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Changing Earth's Orbit Proposed
SEWilco writes "This BBC story points out that a team of astronomers have found a way to adjust the orbit of the Earth. They suggest moving a large asteroid past Earth and using its gravity to pull us out to a slightly different orbit. Their concern was how to keep the Earth cool as the Sun ages and warms up in a billion years. It's nice to see someone thinking of the long term."
- Bruce Campbell
Sorry, but anybody that was involved in the movie "Congo" is in no position to be critical of other people's movies. Bruce Campbell is a likeable guy, but everything he's done post-Army Of Darkness has been unwatchable crap.
Jack of All Trades? Xena? ELLEN!?
Go back to playing Ash, Bruce, or at least Brisco Frikkin' County, Jr.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I am risking karma here:
I am bothered that the highest rated posts onto science related articles are "Funny" ones. Also, "intelligent" articles seem to get less posts. When a post about Microsoft/Apple being bad comes up, well, tons of posts! But on the earth, the RSA algorithm, etc - under 200! And the highest rated? "Funny"
I just think that is "funny" that's all...
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
this is the worst idea i have heard in a long time.. are we really aarogant enough to tinker with the earths orbit?
Heh. Too close. heh. I get the point but.. heh That's funny. Ironic too.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
We're already in an elliptical orbit though...
"We were half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold."
-- Hunter S. Tolkien
That's just the trouble these days. Damn heathen scientists playing God, messing with our orbit like they knew what they was doin.
It'll lead to nothing but trouble I tell you...
*grumble grumble*...
Vidi, Vici, Veni
What will happen to the atmosphere? Wouldn't a gravitational pull this strong, also rip part of the atmosphere away? Or how about the oceans? We'd friggin' flood ALL costal areas! (Of course, some people don't like New York anyway...) How about the Earth's molten core? Wouldn't such a gravitational force destabilize the core, thus resulting in massive volcanic activity, thus resulting in tidal waves, thus compounding the initial tidal problem, thus wiping out EVERYTHING except maybe mid-(pick your continent)?
Deceptively simple?! Yeah right!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Nahh. After all, if a beat-up old type 40 can move a neutron star, moving little old Earth taint no thing.
Besides, you can always just time loop the sun...
www.eFax.com are spammers
I read an article in Discover several years ago that proposed an idea similar to this. That person proposed by the time that such action is necessary mankind will have figured out how to convert matter directly to energy. He proposed outfitting a large portion of the moon with lamps that do just that. They would also use something to move the moon out of its orbit. This was described as a tugboat effect. In a sense the moon would pull the earth away from the sun.
i'm thinking that this might be slightly (in a relative sense) more urgent due to an asteroid doing precisely the oppposite of what they have in mind - pulling us closer. i can't help but think this sort of foresight is a good thing but maybe we've got other, more statistically probably life-ending scenarios we should be paying attention to.
just food for thought.
My .02,
My .02,
zencode
iactivist.org/jason
Just break up pieces of the Earth, and used the to seed other planets.
Then, get in your giant guitar-shaped spacecraft and go there.
(5 points to whomever can name the two groups...)
www.eFax.com are spammers
oops, a little too much deviation, now we're falling into the sun, well at least it will be warmer
For comparision, let's look at the moon.
The moon in fact moves the earth in orbit every month. If you accurately measure and plot out the path of the earth in space, you see a long, lazy, low amplitude sine wave along the the earth's path. This is because of the gravitational pull of the moon. Now you do not see any horrendous disasters because of this.
All that is required is for a large asteroid, about 100 km (62 miles) across, to fly past the Earth transferring some of its orbital energy to our planet. The asteroid would then move out to encounter Jupiter where it would acquire more energy that it could impart to the Earth on a subsequent encounter.
Note that the moon is slightly larger, about 20 times (?) the diameter of the proposed asteroid, meaning it is 8000 times as massive. Roughly. so the gravitaional pull would be slight.
The main problem I see is that we do not have experience in precision navigation of larger planetary masses.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
let's play billiards with the planets and meteors.
Perhaps His reason was to give us big-brained apes a tough astrodynamics challenge and see if we could survive as a species for more than a billion years.
Reminds me of that Love & Rockets song "No New Tale To Tell". The lyrics go "You cannot go against Nature / Because when you do / Go against Nature / It's part of Nature too."
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I thought this was more interesting than the original article due to the implications it has on the existence of planetary systems (i.e. maybe mature planetary systems must look like ours because the others have self-destructed or will do so shortly). Does anyone have more info or a URL on it?
Given your assumption that you need mass2 = 0.75 * mass1 to effectively move mass1 then you can simply move mass2 with mass3 = 0.75 * mass2. And so on. So shifting just the right manhattan sized asteroid with a nuke may be all we need.
However, note that your assumption is probably wrong. Orbital mechanics are a funny thing and I would intuitively think 0.10 might be enough.
Also note that it would take 2 asteroids to do the job since one asteroid contribute most of its slingshot effect in a small time frame. This means earth's orbit's ellipse will only extend along one axis. In other words the earth will still get as close as it does to the sun at the orbital location that the asteroid event takes place. So another asteroid event (probably 365/4 days later) would be necessary.
Was the 'dragon thing' like a Rhino that shot plasma balls or something out of his horn? I remember the rest of the characters. They were the (something)oids.... Man! I gotta get a PDA so I can remember this important stuff...
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
In addition, the moon stabilizes the earth's rotational axis. Without it, it's been simulated that the earth's axis would drift dramatically over the long term, having huge effects on climactic seasons.
That's just the most obvious effects. Any sudden change in the moon's orbit is bound to affect us.
> I can't see why anyone would be opposed to
> moving the Earth when the alternative is letting
> ALL LIFE DIE.
Well, my hat goes in the "waste of resources" ring. If we as a race (assuming we're still around) haven't long grown past this planet in a billion years, we deserve to die. By the time it becomes an issue I hope that humanity or whatever we've developed into has no need for the planet. The thought that not moving the Earth will cause the DEATH OF ALL LIFE seems a bit shortsighted to me.
> This will NOT cause major tidal forces. It won't
> change the Earth's gravity (anyone who thinks
> changing the Earth's orbit could affect it's
> gravity must still not have completed high
> school physics).
