The sun could be the star of some interstellar Clearasil commercial right now, because there’s barely a spot on it. According to NASA, our nearest star is looking so fresh and clean because it hit its lowest level of solar activity since 2011 — almost exactly five years ago.

On Monday, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory posted a video of our squeaky-clean sun, and explained that it was on its way to solar minimum, a time in the sun’s roughly 11-year solar cycle when there are almost no sunspots. NASA describes it as a “pendulum-like pattern,” and notes that there have been very, very few sunspots over the past “several days.”

The last time the sun was this spotless was in 2011 in mid-November, during a stretch that lasted from the 14th to the 18th. A few years after that, the sun reached its most-recent peak of solar activity in early 2014.

NASA says the number of sunspots — normal, temporary blemishes on the star’s surface as a result of reduced surface temperature in that area — has been declining faster than they expected, though it doesn’t appear that the quicker rate will move up the solar cycle timeline. The sun is still expected to hit its true solar minimum in 2021.

The Sun is lookin' good.

Just because the sun is spot-free now, and headed towards an even cleaner future, doesn’t mean there won’t be some sunspot breakouts before then. In fact, they might be sprouting up with a vengeance. “No doubt more and larger sunspots will inevitably appear, but we’ll just have to wait and see,” NASA wrote in its blog post.

Photos via NASA, Getty Images / NASA

When T.S. Eliot wrote that, he was considering the end of WWI and the dissolution of his marriage and the Treaty of Versailles, he was not (consciously at least) contemplating physics-based simulator. But he almost certainly would have been enamored of the visual poetry that Universe Sandbox2 puts on offer. It’s a worlds-building game, an attempt to take the Sim genre to its logical conclusion, but it’s also a way to craft a personal vision for the end of Earth. And it is a profound reminder that we exist at the mercy of larger forces.

“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

The lifelike simulator allows users to inject carbon dioxide into Mars’ atmosphere to try to make life or reenact the Big Bang, or, and this feels so inevitable, crash shit into Earth to see what happens.

To describe the simulated destruction of Earth as satisfying is to undersell the delight of a child with a magnifying glass and some plastic soldiers. Or a skilled Mortal Kombatant given the go ahead to “Finish Him.” Here’s how it might go down if it was me, not God (or whatever), in charge….

Despite being extremely unlikely, the scenario that immediately springs to mindis the collision of Earth and the Moon. It’s a visit that would not end well for humanity.

Beyond being immediately catastrophic, the collision would fundamentally alter the earth’s rotation, as this GIF demonstrates. Consequently, every extant ecosystem would have its weather changed. Time, indeed, might run backwards. (Sure, but would broken coffee cups come back together?)

Roughly 17 hours from impact, the release of energy from impact has increased Earth’s surface temperature to 1657 degrees Celsius, according to the physics simulator (which allows you to track surface conditions of your experiments, including atmospheric measurements).

Earth’s a goner….

A similar possibility: Mars gets hit and pieces from that detonation rocket into Earth’s atmosphere….

Predictably, this is no better a scenario for Earth’s chances than contact by the Moon. Surface temperature of the Earth about 12 hours after impact is actually hotter, 2205 degrees Fahrenheit, and the result doesn’t look much more liveable than the post-Moon impact world.

Fortunately, that’s still pretty unlikely.

The luminosity of the Sun is a function of both its size (measured by radius) and the surface temperature. Astronomers suppose the Sun’s luminosity will increase by 1% every 100 million years.

A projection of the Earth after 1.5 billion years have passed and the Sun’s luminosity has increased by 15% shows things already getting hot:

The most widely-agreed-upon endpoint for Earth as a life-sustaining force (all other disaster scenarios notwithstanding) is the increasing luminosity of the Sun, which is expected to make Earth so hot as to be entirely unlivable in three billion years.

An analysis of the Earth at this point reveals a surface temperature of 101.9 degrees celsius, or just past the boiling point of water — consistent with projections that one of the first things to disappear from late-stage Earth will be the oceans.

