At the beginning of this evening’s festivities, we celebrated how astronomy allows us to predict the return of the sun, just as it has returned every year. But in the long run, that same astronomy tells us the sun is unstable. In the next billion years it will increase in brightness by eleven percent. Long before the infamous Red Giant phase, it will eliminate any flesh-based civilization still located on Earth.
But a billion years still gives us a lot of prep time. And Professor Korycansky at UC Santa Cruz has a solution.
He calculates that a ten-to-the-twenty-second gram asteroid in an extremely elliptical orbit could make close flybys of both Earth and Jupiter once every six thousand years. Its consistent-direction flybys of Earth would pull our planet into a higher, still near-circular orbit. While its flybys of Jupiter would maintain its own kinetic energy. Its resulting orbit would be close enough to stable (in a four-body sort of way) that simple fusion rockets powered by the ice on the object will suffice for any needed corrections.
It’s good to know this problem is taken care of.
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