Right on the second point, but your high school physics need brushing up with the first. Flying a large asteroid by the Earth will indeed cause enormous tidal forces for a short while. It won't change things permanently, but it will cause some short term destruction in the form of flooding and increased tectonic activity (more the first then the second).
Lastly, the problem isn't as simple as just moving the Earth, since we're not alone in this orbit. Most people who talk about moving the Earth fail to consider that we also must move the Moon, lest we move out of its center of orbit and sling it off into space, or worse, get in its way when it comes around. This changes the complexity of the problem by several orders of magnitude, and takes me back to the "waste of resources" point. We'd be better off just leaving this rock behind before then.
Virg
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TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
When you look at an eclipse, you burn your eyes out not because there's more UV than normal, but because your eyes are fully dilated, letting in a lot more light.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Can we move to another galaxy while we are at it? Get some new neighbors, bar-b-q...
- A.P.
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I hope the calculations are not done by those idiots and retards at Martin-Marieta that destroyed a perfectly good spacecraft to Mars by mixing up long obsolete Imperial and real I.S. units.....
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
and one asteroid's gravitational field is -really- going to significantly affect the Earth's orbit. try 'one asteroid 3/4 the size of earth'. and then you have to be able to control the asteroid's path precisely to shift the earth properly. and if you can do that, why not just move the bloody Earth?
riiiiiiiight.
--nick
When steering a 100km asteroid towards Earth, confusing metric units with imperial ones could be a little more of a problem than it was with that Mars probe...
It could have something to do with the ridiculous nature of this particular "science" article. Changing the Earth's orbit with an asteroid to avoid the heat death of the Sun! I mean, come on, man. That's just begging "mock me!".
For the record, I thought one of the most interesting articles today was the RSA one. And, I did post a serious message on that one.
Thbbbt!
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
Honestly, I think we will run out of easily/quickly consumable energy within a few hundred or thousand years, which will throw human civilization back to the level of, oh, hunter-gatherers (while massively de-populating humans, taking us back to less than 1 billion people). With human populations taken back to relatively small levels, and disease, hunger, disasters, etc keeping it there, the planet will have a chance to renew itself. After a few million years, the earth will once again have relatively large oil deposits, forests, and other resources for man to use (if man is still around), and man will once again begin progressing in levels of technology, begin increasing population again, and eventually grow to the point where he consumes inordinate amounts of resources again, and once again run out of those resources, throwing civilization back again.
I think civilization could thus be cyclical until the period of the earth's demise when Sol goes Red Dwarf. Or not, but sure sounds plausible don't it? I think it is more plausible than the theory that man's knowledge and power will grow without bound, because the nature of the universe shows us that we are finite, and our capability to increase ourselves, though very large, must be finite as well.
That is one theory. Other theories that are more plausible than the infinite technological expansion of man include various doomsday scenarios where all life is wiped off the planet. (Which other people have exhaustively covered).
Lemme tell you about things that I don't trust our scientists with: the orbit of the planet. Still, do you think this is going to be the next movie craze, like the whole asteroid cataclysm thing? I can just see it now, Bruce Willis, suiting up to save the world yet again. Sharkey
http://www.badassmofo.com
I find such long-term thinking refreshing. Of course, in addition to a 1 billion year view, it would also be good to be thinking 10, 50, 100, and 1000 years ahead - both technologically and socially.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
No, the puppeteers will do that. We humans, on the other hand, will sit on our asses till the light of the core shines through the stellar clouds.
It's idioitic to worry about something that's billions of years away. Who knows if mankind will survive this next Bush Administration? :)
Skåne: fix that dialect-problem you obviously have and i might consider changing my mind.
get xited
...we'll tether 5 worlds togther and ride them to escape the Core Explosion...
Larry Niven used this idea In the novel "World out of time". Good Novel, done in the 70's I think.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
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+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
aside from that fact that I'm assuming the human race will be long gone (as in extinct) we'll be able to generate our own magnetic fields/gravity wells long before the sun goes nova.
And yes my crack habit is going strong.
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
Actually, I think Professor Abian died a few years ago.
the herculoids... i forget my network logons, but i never forget good tv, or in this case, bad
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
I'm sure we can build a Planetary Transwarp drive by the time we need to move. Come on, people!
How many fighters DOES the Earth produce in a day?
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
I'm thinking of motifs used on album covers, not videos (which, as we all know, killed the radio star (bonus point))
D'oh! I so had that pegged as Planet Caravan. Oh well, no points for me. Do I get any parting gifts? Maybe the "Slashdot - Play at Home Edition".
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
what about if we instead bundle all the hungry and cancer patients into one giant scotch taped lump, fire them into space, and use them to alter the earths orbit.
then everyone will be happy.
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
I'll just go get my dremel tool. I'm sure there's an attchment in there somewhere for cutting off chucks of the earth.
Too late dude, it's already there.
Whoa, check the killer waves!
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
Is that what you're remembering?
Ranessin
Scientists realize that an astroid is a relatively large gravitational body and can be used in a manner consistant with newtonian physics to adjusts the earth's orbit. Wowee.
Hmmm.. Pantera did the re-make and the video, but it was originally a Black Sabbath song.
Then, get in your giant guitar-shaped spacecraft and go there.
D'oh, I'm stumped! Do I still get 2 1/2 points?
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
bletchley park, kidna like mcarthur park? I never forgave richard harris for that one either...:-)
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
Slightly OT, but not really... :)
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--hongpong.com
To move the small planetoid, you just need something of appropriate mass. I recommend shipping the Senators who passed UCITA.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
Then perhaps the articles that are put up are ones that the editors think have a mockable value.
/. was a happy place of intelligent conversation. I actually at one point came to Slashdot to hear about hardware before going to Ars Technica! Instead, the integrity that A.T. has now runs circles around that of Slashdot, where >10% of "fact" posts are amended as "oops, it was a rumor and we never checked."
White the editors make little claim that this is a journalistic site, putting little comments like "If it only had three mouse buttons..." on the end of Apple articles, etc. sort of set the tone. There was once a day, long long ago (2 years) when
Oh well, I am just ranting b/c I have no life. Go linux, and stuff. (+3 "Go Linux")
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
Superman did something similar in order to reverse time...
main(i){(10-putchar(((25208>>3*(i+=3))&7)+(i ?i-4?100:65:10)))?main(i-4):i;}
Umm...isn't the obvious problem the fact that humans face imminent threats of distruction from short-timescale threats such as nuclear weapons. A great theoretical exercise, I am sure, but who funded it anyways?????? A waste.
