this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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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