Even if we don't commit suicide by polluting the environment or overheating the Earth, the clock is relentlessly heading towards the end of the world, Jeff Hirsch said.
You see, there's a little problem with the sun.
When the sun burns the hydrogen in the core, it slowly warms.
After about 5 billion years, the sun will begin to turn into an inflated red giant.
Its outer gas shell will expand and devour the Earth when it reaches its peak size and brightness in 7 billion years.
But long before that, in 1.
In 1 billion, the Sun will become brighter by 11%, raising the Earth's average temperature to about 50 °c (120 °F).
This will warm the ocean so that they evaporate without boiling, just like a pot of water left on the sun-filled kitchen counter.
Plants and animals will be difficult to adapt to greenhouses, although some single greenhouses
Cell organisms known as ancient bacteria may survive.
But only for a while.
Once water vapor enters the atmosphere, the ultraviolet rays from the sun will split the water molecules, and the hydrogen required to build living cells will slowly leak into space.
If our future generations or other wise lives
Follow our form-they have to migrate to other places in order to survive.
But where do you do it?
One way is to launch a rocket and move to another planet.
Back in 1930, British science
The novel author Olaf steelen wrote about a future in which our descendants fled to Venus and later Neptune when the Earth became unfit to live.
Prominent scientists like Stephen Hawking support the idea of setting up colonies on the moon or other planets so that humans can survive any disaster that destroys life on Earth.
But all six were evacuated.
7 Billion Earth people will be launched on a space shuttle equivalent to one billion times.
Even if we can launch 1000 shuttles a day, it will still take 2700 to move the entire population of the planet.
Then, people need to take care of them once they reach their new home.
Moving to any other planet would require "remodeling" it to provide food, water and oxygen to support the colonists.
Why not bring our own planet with the resources we need?
Basic physics tells us that we can actually move planets.
Launching a rocket into space will push the Earth in the opposite direction, just like the recoil of a gun. Science-
Novel Author and trained physicist Stanley Schmidt took advantage of this fact in his novel, The Sin of the ancestors, where aliens built giant rocket engines to move the Earth. (
Read other sci-
Science fiction and movies that solve the problems of the mobile world. )
In real life, however, the Earth is so huge that the rocket has little effect on its movement.
Launch billion-
Compared with the current speed of 30 kilometers per second on Earth, a ton rocket in exactly the same direction will make the speed of the Earth change only 20 nanometers per second-peanuts.
Some astronomers have solved the problem of moving planets, but have not solved emergencies on human time scales.
Greg Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said they are actually designing thought experiments to understand the dynamics of the planetary system.
Therefore, the processes that occur on the geological time scale are very effective.
When we only know our own solar system, planetary dynamics look simple and orderly, but with the discovery of "hot Jupiter" in close orbit around other stars, this has changed.
It is impossible for these planets to form in the hot areas they surround-there is not enough gas and dust to gather such a huge world.
Instead, they must have immigrated there from a more distant place of birth.
In order to understand how the planetary system rearranges itself, his Santa Cruz colleague Don coricanski, Laughlin, University of Michigan astronomers Fred Adams raised the question of how to move the earth, the warming sun will not destroy the Earth.
For their calculation, the three men chose the final destination of the Earth as orbit 1.
The distance from the sun is now five times that of Mars orbit. In 6.
3 billion years, when the sun is red
Huge stage and 2.
2 times brighter than today, the planet at this distance will receive as much sunshine as the Earth receives today.
Moving the Earth to a circular orbit at this distance requires an increase of approximately 30% of its orbital energy.
They say it is possible by changing the orbit of cold objects in the distant solar system so that they can approach the Earth and transfer some orbital energy to the Earth.
These objects are located in a circle outside Neptune called the cold object of the koibel belt, and also in the more distant comet shell known as the Orte cloud.
Because they are far from the sun, the orbital energy of these objects is relatively low, so it is possible to use the method being developed to deviate the asteroid from the Earth.
These range from gravity tugs-spacecraft that fly near objects and pull them off orbit under gravity-to a stronger push for mass drivers, it digs and spews debris from the cold body, pushing it in the opposite direction.
And then they're in orbit.
The ice jet, which evaporates from the surface, is tuned in the internal solar system by the device sent there.
Nobody wants to deploy the future Bruce Willis with a rocket.
A lot of nuclear weapons are needed to do this.
"You need to be very good.
Fine-grained control that nuclear weapons will certainly not produce! Said Laughlin.
About a million close passes like this will work.
If we divide them evenly, it means that there is a close pass every 1000 to 6000, depending on the fact that we want to reach the Mars orbit as the sun begins to evaporate the ocean, or when it reaches red? giant phase.
Fortunately, these objects can be re-created.
They can be used if they rotate around Jupiter and Earth to get energy from the giant planet and transfer it to Earth.
It will be a hard job, and it will take enough patience to keep moving the earth outward as the sun warms.
This also poses a huge risk as these objects have to pass through more than 10,000 kilometers on the surface of the Earth.
These objects will be much larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaur, so a small "oops" can be devastating.
Laughlin and colleagues took this very seriously and warned in summing up their paper: "100-
Objects at cosmic speeds and kilometers in diameter of the Earth will disinfect the biosphere most effectively, at least to the level of bacteria.
This danger cannot be overemphasized.
Colin McInnis, mechanical engineer at Strathclyde University, said: "This danger can be avoided by using a huge solar sail.
Thin Sunsail, mirror-
It's like movies that are driven by weak sunlight.
The idea of mackinnes is to put a free one.
Floating on a solar sail at a point near Earth, the pressure of solar radiation basically balances the gravity of the Earth.
His analysis shows that from a physical point of view, the reflection of the sun from the sail will pull the Earth and the sail outward, increase the Earth's orbital energy, and accelerate the center of mass of the system outward, away from the sun.
McInnes calculates that in order to keep up with the pace of warming the sun, it takes a disk to move the Earth outward-shaped sail 19.
Twice the diameter of the Earth
It must tilt toward the sun at 35 ° and be stationed about five times the distance between the moon and the Earth.
He envisioned building it in space by refining raw materials in 9-9. km-wide metal-rich asteroid.
Nickel and iron from asteroids will be made 8-micron-
Thick film of sail.
The sails are complex and large;
In order to maintain the proper shape of the sail, especially in the face of the disturbance of the moon's gravity, active control is required.
But mackinnes says moving objects through the Earth from the koiber belt are 10,000 times less mass than throwing objects.
Jeffrey Landis, a science fiction author and NASA scientist, says the concept is reasonable.
"It looks like physics is right, but of course, there is no technology or proposal to make a solar sail 20 times the diameter of the Earth, which is science fiction.
Mackinnes admitted that even he did not take the idea too seriously: "It was a matter of Friday afternoon.
But despite the practical difficulties of these scenarios, Laughlin's computer simulation also points out the real danger of playing with planetary orbits.
Planetary orbits are shaped by the gravity of their neighbors, so moving the earth changes the orbits of other inner planets in unpredictable and potentially dangerous ways.
If this move destroys Mercury's stability, the entire solar system may fall into a chaotic pattern, "which is very difficult and may not be controlled," Laughlin said ".
Unless we don't have other options, this could be the best reason to leave the planet alone.