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
... all of the people in China were to jump off of a ten foot high platform ten feet out into the sea, how big would the tidal wave that hit North and South America be?
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Well if we were real careful we could change the length of the year but not that of the day. Remember the length of our days is NOT related to out distance from the Sun in any way. So seconds would still have the same meaning, so would hours and days, but we might need to tack on some extra days to february or something in order to reflect the new size of the year.
this is the dumbest idea i have ever read on slashdot. first off, the time it takes the earth to inch closer is slow slow that we will be able to evolve almost in synce with the change. secondly, there is no way that the world as a whole would ever let some scientists, in the uk not to mention, send a huge astroid wizzing by us.
Hey, i have an idea! Let's endanger all life on earth at present and spend a whole bunch of
money so that people (or whatever the fuck has evolved by then) a billion years from now won't
fry. Brilliant. Or, you know, we _could_ divert that money to things that are RELEVANT, like,
um, world hunger? or, Space exploration? or, oh, i don't know, ANYTHING ELSE!
Ridiculous.
Yes, they crash a 200 lb probe that was supposed to go into orbit, but we'll trust them with an asteroid large enough to shift Earth to a higher orbit?
Seriously though, in response to those who ask 'how would we move something big enough to move the Earth?" Well, we'd do it the same way. Move a pebble, that slingshots another larger pebble into a course that influences a big rock to go by a boulder, past a mountain, etc. At least that way we'd get 10 or 12 slingshots to make sure our calculations tend to be accurate before the next one.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
"...could fall into a timewarp..."
<singing> "Let's do the time warp again!!!!"
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I really REALLY dont thing that all these chinese stuff is funny...someone is being quite a racist here
sorry for the blank message, but what that said was:
even a slight change in the day cycle would cause BIG human health problems. NASA has tested this sort of thing.
SSL Certificate
ok... so I'm a freak.
I still liked the time when Zorak was telling how he went on tour with Boston, that was damn funny.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
To play Devil's advocate (sorry, I couldn't resist), if you say we're meant to be in this orbit, and therefore meant to die, (I know you didn't specifically say that, but I'm Devil's advocate, remember?) then I say that we were put here to test our ability to survive, and by figuring out how to move the Earth we get the prize of longer survival. That's not immoral at all.
So there.
Virg
California is the most important state in the most important nation for the following reasons:
:)
1) Thousands of hot chicks
2) Silicon valley
3) Disneyland
4) Thousands of hot chicks
5) Me
You do NOT want to break us off.
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
How many times do I have to say this. The length of the day is in no way, shape or form related to the size of Earth's orbit !! It is related to the amount of time it takes the earth to complete one rotation. Rotation and revolution are two completely unrelated vectors!! Get it through your heads people!!!
um, eyes are dilated, check. let more light in, check. eclipse conditions, check
oh, but wait- it's dark out during an eclipse!. I guess that's why your eyes dilate open so wide! so just what light is it that fries yer eyes during an eclipse again? please explain this to me.
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
The vanity and hubris of these "scientists" is striking when one considers how much harm they could do. They could wreak havoc with the order of the universe. If they even attempted to put their plan into effect, the government should detain them for (attempted) crimes against the Earth and humanity.
I am not a lawyer.
This is a brilliant move. I can see it now, 5 minutes before this 100km wide asteroid smashes the Earth to smithereens, one NASA scientist will say to the other, "Hey, did you calculate that trajectory in metric or English units?"
I don't think I want scientists trying to move the planet just yet, let alone, sending 100km wide asteroids any closer than they already are. If they can test it out on, say Titan, first, and get it into it's own orbit, and maneuver it around for a few hundred years without doing any damage, then maybe.
But hey, what do we care? We'll all be dead and gone before anyone even writes the check to research this.
Pete Davis
Actually, you could include everyone as long as they jumped off at noon local time. we could have this earth moved wherever we wanted it in a jiffy!
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Let's not experiment on Earth (it's the only one we've got). Mars, tho...we could move it closer in, warm it up, melt some of that ice, get the atmosphere and temperature a little more comfortable.
Mars is smaller and thus the mass that would be needed to change its orbit would be smaller. We might even be able to do something with its moons Phobos and Deimos, which (if I recall correctly) are basically just captured asteroids.
Max
The "greenhouse effect" is not itself a bad thing. It merely refers to the fact that some energy reflected off the earth's surface is captured by the atmosphere and re-radiated toward the earth rather than lost into space. Without it, the earth would not be hospitible to life as we know it.
A "runaway" greenhouse effect occurs when temperature warms up beyond equilibrium, to a point where the oceans start to evaporate at a significantly higher rate. Since water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, this is the beginning of a nasty feedback loop: as the temperature causes water to evaporate, the increased water vapor in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise, which causes more water to evaporate... i.e., it becomes a runaway positive-feedback effect. Here is a good description of the ultimate runaway greenhouse doomsday scenario.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Why would there be the normal level of UV? I don't think that's possible.
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Thought I would mention a couple of things related to this subject.
1) Our sun is not big enough to go Super Nova, so don't worry about that. A Nova is a different thing that occurs in binary star systems so we don't have to worry about that either. What we do have to worry about is when the sun enters the Red Giant phase and begins to expand. That is what these scientists are pondering.
2) Any 3 body gravitational system is chaotic. A chaotic system does not mean that is is wild and out of control. It means that it is very difficult to predict because the system is very sensitive to initial conditions. However, this is often a benefit because a chaotic system can exhibit a large range of behavior, whereas a non chaotic system is stuck in it's stable behavior. Also because of the chaotic nature of a 3 body system very small perturbations can eventually greatly effect the system. This means that we would not need a very large asteroid to move the earth, a small one that approaches just right would do the trick, and it would happen over a very large time period (millions of years). However because of the chaotic nature of the system we cannot exactly predict exactly where the earth would end up (we could eliminate the possiblity of it plunging into the sun, or being ejected from the solar system). To pull this off we would probably need a series of asteroids to occasionally redirect the earth slightly (perhaps every few thousand years). Since the forces involved would be small the effects of tidal forces and effects on the environment would be small and gradual.