The surface temperature of the earth has more than tripled, to 376 degrees Celsius—according to the simulation—while the Sun’s radius has expanded from the current 696,300 km to 702,020 km. This is consistent with predictions that at the three billion year point, Earth’s temperature will resemble Venus’s (with a present temperature of 462 degrees celsius)….

Another well-known end times prediction from scientists states that our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the nearest galaxy, Andromeda, will collide in about 4 billion years.

Supposing that we’ve already found a way to get off the burning rock Earth will have become and colonize Mars or a planet further on, scientists speculate that the merging galaxies will make life difficult by ejecting our Solar System into outer space or, at minimum, moving us further from the galactic core.

The goods news is that we probably won’t hit anything. Scientists actually expect this interaction to feature few real collisions because the amount of space between celestial bodies is vast. Still, things get iffy when supermassive black holes are in play.

Universe Sandbox2 is like a physics lesson on the ultimate meaninglessness of life. Perhaps the most nihilistic game on the market, it serves as a stark reminder that the Trump presidency will be nothing more than a galactic hiccup — barely worth worrying about at all.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

Every high school physics student can ramble this off by memory: According to Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, the speed of light is always the same; therefore the laws of physics exist and behave the same everywhere in the universe.

For a pair of physicists, that century-old notion simply reads: Challenge Accepted. João Magueijo from Imperial College London and Niayesh Afshordi of the Perimeter Institute in Canada proposed a new experiment proving Einstein wrong and demonstrating that the speed of light actually isn’t a constant. The pair thinks light may have moved faster in the past, around the time of Big Bang, and that it’s actually slowed down since.

The speed of light is an idea that scientists have pondered since the time of Aristotle, but it was Einstein who really gave this concept context for the modern era of physics with his infamous Theory of General Relativity. The assumption that the speed of light is a constant has been a proximal way to also assume the universe operates uniformly.

If the speed of light isn’t constant, however, it throws even the most basic laws of physics into question.

Magueijo and Afshordi think the speed of light might have been different in an infant universe that exhibited a more lumpy density. Historically, this was explained by inflation theory the universe rapidly expanded before slowing down and normalizing out to its current rate of growth. But if the speed of light was affected by this lumpiness, then perhaps it hasn’t been able to reach the edges of the ever-expanding universe and smooth things over yet.

The pair think the speed of light used to be faster than it is today and helped bridge the fringes of the universe with the insides. As the universe evened out and became more homogenous, the speed of light dropped. But if the edges of the universe are still composed of clumped up densities, they could facilitate a faster-than-expected speed of light.

This is all pretty fascinating, but it raises the more critical question: Should we even care? If Einstein is wrong, and the speed of light isn’t a constant, what exactly would that have to do with what we know about the universe?

In practical terms, obviously, this means nothing. The speed of light, where we are in the universe, will be basically the same for as long as the human species exists. We are nowhere near the point where we can develop modes of travel that rival the speed of light (although we are trying).

If that ever happens, then we might have reason to better understand the speed of light. If we master interstellar travel, that would give humans the operate to travel out to regions of the universe that possess lumpy densities. If we have spaceships that can move at the speed of light or even faster, then we’ll need to know what might happen to them should we venture out to those places where the laws of physics as we know them no longer function as we know them.

And that raises perhaps the most important ramification behind a variable speed of light. It throws everything we know about the physical world into disarray. If our most basic natural laws suddenly have exceptions, then everything has an exception, doesn’t it? Scientific research may feel like it has amounted to very little.

But a complete upheaval of our knowledge of physics would be equal parts fascinating and discouraging. Yes, we should care if Einstein was wrong about the speed of light, because the effects on how we investigate physics might not even be comprehensible to us at this point in time. And all this speculation is moot if Magueijo’s and Afshordi’s experiment can’t support their hypothesis. We’ll have to wait impatiently to see exactly what the pair find. They might be totally wrong. But if they’re not, the scientific community will have to come to grips with a world they actually know nothing about.

Photos via Flickr / Domiriel

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }