this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Pretty crazy to be reminded that in a far off future, Earth could be a wasteland because that just how the universe works.
But I do think that there is one possibitiy of saving the planet and luckily billions of years for technological advances to allow us so. If we dont kill ourselves I'm the next 1000 years.
We will need to find a way to propel the earth when needed. Turn the planet into one big ship and push earth into the newest habital zone of whatever phase Sol is currently in.
And really in a short amount of cosmic time, we will need to push the earth farther out as the Sun increases in luminosity. In the time the earth has had life on it, we have about that exact same amount of time to get the earth moved or our home becomes a wasteland.
But I guess it might be easier to just keep moving outwards to Mars and then moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Why would we move the Earth? This is from Quora, so you know it's true:
So with a tiny fraction of the size, effort and cost, we can build massive ark ships and every human can simply leave Earth. Even if we want more space than that, 20 times less dense than New York would still be 10% the size and cost of moving Earth (and has the advantage of us not risking destroying Earth entirely in the process somehow).
I think my reasoning has more to do with keeping all of biodiversity with us. Why start over each time the habital zone moves, when we could just move it all.
Obviously it's easier moving a select group of living things. But who knows π€·ββοΈ
Assuming we've "defeated" natural selection, or at least made it slower, humans will still be relatively the same. This is in comparison to the rest of life on Earth, which we assume will evolve at the same and/or faster rates as they always have. So the animals that you're talking about "saving" will have spent millions - billions? - of years adapting to the slowly changing environment. Rapidly moving the earth would change everything - tides, gravity, the length of the days and years - would just result in mass extinction anyway.
We're talking at very least hundreds of millions of years in the future and the alternative being literally moving the Earth. I think we can handwave an algae farm