3) The earth already is moving away from the sun, because the sun is losing mass to the solar wind. My guess would be getting the mass loss of the sun correct would be the most difficult thing to work into the calculations since it isn't totally constant, and probably will become much more erratic as the sun begins to approach the red giant phase.
4) My guess is the thing people of the future would have to worry about isn't the sun expanding and heating the earth too much, but the sun will probably become much less stable as far as radiation output causing rapid heating (several degrees over a few hundred years) followed by rapid cooling. This kind of variability will probably wreck havoc on the environment. (This is all assuming we haven't already screwed things up ourselves).
5) This study is more relavent than you might think. While it will probably never be used to actually move the earth, the same techniques could be used to move things (spacecraft, asteroids for raw materials, etc..) without vast expendature of fuel as is currently done, where much of what we do is the brute force method. I read a paper that described how to get a spacecraft to the moon using less energy than a homan transfer (the most efficient way we currently change orbits). The method used the fact the earth, sun, moon system is a chaotic 3 body system. The drawback was that it took years to get the spacecraft to the moon.
Sorry that was so long winded.
Sean Roberts
I vote for one of those leech states like Montana, Iowa etc. California pays more taxes then it receives so that states like Montana get more fed dollars then they pitch in.
In other words California, New York or other populated states subsidize the rural lifestyle. I say get rid of the leeches not the ones doing the paying.
War is necrophilia.
And Michael Moore.
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If the orbit changes, so does the calendar. Just imagine what would happen if one second no longer held the same meaning. A Hertz is no longer a Hertz, so much would have to change. That would be fsck'ed up. Anyone remember the SNL skit of a metric day (woo hours) in the 70s?
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> From the people who brought you Thalidomide,
...and antibiotics, Kevlar and the Internet. Just because a scientist proposed it doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea.
> Chernobyl, and Bopal (sic), a new and "improved" earth orbit.
Luddite.
Virg
In theory, the unverse could go two ways. It could have enough mass that after it overcame the force of the supposed big bang (the universe is expanding) then gravity would start to pull it back to where it came from and the universe would collapse. Of course that is probably many billion, even trillions, of years in the future.
Or the universe could just expand indefinetely to the point where it would be impossible to see other stars with the naked eye. Again, that is billions of years away.
Either way, we would have to be a class 4 civilisation to keep ourselves alive. That would probably mean that we would have to leave our universe and start on spreading human screwyness to other unverses.
Right now we are a class 0 civilization.(i think that this is the way it goes.)
Class 0=conquered our own planet
Class 1=conquered space (stuff outside of earth orbit would be common)
Class 2=conquered other planets(colonies)
Class 3=Conquered galaxy
Class 4=Conquered other galaxies
But it is cool to think about the fact that when the sun decides that it is gonna go, it will expand to roughly the size of earth orbit. When that happens, it will probably make the 3rd page of the galactic times "today the home system of the human race went up in a puff of ionized gas"
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Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
right, your eyes are fully dilated for the lack of normal light, though roughly the same amount of UV is still shining. Your eye dilation is governed by the luminance in the standard spectrum. any sort of long term solar occlusion would screw with the biology of eyesight across nearly all phylum that have it. 'cepts for certain insects, possibly.
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
Hey, I'm in Canada and the balls froze off the brass monkey last month. I say we move the damn planet closer to the sun so I can start working on my tan.
You know, someone's taxes somewhere paid for this stuff. I hope next they can figure out a way to make the days longer. -Moondog
"Oh well, I am just ranting b/c I have no life. Go linux, and stuff. (+3 "Go Linux") "
If you think this is tru then you have not been slashdot. For the past several months the highest rated comments have always been "Go Microft" posts. any post which touts the reliability of windows 2K or the quality of MS and Ms tools always get modded up +5. Go check for yourself. Slasdot is now MSDOT.
War is necrophilia.
ask cecil adams about this.
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Hey, I like this planet...now if people would just stop indulging in such conspicuous consumption, and dumping their shit all over the place, maybe it would be a decent place to hang around.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Apparently (according to some documentary or other on the Discovery channel UK tonight, which I didn't really take in, being too busy with other stuff), the moon is slowly receding from us. In a few million years we'll lose it. This is due to gravitational friction, caused by the effect the moon's gravity has on earth's oceans.
There's some more on the receding moon here Be warned that the site that URL points to is an anti-creationist site. Not that you'd find me sharing any daft ideas with creationists, but its probably blocked if you live in certain less than enlightened states of the USA.
One way of fixing this is to dam the worlds oceans. That's one heck of a barrier..
An alternative would be to steal a moon off another planet. Scientists have pointed at Europa as a 'suitable' satellite.
Personally I don't plan on being about when they try and insert Europa into Earth orbit; if they miss, the results could be, err, sorta messy.
Or because you finally have some kind of reason to stare at the sun, so you do something you know you shouldn't and that would hurt you regardless of the circumstances.
Click here for $50!
as I understand it, that isnt why the sale of it was actually regulated. It was because kids were getting high off of it. It was killing many of these kids. Hold the bottle upright and start inhaling... get all messed up, let the bottle fall over on its side, your lungs are frozen. Game over. This happened to several people I went to highschool with in the late 80's. It was getting to be quite a problem. Anyone can feel free to provide some contradictory info if I'm wrong however.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Except it was called Thundar, The Barbian. And he had a Sun Sword that he would use to crush the skulls of Slashdot Trolls.
/. nightmare.
And Oopla would let Princess Ariel pour hot grits down his pants.
Or maybe it was just a
This is the very first thing I though about when I read the brief on /. In fact my co-worker brought this up as well. What are the chances that we would get this asteroid to go exactly where we want it to?
Think about it, one extremely miniscule miscalculation of an angle can have catastrophic effects. Knowing our current ability of screwing things up royaly, how are we gonna manage such a feat?
I guess the same rule applies here, the higher the risk the higher the payoffs. Well if they do pull this off it would be cool as hell....but by then I think that most if not all of us would be dead. Unless you get your head placed in a jar like they do in Futurama =)
Just have all the governments (Mainly Russia and the U.S) bolt all their rocket engines upside down at the same place, and turn them on! IMHO both of these ideas are stupid :)
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."
