Ask Ethan: Could we save the Earth by migrating it away from the Sun?
Someday, the Sun will heat up enough to boil our planet’s oceans. Could moving the entire Earth away save us?
“I would argue that in any habitable zone that doesn’t boil or freeze, intelligent life is going to emerge because intelligence is convergent.”
-Simon Conway Morris
Someday, in the distant future, the Earth’s oceans will boil, destroying all life on the planet’s surface and potentially rendering Earth completely inhospitable. It’s the type of global warming that no human can avert: the gradual warming that the Sun experiences by burning its core fuel over its lifetime. But there may be a way to keep the Earth inhabited if we plan a very long-term solution: migrating the entire Earth. Is this really plausible, though? That’s what Mathieu Nisen wants to know:
I want to dream a bit: do you think it could be physically feasible to migrate the earth’s orbit with our current knowledge in science?
To find out, we need to figure out how hot it’s going to get, and how fast, in order to move the Earth quickly enough to save it.
