Towing an entire planet out of trouble… sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it? About as gloriously pulpy a sci-fi plot as you could ever think up. Thankfully it’s not the latest geoengineering idea designed to cope with global warming, but a suggestion on how we might cope with the expansion of the Sun as it ages, which won’t be a problem for a good billion years or so. Then again, it won’t be a problem for us at all unless we get through the next century or two…

Either which way, moving entire planets isn’t something that could be accomplished in a timescale of any great use to humans in a solar emergency, but it makes a nice hypothetical scenario for scientists modelling the dynamics of planetary systems. [image by alicepopkorn]