Well, I'm just glad that nobody's going to try doing this in my lifetime... Any worries that I have will be worked out by then. Of course, maybe they'll be stupid and try to move the Earth in one big motion, which would pass a large asteroid very near to the surface. If that happened, I'd worry about fun things like volcanoes and magnitude 10+ earthquakes... When you pull on something like the Earth (which probably has the consistency of a tennis ball), it is going to stretch in interesting ways.
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mod parent up. heheheehe
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Ahhh, like the "Seti@Home"-on-a-card that never really existed? That was a real forehead-slapper. But, I have to admit that despite Slashdot's little eccentricities, I *really* enjoy reading posts on here. There *really* are some bright people on this site. I get reminded of that (rather painfully at times) whenever I post on a subject I don't have a complete mastery of, and receive a mental bitch-slapping.
In fact, that's the one thing that really bugs me about this site -- people tend to want to jump on you and mentally beat you down if it looks like you're posting on a subject that you're not a PhD candidate for. As much as anything else, I think that attitude discourages serious conversation. *Shrug*...
Or, it could be that people reward humor because they just really appreciate the occasional chuckle...
Go linux, and stuff. (+3 "Go Linux")
Hmmm... maybe they could replace moderation with a tool that greps for "Linux, Linus Torvalds, RedHat, BeOS, Suse", along with positive remarks, and rewards them. Oh, and "Microsoft, Bill Gates, Steve Case" and negative remarks. Of course.
Go {Linux|Linus|Suse|BeOS}!
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
Ah yes, that was it
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
So you want a popular vote to determine whether or not to move the planet?
No thanks, I'd rather not have the idiot neighbors on my block deciding on the fate of the world. How about letting "experts" (determination of the rank left as an exercise for the reader) decide instead?
Besides, do you think the rest of the world is about to take voting advice from the United States?
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If we're still we in a billion years, something else has gone very wrong. Where was life 1 billion years ago, and who expects evolution to stop? In fact, with genetic engineering, it would be very surprising if our successors in 1000 years were of the same species. The compulsion for the preservation of the species yields many strange perspectives when applied to extended time frames!
How witty
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
Agreeed, if we achieve such interstellar travel capabilities, then what's the use of living on the earth anymore? By that time most of the people would be living in other planets, on space stations, or other galaxies. I think that in 6000 years we should have achieved the technology to migrate to other planets/solar systems
Wouldnt such a high speed fly by just destroy the planet? Im not suggesting it would be torn apart like the Destruction of the Deathstar - but what would happen to the 'tectonic' (sp?) plates? Wouldnt it be such a tramatic event to that we would end up with massive destruction on the planets surface?
Too late!
-- You can't fix dumb.
...get everyone in China to jump up and land at the same time? I've heard that will have the same effects, and it is probably much easier then maneuvering an asteroid.
Suddenly I'm picturing everyone spinning away in space along with the rubble of earth and America and Japan blaming each other because someone forgot to take into account the date line, and they passed two giant meteors past the earth at the same time and ripped it apart... ;)
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Yes it does. It's the tax dollars from those holywood bigwigs that are paying the farm subsidies, loggins roads, mining subsidies, dairy subsidies etc. Get rid of the hollywood bigwigs and the entire midwest goes bankrupt.
War is necrophilia.
The tidal forces involved would kill everything anyway, so you don't need to worry if the project actually worked.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
All other moons are ours for the taking ... except Europa.
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One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
What happens if they mess up..........
Why not concentrate on things like improving our industries to make them less poluting......
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It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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How would our gravity change? This would not change the mass of the Earth, only its location.
f(g)= G*M(1)*M(2)/r^2
Erlang Developer and podcaster
How about we get off of the planet and colonize a few more before we start playing space pinball?
Seriously, in a billion years mankind will have reached beyond the scope of mere planets and possibly even galaxies or we will have died out like the dinosaurs. A billion years almost gives enough time for reptiles to evolve and leave the planet as well.
I've often wondered in those asteroid/comet/supernova/etc. earth-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time scenarios, why nobody considers just digging a deep tunnel, firing off a few hundred nuclear weapons, and squirting the molten core out like a rocket engine. Between the existant heat and pressure, and the added force of the thermonuclear devices, I'm sure it would be enough to push us out of the way. If we dig from the north or south poles, we'll even have the balancing rotation in place for no cost!
True, the damn thing will probably crack like an egg, but it sounds a lot more fun than just being incinerated by the sun, and any survivors living on other planets would get both (a) a nice fireworks show, and (b) a good laugh at the attempt.
Just a thought... the gravitational pull of the asteroid would surely move tides and tectonic plates. Would a planetwide evacuation be necessary?
Of course, this is assuming we're still here in a billion years. Unlikely, but hey, we could fall into a timewarp. I guess.
It's actually quite an old (and not racist, but humorously flawed) proposition.
Click here for $50!
Close, but no cigar.
The biggest error is that THE MOON IS NOT GRAVITATIONALLY BOUND TO THE EARTH. Do the math - the gravitational attraction from the sun is twice that from the earth. The moon is unique in this, and one reason why many people call the earth/moon system a double planet.
To be sure, as a first approximation you can treat the earth-moon system as a binary system and get reasonable results - you can treat the sun's gravitional attraction as a uniform field that can be ignored. But if you want to do any long-term predictions you have to include the tidal forces from the sun - the moon is just a little bit squeezed towards the earth when half-full, and just a little bit pushed away from the earth when new or full. Tidal forces tend to circularize the moon's orbit, but this solar tidal force is "pumping" the moon to a higher orbit at the cost of the earth and moon moving a tad closer to the sun.
In the long run, the sun will win. The moon will "break free" of the earth's orbit *long* before tidal locking occurs. It's been years since I read the details, but I think the earth's day maxes out at under 30 hours/day when the moon escapes, and it won't happen for another billion years or so.
I also seem to recall that the tidal bulges lag the moon, and are slowing it down. But this situation is very odd - everywhere else in the solar system tidal friction cause the orbit to decay to the Roche limit (then you'll get rings as the satellite breaks up). Here the solar tidal forces are actually pumping the moon into a higher orbit.
