Humans Can Be Saved from Fiery Apocalypse by ‘CHANGING Earth’s Orbit’
The Sun – which grows at a rate of 10 per cent every billion years – will continue to expand so much that it will eventually begin to heat up our planet to the point where it is uninhabitable.
Although this won’t happen for another 500million years or so, scientists are already gearing up for the inevitable.
In a report titled ‘How to Survive Doomsday’, Columbia University astrophysicists Michael Hahn and Daniel Wolf Savin said moving Earth from its current orbit, in line with the Sun’s expansion so that we always stay the same distance, might be the best option for us.
They propose that we fire a man-made asteroid into space to throw us off our path.
Building a solar sail is one way to escape the Sun’s growing heat
They write: “If we fired a 100km wide asteroid on an elliptical orbit that passed close to the Earth every 5,000 years, we could slowly gravitationally nudge the planet’s orbit farther away from the sun, provided that we don’t accidentally hit the Earth.”
Alternatively, and perhaps the safer sounding option, would be to create a giant solar sail – which would have to be at least 20 times the diameter of Earth – that uses energy from the Sun to pull our planet slowly away from the expanding star.
The researchers continue: “Strategies like these could, in principle, keep the Earth in the habitable zone until the sun expands into a red giant.”
Eventually, man may become machine
What the duo also suggests is that we upload our minds to computers and let future humans live as robots.
Although it’s not possible to upload our minds to computers at the moment, company’s such as Google have touted the middle of the current century when expertise in neurosciences will have advanced enough to do this.
They write: “We humans might simply decide to upload ourselves into machines, which would be relatively comfortable on the dystopic future Earth.
“This would require advanced computing resources and a deeper understanding of neuroscience than are currently available, but there is no known fundamental reason why we could not exchange our biological hardware for robotic replacements.”
