STARLIFTING

ON earth everything dies, but those sparkling stars seem to be an exception, a source of solace in a brutal cosmos but stars do eventually die, it feels wrong the source of our planets biosphere is gradually stepping towards its death, although a billion years from now. Before it dies it'll rip apart Earth's atmosphere, boil off its ocean, eventually smothering the earth itself in its final embrace. A similar fate awaits for all stars and eventually trillions of years from now there will no light in anyone's sky. Universe will plunge into darkness. It seems all scary until we think of things that could prolong the life of our sun, could we save our sun from dying? through our ingenuity and technology. As the sun ages its luminosity increases that where the problom arises for our planet

With this rise in energy Co2 levels will enventually drop to zero ending photosyntheis life and collapsing the global food chain, thus complex life will end of earth this way. if we want to maintain a habitable Earth for longer then we need to somehow keep the irradiation strike in the earth stable over that time and the sun doesn't want to cooperate with that so that begs the question is there something that we could do or perhaps something that I'm more technologically advanced descendants might be able to do there are basically three options option one is just to pack up and move the entire population to another solar system a journey of daunting scaling complexity in that choice we sacrifice our home watch it burn to the ground as we sail away into the sky a final goodbye to the parent that gave us life but options 2 and 3 refuse to let the Earth die so easily and seek to preserve it starting with option two the idea here is somewhat audaciously is to physically move the Earth further back from the Sun and it's this idea which has gone the greatest scientific attention in recent years in 2001 Don korikanski authored a provocative paper that suggested that our distant descendants could indeed pour this off using asteroid voids the idea starts by first finding a very large asteroid something like the size of 324 bam Burger but worn in a highly elliptical and distant orbit such that it periodically swings into the inner solar system every few Millennia or so the asteroids orbit is then manipulated perhaps using reflective paint or even just smashing into it like the dark Mission recently did either way this manipulation causes the asteroid to make a near pass of the Earth in doing so the asteroid will whip around the earth performing a gravitational slingshot in such exchanges orbital energy is transferred between the asteroid and the Earth with the direction depending upon the angle of attack korikanski cleverly arranges the slingshot such that the asteroid's orbital energy is lowered but the Earth gains now because the Earth is so much more massive than the asteroid this has a huge effect on the asteroids orbit but just marginally increases the Earth's orbital distance around the son congratulations you have just moved the Earth back a tiny bit and thus slightly reduced its temperature now to really make a difference we're going to have to do this many times so rinse wash repeat over and over and the real Elegance of this scheme is that that asteroid can be reused to this end the first step is that the asteroids orbit is nudged with thrusters towards Jupiter where it performs another slingshot to regain its lost energy additional adjustments are then made to the asteroid's orbit to ensure that it returns back to the Earth in its next round trip and in fact the authors propose at the outer planets such as Saturn could help here for an asteroid with a period of say 6 000 years it would perform one million of these close encounters with the Earth over the next 6 billion years each one pushes the Earth's orbit back a little until we reach an orbital distance comparable to Mars's current location that distance is important because in six billion years time the Sun will be about 2.2 times more luminous so pushing the Earth square root 2.2 times further out which is where Mars lives now means our irradiation stays the same as the modern value the scheme is brilliant and I remember being quite inspired by this paper when I first read it many years ago just the idea that we can use the components of our solar system to modify our environment Astro Engineering in fact many have even suggested that we could use this to solve climate change in the short term however it has to be said that this idea comes with some considerable challenges perhaps most alarmingly we're deliberately aiming one of the largest asteroids in the solar system system to close proximity of our fragile home planet indeed an asteroid would need to be so large that if the unthinkable happened and we miscalculated leading to a strike on the earth it won't just trigger a mass extinction it would completely exterminate life on Earth game over.

star lifting could be the key to sustaining the Sun for far longer this Natural Life allows it's a staggering thought that human Ingenuity could one day greatly extend the lifespan of an object that massively dwarves add tiny pale blue dot Although our paper is largely satisfied with the results that we could theoretically extend the sun's lifespan by 10 Giga years.