P.S., I believe I once read that the day was about 23 hours when dinosaurs were walking around. 14 hour days occured shortly after the collision 4 billion years ago, back when the moon would have filled the sky.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Yeah, well what if we head into a 10000 light-year wide cloud of space dust as we move around the galactic rim? Ice Age, the sequel! Bet you didn't think of that, huh? Then what'll you do, you overreacting, orbit changing, knee-jerking scientists!!
(This is all tongue-in-cheek, you know)
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
I can think of dozens of reasons why it would be a waste of time. When you change the orbit of Earth, you are changing its distance in relation to other planets and the sun. This would effectively alter the gravitational field felt on Earth. Eventually Earth would cross paths with other planets (and/or moons) whether by gravitational pull or by artificially changing the orbit. If this is the case, then it would be more efficient to terraform the other planet in question, since science is already working on such a proposition.
What wasn't accounted for is the fact that the Sun will eventually cool down into a cold, dead star. At this point, it will have a strong gravitational pull, low energy and high entropy. Basically, the sun will be totally useless, unless we can find some way to harness its gravitational energy (which is almost pointless as gravity is the weakest of the four forces of nature).
In short, we'd be better off spending our time doing other things. Earth has adapted over time, and there's no proof that it won't stop doing so. Life wasn't always as we see it now, and in all likelihood it won't be for long. On average, a major extinction occurs every 50,000 years or so, which means that we're due for one soon. And the next species of intelligent life (and all other life for that matter) on Earth will be better equipped to handle the pressures of the new environment. If the Earth can withstand what it has (you try to withstand a volcano!), a little heat won't do much. Just let evolution take its natural course. It's worked for 15 billion years, so we ought to give it some credit.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
Actually considering the average weight of Modern Americans, you would get the same net effect if you had the yankees do this.
... is to have everyone in China and India jump at the same time.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
and so i have... did it millennia ago! hey, it's no accident that life has evolved on this planet... it was all me. you're not so naive as to imagine that earth has always been in the orbit it's in now, are you?
So the British will move us into a warmer orbit, the Libyans will move us into a cooler orbit, the Swiss will make the orbit take exactly 365.25 days...Everybody dance!
The ecological calculation is greatly simplified when the alternative is to leave the Earth where it is and letting it burn to a cinder. Besides, preventing getting blown out of the heavens by a big rock can only be solved by putting an engine on that big rock and moving it. Within a billion years we'll have a lot of former Doomsday asteroids with drive engines on them...
The year was 1999, the earths moon has been thrown from it's orbit and women were still feathering their hair..... how's that asteroid idea look now ? hu???
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Does no one remember the shortlived series "Thundarr the Barbarian"?
The year, 1994. From out of space, comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the moon, unleashing cosmic destruction. Man's civilization is cast in ruin. Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old. A world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice. With his companions, Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sunsword, against the forces of evil. He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!
Ranessin
From the article: "All that is required is for a large asteroid, about 100 km (62 miles) across, to fly past the Earth transferring some of its orbital energy to our planet. The asteroid would then move out to encounter Jupiter where it would acquire more energy that it could impart to the Earth on a subsequent encounter."
Sounds like a fun game of cosmic billards. Just as long as they make sure they get the english and spin right or we could all wind up scratched.
-philos
Then again, an asteroid could hit us where we are now. And who's to say that the asteroid 'tow truck' won't hit us.
Hopefully they've considered the posibility that this could drastically alter the Earth's climate.. But I'd take an Ice Age over incineration.
Douglas Adams
1952-2001 :(
I think the way to do this would be to mount giant rockets on the asteroid, and fire them as needed to change its orbit. Only a small deviation would be needed to have a large effect later. The obvious problem would be refuelling the asteroid's rockets, but if we could find a way to do this, then it would be technically possible. With our current state of technology, this project would be hideously expensive, but if the future of the Earth was at stake, then this would not be an obstacle.
If asteroids were to be used in this manner, then the best time to zoom them past the Earth would be when the Earth is at aphelion, the furthest point in its orbit around the Sun. This has the effect of increasing the perihelion distance, thus making the orbit more circular. Scheduling the asteroid flybys for perihelion is less effective, because the Earth will not incease its perihelion distance, and the orbit will become more elliptical. This is obviously less desirable.
Another way of controlling the climate would be to reduce the mass of the Sun. This is obviously more difficult, but if possible would probably involve using extraordinarily powerful electromagnets to pull matter out of the Sun.
If the Sun is going to increase in luminosity by 10% over the next billion years, then on average the Earth will need to increase the radius of its orbit by about 7 meters a year on average to maintain the same climate. ((sqrt (1.1) - 1) * 149,600,000 km / 10e9). Perhaps we should get started right away, given our current peril of global warming from greenhouse gases.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Actually, the whole thing is the wrong approach. We should be trying to stabilize the sun instead of move the planet. Granted, that's a little bit harder, but we've got a billion years to figure out how to do it. All we need to do is figure out how to counteract the gravity of the sun, which is slowly causing it to contract and become brighter. If we can control the rate at which the sun contracts, we can keep it's brightness the same, right up until it turns into a dead white dwarf (a large, cold lump of iron).
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout Apr 21-27
Sorry, not even half correct.
I'm thinking of motifs used on album covers, not videos (which, as we all know, killed the radio star (bonus point))
www.eFax.com are spammers
That was baaaaad. But funny, nonetheless.
Yeah. Or a bunch of pinko liberal Democrats.
I vote for all of the USA.
Why stop at just the Californians when we can do the whole job at once?
What if you've already reproduced?
Forget the one billion years from now! As someone has already noted, if we can set up a grazing path asteroid by then, we probably won't even be living on Earth.
However, we won't be living anywhere if a non-grazing non-trivially-sized asteroid impacts earth. So far as I have heard, only meager funds are devoted to the search for such bodies and there are no funds devoted to readying hardware which might deflect such a potential impacting body.
As I hope all realize, exploding such an incoming object will just yield smaller bodies over a larger impact area. There would still be almost as much kinetic energy to be dissipated on impact except for fragments which might miss the Earth and added burnoff from increased surface area.
...before the Vogon Constructor Fleet destroys the planet to make way for an intergalactic bypass!
(Hey where's my thumb??)
