Ruijssenaars claims that the Landscape House will be as sturdy and durable as a house built with regular methods and materials: “The whole structure is calculated with the knowledge coming from engineers from large companies like Arup. In this design traditional techniques and new 3D printing techniques are combined — the façades for example are made with glass and thin steel construction. It is the combination of façade and floor/ceiling that gives this structure its sturdiness.”
We’re increasingly seeing 3D printing find its feet as a way of producing useful objects, and not just on the scale of small items like medical implants. That said, most of the time we’re still seeing 3D printers putting out children’s toys or action figures rather than, say, guns, which are still being tweaked by their designers. The Landscape House should cost between €4-5 million (£3.3-£4.2 million), according to Ruijssenaars, and should be take around 18 months to build. It’ll be finished sometime in 2014.
Ruijssenaars said: “It is interesting to explore the possibility of printing houses for the poor. This week we were approached by a company from South Africa that constructs buildings for the poor. In architecture it is interesting because you can skip the trouble of making a mould of wood that you fill with concrete and later have to remove.”
Reportedly a Brazilion national park is also interested in buying a copy of the Landscape House for use as a visitors centre, and we could see the same technology being used to build bases and tools for astronauts on the moon in the future.
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