The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is one of the most iconic features of our Solar System. And your grandkids will likely never see it.It’s a planet sized storm that has been raging for up to 350 years, longer than the United States has been a country. Astronomers as far back as the 1660s looked up and observed it, while generations since have seen the incredibly detailed images of the iconic red spot taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.It seems permanent. And in as few as 20 years, it could be gone, forever.Jupiter is an awe inspiring monster, a planet of extremes. You can fit 1,300 Earths inside this gas giant, and it is 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets in the Solar System combined. It spins 28 times faster than Earth, with one day on Jupiter lasting only 10 Earth hours.So it makes sense that Jupiter should play host to the most extreme storm humanity has ever seen.The Great Red Spot is a massive high pressure storm that could swallow the Earth. Winds exceeding 640 km/h tear around its edges, while some measurements put its winds close to 700 km/h. By comparison, the fastest cyclonic wind ever recorded on Earth was Tropical Cyclone Olivia, with speeds topping out at 408 km/h.The Great Red Spot is a gigantic anticyclone, rotating counterclockwise once every six days. Its position between Jupiter’s powerful atmospheric currents helps explain why it has survived for so long.Currently 16,350 km wide, the Great Red Spot is about 1.3 times the width of Earth. Flyby measurements by NASA’s Juno spacecraft have mapped it to over 350 km deep.But the Great Red Spot is changing.It was once far bigger. At its peak when observed in the 1800s, it was estimated to be about 48,280 km wide, more than three times the width of Earth. Even its color has changed, displaying a constantly mutating mix of deep reds, fiery oranges and even light beige.It has been shrinking for decades and showing no sign of stopping. Recent observations show the spot that was once more elongated is now more circular, a sign it’s losing structure, not just size.And this may have already happened once before.In 1665, astronomer G.D. Cassini observed and documented what he called a “Permanent Spot” on Jupiter. He tracked it for decades. But after that, Cassini’s spot on Jupiter wasn’t definitively recorded again until 1831, 166 years later.Some modern researchers now believe Cassini’s spot was probably a completely different storm, a massive weather system like the Great Red Spot that eventually collapsed and dissipated.Think about what that means. A storm many times the size of Earth, a storm that had been raging long enough for a 17th century astronomer to name it “permanent,” vanished silently between observations. No one noticed it was gone. No one knew another storm had taken its place.You might say, what’s the big deal? The Great Red Spot is just some storm on Jupiter. If it was gone today or never there to begin with, it makes no difference to us on Earth, right?Not quite. Not by a long shot.Studying the Great Red Spot has given scientists some of the most detailed data on how giant, long lived vortex systems sustain themselves. It has also helped scientists understand the Coriolis Effect and how planetary rotation shapes weather patterns.There are real world applications on Earth too. Understanding how the Great Red Spot sustains itself against surrounding turbulence has given scientists tools to study atmospheric blocking, which can cause heatwaves and cold spells. When blocking is predicted weeks in advance, governments issue heat warnings, farmers adjust harvests, and food security models can flag the risk of crop failures.This isn’t hypothetical. There are things we understand about Jupiter today that future generations simply will not be able to replicate.The data window is closing.And Jupiter’s Great Red Spot isn’t the only thing disappearing.We think there is a permanence to the Universe. But like the Great Red Spot, the Universe as we know it is changing. It’s expanding and spreading out, and this expansion is accelerating.Imagine a civilization that could evolve two trillion years from now. They would have an entirely different view of the Universe. They might see a few merged galaxies from their local group and nothing else. No matter how big they built their telescopes, they would find nothing past their immediate neighborhood.Their cosmology would be fundamentally missing something, and there would be no way for them to correct it.We are here at a remarkable moment in cosmic history. We evolved at just the right time to map distant galaxies, detect the echo of the Big Bang and observe stars being born in nebulae that won’t exist forever.And close to home, we can observe and study a 350 year old storm on a planet 600 million kilometers away at a time when we are technologically evolved enough to understand what it means.Your grandkids may never see the Great Red Spot. That’s a real possibility. That’s a huge loss.But you can still see it.Tonight, you can point a telescope at Jupiter and watch a storm that has been churning since before modern science existed. You could spot something, write it down, and help towards a new discovery.We are privileged to be here at this moment, and we need to embrace it.