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Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Perhaps it is not immediately (as in the next few thousand years) applicable to the solar system. But if we find other planetary systems where earth-like planets are in less than ideal orbits (just like Venus) we can apply similar techniques to move them to just the right spot. It may actually be faster than terraforming planets in "bad" orbits. Besides, if we're using generation ships they're probably large hollowed-out asteroids anyway and thus have all the propulsion installed in the first place.
Never attribute to stupidity what can be construed as a monopoly preservation tactic.
Nina Hagen. 'nuff said.
At least now we can learn a few things about our planet's history from this...all the dinosaurs were trying to do was save themselves from the ultimate heat death of the sun. ;-)
Wasn't this a Twilight Zone episode?
Hammer of Truth
Someone already tried that 4.5 billion years ago. That's how the Moon was formed.
(Either that, or someone tried to move the Earth's orbit with a Mars-sized rock to compensate for the Sun changing from protostar to main-sequence body, and screwed up real bad ;-)
When they landed, they would push the Earth a little bit away from the Sun
You didn't study much Physics in school, did you? (Hint: Think conservation of momentum)
Mmmm.. Donuts
if we were meant to be in this orbit, and therefore meant to die in a few billion years. Would be we morally in the right to try and change this and play god? That's silly. If we were meant to be stuck in this orbit, then the earliest humans were meant to be eaten by lions and not pick up sticks to protect themseves. It's an merely an act of self-defence, on a much larger scale.
"Good. I thought we were in real trouble for a minute." -Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
definitely, mod that puppy uppy... it IS hilarious... and that tagline kills
Well, trying to move the earth a billion years from now due to the sun's expansion is retarded to say the least. But, it could have interesting uses for realiging other planets in the future for terraforming and other such expirements. Just don't waste time on trying to calculate how and when to realign Earth. God put Earth in this position for a reason. Worrying about how to change it is absurd.
If, in the year 100002001, we're still bickering about the most pointless of things (or, in this case, saving the planet), I say we just let the Earth fall into the sun. We obviously don't deserve to live if that's the case.
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this is not a sig
this is a sig.
well? answer the question, dammit!
Hrm.
Another game humanity wants to try and play yet knows only a slim fraction of the rules. Anyone heard of the domino effect? no?
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People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Better yet -- Everyone give me US$1 now, and in 5 billion years I'll show you all what I've come up with...
I can just picture the hand-wringing arguments between the faction that wants to save Dear Old Earth from being cooked, and the faction that wants to let nature take its course because That's What Goddess Intended. I'm sure there will be a lot of really good folk songs comin' outta this one...
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Yeah, soon with missele defenses there'll be no way to really screw up the earth, I'm glad they're working on this one. Woudldn't it be funny if a bug in the nth bit of a floating point calculation on a PC ended all life on earth?
yes. humans play at being god all the damn time...
It kinda reminds me of the game Master of Orion 2. Teraforming planets. Now only if we can get stellar converters, silly aliens will never have a chance and we can branch out and take over the entire galaxy! MWUHAHAHAHAHA...*cough* err so yeah...this kinda reminds me of the game Master of Orion 2
___________
I don't care what it looks like, it WORKS doesn't it!?!
and i am using them to wipe dry my eyes from laughing so damn hard
Couldn't the whole thing be solved a lot more simply? All we have to do is dig on the sun-side of the earth and put it on the far side. The chinese have been getting ready for this for a long time. You see they have been building a huge population and a huge sidewalk (actually meant to span half the earth). Then they are planning on setting up a gigantic chinese fireline to pass buckets of earth from China to the western tip of Africa.
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
Well, the conspiracy/privacy nuts will be happy now that the Earth has the ability to be hidden from those pesky UFO's...
Karma: Good. I'm hoping in the same way as pizza is 'good'...
Ok, so Britain decides to do this, all by themselves
So? We just want better weather!
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
Ok, so Britain decides to do this, all by themselves. Great. And they pull us too far.
Realize please that if the temperature of the earth goes down by more than like two ro three degrees, a lot of thigns will change. We could trigger an ice age! That's not exactly the best cure for an economic recession.
If this is ever going to be done, it would have to be a unanimous vote from every country, holding majority elections in the country to decide the nation vote. Because this could easily fuck up and you don't wanna fuck up the planet unless everyone agrees it will be fun.
Anyways, I'm going to restock my Y2k bunker and include a small micro-nuclear heating cell. Any beautiful women, ages 16-24, who are interested in repopulating the planet once it moves back into a stable orbit, drop me a reply. thanks
Of course, we never expected our software to ever exist in the year 2000...
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Pantera or Black Sabbath for the first and Boston for the second.
-- This space intentionally left blank.
Just when you think that humans can't be more stupid, they pull out another retarted-bunny from the hat. The fact they are actually thinking about this is totally repulsive to me. I mean there are better things to do with our time like feeding the hungry and finding cure for the diseased.
Let the future gen worry about this sorta crap. We are thinking about future and we haven't even fixed our present yet. tsk tsk.
peace out.
NeoCode
I do agree that /. is a three ring circus.
In ring 1 we have experts- people who are the veritable PhD candidates in a particular field. Granted it is a small ring, but it is there.
Ring 2 we have the nimrods, the trolls, the first -post natalie portman's hot grits, l33t hax0r, script kiddie, etc people. Fortunately it is the smallest ring, but I think that it grows faster as people give up on integrity and depart from Ring 3.
Ring 3 has the the normal everyday Joe/Jane. I am probably in this ring, at least in as far as computers are concerned. Personally I am a Cognitive Scientist, but I like to read about hardware and I like to tinker with OS's. I also feel that it is okay to pay for one and not know what is in it. Of course this subjects me to those in Ring 2, the people who capitalize the letter F in free when it refers to the almighty penguin. I have been moderated down for mentioning said fact, which I find is sad. I get reemed for pointing out that Linux steals many of the concepts from other OS's, and then defames them as trying to make money. Well, money pays people to figure out how to make a good OS. But that is a whole different rant.
I appreciate the occasional humor in a post, but not every single post. Let me explify with the Challenger anniversary. While some people relevantly pointed out that more a sigma of the population of the world was wiped out a couple days ago and Slashdot didn't mention it, others told me that the last thing that the teacher on the Challenger said was "you feed the dogs, I'll feed the fish." I want to see one of them grow the balls/hubris to climb a giant aerosol can and launch themself into a vacuum. Hell, they are the agorophobes who fear going outside for ridicule- hence "trolls" I suppose.
