How Will Humankind Survive the Red Giant Catastrophe?
Earth shifted to the Kuiper Belt
The Death of Earth
It is predicted that in about 5 billion years our Sun will expand into a Red Giant, consuming the inner planets and Earth! Assuming humankind lives to see this, or encounters similar situations in future colonial planets, planning is going to be crucial in order to survive such an event. While this may be far off, it is interesting to consider the situation.
Plan to save Earth
Taube and Seifritz recently suggested a plan that would allow us to steer clear of the enlarging fireball that was our Sun. First plan is to move Earth to the Kuiper Belt some 50 AU out by means of a swing-by technique: Using a large thrusting device, we would move Earth barely into the gravitational wells of of Jupiter and Saturn or possibly several passing asteroids. This would allow the Earth to ride on their potential energy and move further away from the soon to be deadly Sun.
However, there is still the problem of illuminating Earth during this traveling period and at its final destination. Taube and Seifritz suggest that, as we will be taking the moon along with us, that “A ring of DD-fusion power stations outstretched on Moon’s orbit should produce the necessary 175 PW of visible light with which Earth has to be illuminated.” That’s 175 PetaWatts of power from deuterium-deuterium fusion generators. Amazing. This would then be configured into a permanent artificial sun - ArtSun at Earth’s new location in the Kuiper Belt.
Oddly enough, at the end of their conclusions, they state, “To our best knowledge this is the first time that somebody speculated about such a kind of Planetary Engineering.” However, while reading this paper I was reminded of the Puppeteers from Larry Niven’s Known Space series. They had a similar plan, in which they moved 5 of their worlds, 4 of them farming worlds, in a Klemperer rosette in order to escape a galactic catastrophe. I think they actually brought a sun with them to provide power. They did have large fusion thrusters to actually move the planets, though. I might write a comment to Taube and Seifritz seeing if they have ever read Ringworld. If any of you haven’t read it, it’s a great book!
Whether we will ever have the resources and capabilities to do this remains to be seen of course. I am not very optimistic, though, given that humankind has a habit of fighting amongst ourselves.
Sources:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0811/0811.4052v1.pdf
This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Astrophysics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
