Starship Asterisk*

Q4: Have some APOD pictures been run more than once?
A4: Yes. Many of our readers have been with us less than a year and are unaware of some really spectacular or important astronomy pictures. New information about old pictures is becoming available over the WWW. The text and links for rerun pictures will make use of this newly available information. So although the picture might be old, some of the text and links of each APOD will be new. Also, more web surfers have larger bandwidth connections, which allows us to post higher-resolution image files that can be transferred conveniently. Software to handle more sophisticated image file formats has also become more common, so the picture's size and/or format might be new. Lastly, rerunning APODs saves us time and helps us update our archive. In general, our rerun policy currently is to only rerun APODs more than one year old to keep the pictures relatively "new" to new APOD viewers. We will almost never rerun more than two pictures in any given week. So when you load the current APOD,it is still, most probably, a new picture.

saturn2 wrote:The planetary nebula is the end of a star.
The end of our Sun will be in 5 billion years from now.
IThe life on the Earth has many time in the future. Very well.

Chris Peterson wrote:

saturn2 wrote:The planetary nebula is the end of a star.
The end of our Sun will be in 5 billion years from now.
IThe life on the Earth has many time in the future. Very well.

Yes, but "only" a few hundred million years until our climate becomes quite problematic for most complex animals. The Earth will become uninhabitable (as we generally understand the term) long before the Sun flames out.

biddie67 wrote:what will the selective process be to include as many different types of people (hopefully stable and constructive types) to allow for a healthy genetic pool ??

biddie67 wrote:This kind of statement rattles my primal senses. We already know the long range future of this wonderful Earth. The search for inhabitable worlds and our so-far primitive struggle to develop the technology to reach one/some of those worlds is also already under way.

And what kind of "terra forming" would be necessary?? And how long would it take before people could safely and openly settle there??

Chris Peterson wrote:I'm not sure it matters. The length of time involved is much longer than any species has existed on Earth. The reality is that there will not be any humans (homo sapiens) by then- we will be extinct, or radically changed. What works for us now most likely won't then. So there's no point in finding other places to live just to escape Earth's ultimate fate.

Indeed, if we did colonize other planets- regardless of how we terraformed them- there would almost certainly be nothing left in a few hundred million years resembling the original colonists, and whatever there was would be a distinctly different species from the colonists on other worlds.

orin stepanek wrote:Cute nebula; but I don't see that it looks anything like a ghost! I never seen what a ghost looks like; so who am I to argue.

islader2 wrote:@ ORIN STEPANIK Okay, Orin, turn in your solon badge. The nebula looks ghostly through a primitive telescope. IMHO, you should know that with all the posts you have contributed==many of them outstanding. {We solons==albeit self-appointed==need to look and to sound sharp.}

FloridaMike wrote:Where the heck is Neufer? A comment like this is usually his cue...

orin stepanek wrote:Darn; you made me google solon! No help there as solon hast too many references! Any way; sorry no badge! You really think it looks like a ghost?