The typical ending of our lovely planet will come in several billion years when the Sun swells up and engulfs all of the inner planets. But it’s never too early to start thinking of how to rescue our beloved cradle.
According to an article in the NYTimes, the Earth faces an unknown future because it will move further out in orbit as the Sun expends its mass and the gravitational forces become weaker.
One solution is to lasso comets and asteroids, swinging them near the Earth and using their slight gravity to boost the Earth to a higher orbit, where it could escape the Sun’s expansion. Because, y’know, what could go wrong with that?
(image from NASA website)
Sounds like A WORLD OUT OF TIME by Larry Niven. Earth ended up in orbit around Jupiter, if I recall.
Ooh, I haven’t read that one. Add another book to the already-tall pile.
It stands to reason that by the time our Sun is due to cook us all in our shoes, we will (if we haven’t already destroyed ourselves) be at least a Type 1 civilisation (we’re currently an untyped civilisation – barely a civilisation at all) and will thus have the technology and energy resources required to up sticks and move on, in our entirety. Of more immediate concern is the upcoming ice-age, which we can expect to see probably a hundred-thousand years or so after the current ice-age has finished.