Question: If the sun disappeared would humans die or evlove?

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  1. If the sun disappeared, we would probably die unless we could get away fast enough (something we don’t have the technology to do yet). Evolution takes millions of years to come up with new useful traits in organisms, and the sun disappearing would happen much more quickly, I imagine. The sun will change, and it may be that humans will be able to adapt to different temperatures…for a little while. But eventually life would be impossible on Earth even with only small changes in the sun.

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  2. @king98: Fabulous question! We’d be stuffed!

    Nearly all life on Earth is dependent on the sun. You might think we don’t need it, but all the plants do and our food chain links back down to plants and animals who need to eat plants. Without those tiny animals who eat phyto-plankton in the sea or organic green matter on land, there’s nothing for the next sized up critters to eat, and so on – until we get to the fish and animals we eat. And the plants we eat can’t exist without the sun.

    Although there have been some experiments with growing plants in buildings using artificial life, it’s nowhere near the scale we would need for the world as we know it and the human population to exist.

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  3. If we did not have any warning, we would certainly die.
    If we did have warning, everyone would argue about it it was true (just like they do about climate change) and we would die.
    But potentially, we could work at developing technology (it would have to involve nuclear energy or geothermal energy – just about every other kind comes from the Sun) that would enable us to survive. And we would have to live underground.

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  4. Nothing to add here. If there was no time to do anything else (like adapt the way we live – not via evolution though) we’d cark it.

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