Pretty crazy to be reminded that in a far off future, Earth could be a wasteland because that just how the universe works.
But I do think that there is one possibitiy of saving the planet and luckily billions of years for technological advances to allow us so. If we dont kill ourselves I’m the next 1000 years.
We will need to find a way to propel the earth when needed. Turn the planet into one big ship and push earth into the newest habital zone of whatever phase Sol is currently in.
And really in a short amount of cosmic time, we will need to push the earth farther out as the Sun increases in luminosity. In the time the earth has had life on it, we have about that exact same amount of time to get the earth moved or our home becomes a wasteland.
But I guess it might be easier to just keep moving outwards to Mars and then moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Why would we move the Earth? This is from Quora, so you know it’s true:
Assuming an average person when standing straight occupies about 1.5 square feet, you could fit the entire population of the earth in a square 25 miles x 25 miles = or 625 square miles.
Now considering the earth has about 57 million square miles of land, that is about 0.0011 percent of the landmass.
Incidentally if you put the entire population of the earth in one city with the population density of New York it would be as big as the state of Texas. Texas is about 0.5% of the earth’s land mass.
So with a tiny fraction of the size, effort and cost, we can build massive ark ships and every human can simply leave Earth. Even if we want more space than that, 20 times less dense than New York would still be 10% the size and cost of moving Earth (and has the advantage of us not risking destroying Earth entirely in the process somehow).
I think my reasoning has more to do with keeping all of biodiversity with us. Why start over each time the habital zone moves, when we could just move it all.
Obviously it’s easier moving a select group of living things. But who knows 🤷♂️
Assuming we’ve “defeated” natural selection, or at least made it slower, humans will still be relatively the same. This is in comparison to the rest of life on Earth, which we assume will evolve at the same and/or faster rates as they always have. So the animals that you’re talking about “saving” will have spent millions - billions? - of years adapting to the slowly changing environment. Rapidly moving the earth would change everything - tides, gravity, the length of the days and years - would just result in mass extinction anyway.
Cause you need the rest of earth to keep those people alive.
We’re talking at very least hundreds of millions of years in the future and the alternative being literally moving the Earth. I think we can handwave an algae farm
5 year olds after reading that in billions of years all life on Earth will be extinct 🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨😭😭😭😭😭😭
Yeah I remember crying my ass off when I first found out about this.
Thanks for the kindergarten memories, Ms. Oax!
I remember learning what “heat death” meant from an elementary school science teacher, and I remember feeling very anxious about it.
We could move the planet ourselves by building solar sails in hyperbolic orbits that use a gravity assist from Earth to slow down. We do the same thing at the moment with space probes to speed them up - it’s all about the angle of the approach.
It’s a big planet, but we have plenty of time. If we started relatively soon we could do it slow and cheap.
Lmao I mean yeah, but what are the chances?
Says so in the article:
Still, it’s best not to put your money on a stellar savior. All these possibilities together amount to just a 1-in-35,000 chance that life on Earth will survive after the star whirs by, the researchers found. As Raymond noted in his blog PlanetPlanet, that’s roughly the odds of “randomly pulling the ace of spades from two separate decks of cards while also rolling a combined 10 with two dice. Not the best odds.”
Isn’t that more saying the chances of survival if a star manages to fly by us?
Says so in the article
As Raymond noted in his blog PlanetPlanet
Remember the bit where we were laughing at the old folks for believing everything they read on Facebook, kiddos?
