Recipe for Saving Earth: Move It



They say:



Well, heaven might have to stay put. But with existing technology, some advance planning and a little orbital energy, courtesy of a redirected asteroid, Earth's distance from the Sun could be increased by 50 percent in just a few billion years.



It's a scheme that could save the planet, at least for a while. Because if Earth stays in its current orbit, we are doomed.



Hot death



Just as sure as the Sun comes up every morning, it is scheduled to die. Experts give it some 7 billion years, when it will turn into a bloated red giant. As the name implies, a red giant is a star swelled to gargantuan proportions. Earth would be first engulfed in heat and light, then vaporized.



Well before then, things will turn real nasty. In just a billion years, the Sun could be 11-percent brighter, scientists say, rendering Earth an inhospitable greenhouse. In 3.5 billion years, the Sun could be 40-percent brighter than it is today.



With our demise so clear on the cosmic horizon, astrophysicist Fred Adams of the University of Michigan and NASA's Gregory Laughlin got to wondering in recent years how the planet might be saved by gravitational interaction with a passing star. They ran computer simulations of possible encounters over the next 3.5 billion years, finding last year that the odds of the Earth being completely ejected from the solar system are one-in-100,000.



Slim odds. And life in the frigidity of deep space would be no summer picnic.



So Adams and Laughlin, along with Don Korycansky of the University of California, Santa Cruz, began to discuss consider how human intervention might bring about a more suitable long-term orbit, one that gradually expands with the aging Sun.



Their idea, which evolved from interaction with a star to rerouting a giant space rock to save Earth, will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Astrophysics and Space Science.

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DANG! Fo Shizzle!



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