Earth Should Be Fitted With a Thruster to Escape The Sun.
Earth Should Be Fitted With a Thruster to Escape The Sun.
ANTARCTICA — In around a billion years, increases in the sun’s energy output will ensure oxygen levels on Earth drop to levels that cannot sustain complex life, according to a study in Nature Geoscience.
However, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel suggests on the website Big Think that one compelling solution to this disastrous outcome is to attach a massive thruster to the South Pole to move Earth’s orbit.
Earth’s problem is that the increasing concentration of helium in the sun’s core leads to gravitational contraction, causing the sun’s inner core to heat up, which in turn increases the rate of fusion.
That ultimately increases the sun’s energy output by about ten percent every billion years, and Siegel explains that “there are only so many defenses and feedback mechanisms our planet has at its disposal.” As an alternative defense, then, Siegel calculates the Earth would need to move an additional 4.9 percent away from the sun, from an average of 149.6 million kilometers to an average of 164 million kilometers, to maintain energy levels as they are now.
Any thruster looking to generate that movement would require 500,000 times more energy than the total generated by humanity in history, continuously, for 2 billion years, and Siegel suggests this could come from a massive array of solar panels.
Subsequently, the thruster itself would be built at the South Pole, where it would not interfere with Earth’s existing direction of motion and could, over millions of years, propel the Earth to a greater, and safer, orbital distance from the sun.
The Conversation explains that the mechanics of such a thruster could involve firing out a stream of charged particles that propel Earth forward, using similar physics to that used for launching a rocket into space, though it would require the energy equivalent of 300 billion billion launches.
The new orbit would move us out of the path of some space objects and into the paths of others, according to Siegel, but we could achieve the goal of reducing the amount of the sun’s radiation hitting our planet, buying us billions of years before the sun ultimately runs out of fuel.
