Question: what would happen if the sun dissapered

Eleanor Holmes answered on 20 Nov 2013:

Interesting question. Let’s look at it from a few angles, shall we?

Food: No photosyntesis means no more crops which effectively means no more domesticated animals for meat. The food we have now would run out pretty quickly and we would be left only with plants that can grow in darkness or under UV light inside. It might be sustainable. But not for everyone. Our population would have to fall dramatically.

Cold: If the sun disappears we will have about a year before global temperatures get so low that the oceans freeze over. This would actually end up insulating the water below the frozen top layer. So if we have some sort of underwater base we could stay reasonably warm and eat fish.

Energy: All our energy ultimately comes from the sun. Even oil was once plants and animals that basked in the rays of our favourite star. But we have stored that energy and would possible be able to run lights and generators in our underwater base for quite some time. There is also nuclear energy and geothermal radiation for heat, etc.

Orbit: Of course the Earth would no longer be orbiting the now non-existent sun and would drift off into space and who knows where we would end up? Interestingly, since the sun is 8 light minutes away, we would actually continue to orbit the empty space left by the sun for 8 minutes before flying away. This is because no information can travel faster than the speed of light. Even the information that the enormous mass we have been orbiting for millennia is no longer there!

So we would likely die. It would be very grim and bad. But it won’t ever happen. Something cannot become nothing.