Could humans survive on earth without the sun?

I think we could. We'd have to tunnel quite a ways into the earths crust to stay warm, but with geothermal energy production, we could replicate everything we need from the sun. We can make lightbulbs that emit the spectrums of light that crops need to grow, we can synthesize the vitamins that our bodies use sunlight to produce. We can simulate outdoor environments to 'trick' our subconcious into a connection with the natural world (in theory anyway).

What do you think?

 

No. We need the sun or we would be in a deep freeze.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine!

 

Why do you ask

I mean I know that Trump thinks that the sun shines out of his arse and if he does not get out of bed in the morning...........

 

The sun only warms the surface of the planet. Everything under that is warmed from the core. Go deep enough, and none of the energy is from the sun, only the core

 

Actually I was hoping to have a scientific discussion, which is why I posted in the 'Science' section.

Surely you can stop thinking about Trump for one discussion...

 

Yes for a couple million years until the core cooled however without the gravitational well would be an issue as our planet had nothing to circle unless a black hole took its place somehow.

 

How deep would we need to go and is there soil sufficient to grow food in plentiful quantities to sustain large numbers of people at those depths? At some point we'd be into stone layers so growing food and having enough nutrients in the growing medium for long-term sustainability would be a concern. I don't know the answers, but it would take immense tunnels to grow crops on equivalent acreage as on the surface, especially since as we go deeper we also lose circumference distance "around" the earth.

 

OK Read Fritz Lieber's " A Pail of Air"

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51461

Free E book from the Gutenberg project - Merry Christmas!!!!

 

My guess is no. Since the sun has another 4-5 billion years to live, let's take the scenario that something knocks the earth out of its orbit and sends it hurtling out of the solar system. Within a few years' time, darkness on the surface of the earth would kill every living plant. Within a century or so, the oceans would freeze to the very depths. Within a few centuries, whatever remaining internal heat keeping the volcanoes and thermal vents going would dissipate. In order for humans to survive, even deep underground, we/they would have to generate vast quantities of heat to fight off the effects of near absolute zero temperatures. Only nuclear power could do that, and without a vast quantity of a ready supply of liquid water, it's tough to envision how a nuclear power plant could be kept cool. Drinking water would be another problem. Converting ice to water requires a tremendous amount of heat for the results that you get, and it would be inefficient to keep billions of gallons of water in liquid form. Human deaths would be staggering even before this nuclear powered underground city got going, and even after it was going, it wouldn't be big enough to hold more than a small fraction of the world's population. And then there's the dual problem of extracting more uranium to keep the plant going and removing the waste far enough away to not poison the people. Most of the atmosphere would be stripped away, as the heavier elements freeze out of the air and the lighter elements get lost to space. Going out on the surface would be like going on a spacewalk for astronauts now, requiring spacesuits and plenty of preparation. Keeping animals would be inefficient, so the few thousand remaining humans and their plants necessary for eating would be the only living things. Isaac Asimov postulated a Martian colony that survived on various kinds of molds grown in barrels. Not sure how long a human could live eating only mold. Carbon dioxide would become a major issue because it requires a great deal more plant biomass than animal biomass to exchange carbon dioxide into oxygen, and that would require light for photosynthesis, and heat to keep the soil warm enough for plant roots to do the chemical exchanges that take place there. Just to sustain a few thousand people would require acres of plants and millions of gallons of liquid water, all of which would need to be kept above 55-60 degrees. Meanwhile, your nuclear power plant would be converting millions of gallons of water to steam per day. So then the second law of thermodynamics comes into play, can you generate enough electricity each day to melt enough water to cool the power plant to generate enough electricity to melt more water? Because nuclear power creates new energy, the answer would be maybe, but I'm thinking the second law of thermodynamics would triumph, and you'd run out of water pretty quickly.

The Fritz Lieber story was pretty good, but burning coal to keep life going seems problematic to me. Besides the oxygen consumption, there's also the issue of carbon monoxide generation. And how much coal would you have to burn to keep out near absolute zero temperatures?

 

kinda like the movie Logan's Run

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/

 

We could survive without the sun because most of the heat generated by the planet is decaying particles which have half lifes longer than the sun will be around. Granted the population would be much smaller and you would have to engineer underground facilities for necessities like, food production, water purification, lighting, high speed internet for porn and waste reclamation. It could be done though.

 

I don't have to think. It is beyond refute

No. Definitely not. The sun powers the world.

 

Wouldn't that depend on the population assuming the government say in the US committed to save one hundred thousand people and put all our resources to get safe structures underground to get them started and controlled the population you could stretch resources for some time as we develop new tech since under pressure humans are good at that. So say only 3 million humans were left after the deep freeze they might go on for some time. Noting the survivors would include the greatest human minds and engineers and the best technical experts we have and the healthiest and most fit people with the best genetics they would have the also best chance to survive the longest. And again if a black hole was in the suns place we could perhaps find ways to survive off it there are options like staying long enough to build space tech able to go to another star system and do that abandoning Earth we would only need some centuries to give it a try.

And would it be a fast or slow even the sun poofing out instantly would be unlikely say a dime sized black hole entered the sun and parked in the center I would think it would take some serious time to finish it off and that might give us options. Sending out colony ships, building artificial cities, work on new technology to get power for some time our species might die here on Earth but could survive elsewhere.

 

If you dig deep enough then you can stay warm, even without the sun. The heat would come from within the Earth itself. The problem is that you cannot use that heat easily to generate electricity. The reason is that to generate electricity you need a difference in temperature. One way could be to drill deeper underground and boil water, generate electricity from the steam, then send the steam to the surface to cool down into water again. If that could be done then humans MIGHT be able to survive.

 

No, we need the Sun, the Earth circling the Sun maintaining many delicate balances that would be disrupted and life as we know it would become untenable in countless unfathomable ways.

 

Yes, but who'd wanna spend their life living in a warm cave? DUH!

 

3 million is a far cry from our current 7 billion. And even a dime sized black hole would be more than enough to suck the whole solar system into it. You have to remember that the smallest black hole is the result of a super massive star collapsing in on itself, and all that mass becomes compressed into a small area.

The most likely scenario for our sun is that when the hydrogen runs out and it has to convert to using helium for fuel, it will become a red giant star, expanding out past the radius of Mars, swallowing up all four of the terrestrial planets. Now come up with a plan for THAT eventuality!

 

Well assuming it takes time say ,lets get crazy, the planet becomes too hard to live on in say a thousand years that is ample time to get artificial space habitats in orbit around the sun and space bodies further out and other space arks to launch into space our species would likely survive possibly not the planet. We would need to plan to save the best of our species and the most genetically stable that's not likely me or you or anyone here.

 

Simplicity aside in order to have a serious scientific discussion...Over time (perhaps a thousand years) we humans might survive without our star. All life as we understand it would go extinct by then however, unless we somehow managed to migrate to a new one. Life requires an energy source in our form and without it or massive changes to our biology our species would fail after fading, without artificial genetic evolution.
Even if we managed to become a space race we would require adaptation that evolution could not provide in the needed time frame, we would need to do it ourselves.

 

I don't think we would make it. Sun light is needed to grow plants. Without plants we wouldn't be able to feed domestic animals and that would mean vegetables and meat would disappear. I think we'd be in big trouble.

 

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No.

 

Most of life on our planet has been extinguished by mass extinctions possibly caused by meteors hitting it. Imagine what the loss of the sun would do. We might survive a week or two. Not more.

 

For a certain period of time, I don't doubt that .0001%or so of the population might be able to survive a troglodyte existence. But sooner or later such a small population base would run out of essential supplies to survive. Barring some geological upheaval that is.

 

I suspect all of the separate elements are technically possible, though I’m not sure we’re currently capable of all of them consistently and efficiently so I’d say the combination of all at once would be insurmountable.

I know there have been experiments involving self-contained environments, looking to the possibility of people living on the moon or other planets but they require massive amount of resources and equipment to support very small teams of professionals for limited periods of time and they all still heavily rely on the Sun.

 

No. We would need a century's warning to build what you are talking about. We'd never survive.