Don't forget, "Go Transmeta!" Intel makes two mistakes out of 50- bad bad bad! Transmeta is 0 for 2... "Well, they'll get 'em next time. Go Linus!"
Until we meet again...
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
Mind you, if the alternative is frying slowly under an angry sun, I suppose it would be worth tossing the whole Earth onto the scales of chance...
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
it would be nice to be able to move the Earth as well. After all, we'd look pretty damn silly up in heaven trying to explain why even though we were given a few billion years to figure it out, we couldn't keep the Earth safe...
My favorite quote of all time applies here:
"Trust in God - but row away from the rocks."
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This idea sounds like these guys have been watching too much Doctor Who.
Just so long as NASA doesn't get involved. It's probably not a good time to be rounding pi off to 3.
"My job is being right when other people are wrong." -- George Bernard Shaw
So we can move the Earth to make it cooler.
Can we move Venus to make it habitable?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
well it was really the flash wrapping a copper cable around the earth a few times. You see the earth was in danger of getting to hot because these aliens wanted to move here. The earths climate was too temperate so they move it closer to the sun. Then the ultra cool yet anoyingly corny flash did his thing.
#=-weo-=#
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...and 3/4 of the Hollywood morons who have too much coke in their system to make sound political observations
2) What if it went wrong ? A few million miles can make a hell of a difference to the temperature of the earth's surface. I object to scientists playing 'God' like this.
3) Who is going to pay for it ? Why should the US taxpayer subsidize this scheme, when countries such as Libya, Cuba, Iran and Syria (All sworn enemies of the US) would benefit too ?
All in all, it seems like a good idea at first sight, but as usual, they have not really thought it through.
What do others think ?
(No, not the Greg Bear story)
I'm just wandering, since we are hoping to colonize Mars someday, why not try to move it a bit closer to the sun, so it would be easier to terraform it?
Why don't we just start playing planet pool ?
Saturn in the top left pocket anyone - or can we do a plant involving Earth and Venus ?
This whole thing sounds WAY to dangerous for people to be thinking this.
If nothing else, this is great sci-fi material. I'm already getting story material which this would help facilitate.
Any spoon would be too big.
Hey sounds great... now can I get some Freon for my air-conditioner again?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Wouldn't it just be easier to give Skåne back to Denmark?
some one please stop the earth, let me get off before they try any of this. "New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. " --David Letterman
The naivety of some scientists really gets me sometimes. Saving the earth from getting fried is a little more complex than just a two body gravity problem. It would involve highly complex ecological calculation, something an astronomer isn't cabable of really performing. Yes, looking toward the future is a great idea, but shouldn't we be concentrating on getting to that future a billion years away? Maybe we should be looking towards the near future and how to prevent possibly getting blown out of the heavens by a big mean rock.
admit defeat, live in decline, be the victim of our own design
Did anyone notice that a body massive enough to affect earth's orbit significantly, passing close enoough to change our orbit, would cause richter 12+ earthquakes and volcanoes? The volcanoes would put enough dust in the air to cause a new ice age, , and wipe out most life on earth, except for some bugs and sea life. Sounds like an improvement. Sounds like fun to me. Any bugs out there want to vote this one up?
wake up and hold your nose
I would say that this 'fact' is not at all unequivocal. Perhaps only to the ignorant or uninformed.
So we may want to move our planet into a higher orbit over the course of the next billion years. Given that goal, this is the wrong approach. Using a single (or small number of) large, short-duration adjustment to the orbit is dangererous. The risks of stress fractures (earthquakes), even if all the calculations are correct, is too great. And if there is a miscalculation, well, game over.
No, we want a slow long-duration force applied to the planet. Something moving us no more than perhaps a meter or so a day. That would give us a nice safe slow adjustment.
Now how do we acheive such a change? That's a good question. Perhaps we could do something magnetic, similar to how satellites can use tethers and electrical charge to push off the magnetic field? Perhaps we could tap into the solar wind in a novel way? Perhaps we could find a way to convert nuclear explosion energy into magnetic energy to push off of the earth's magnetic field?
I wouldn't call it pointless. At least it is a great thought experiment - and those are often the things that lead to great strides in science. I do, however, agree with what you have to say, although on a different level. If by some chance Earth was in danger of being destroyed by the sun, comet, asteriod, etc, and we had the technology to actually bring a HUGE enough body close enough to our planet to move it, don't you think we would have by then mastered the creation of gravity waves? Heck, lots of research is being done of them already, and we are just begining. I would say that gravity wave propulsion would be much more efficient than tugging an asteriod close enough to Earth to move it.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
They suggest moving a large asteroid past Earth and using its gravity to pull us out to a slightly different orbit. Their concern was how to keep the Earth cool as the Sun ages and warms up in a billion years.
... after all, I have it on good authority from our current President, George W Bush, that global warming doesn't exist and we can build a really large umbrella to cover the US from those nasty missile thingies the Communists want to attack us with ...
I thought the earth was flat
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
.. and change the gravitational constant of the universe.
What do you mean, "how"? You just DO it!
hahaha
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CashWars
It has been infused with pork bacon juices.
Ceres, with a diameter of 480 miles, and .000x mass of Earth, would not make a dent, unless it crashed into the Earth with significant velocity.
:-)
But then, do really really want to live here after that?
Maybe move Mars or Jupiter to affect the Earth.
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
Sure. Humans are (and I'm sure I'm guilty by making this statement) the only present lifeform (on Earth) capable of being intentionaly conceited. Homocentric, if you will. And this is why we think we'll be around for billions of years. Which, I'm sure, we will not be. As far as the technological concerns, the billions of years are broken down into smaller increments, so we use todays technology today, and tomorrow's tomorrow. However, I can't see that any future technology will have much bearing on the Earth, as it is almost completely environmental and behavioral. Technology doesn't change humans as humans, and that will be the cause of our decline, and no future technological enhancements can change that.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
Get off the earth and get out of the solar system too. We are all vulnerable so long as we're all in the same place.
In a billion years, I have to believe that making the sun behave like we want is going to be easier than actually moving the Earth. By then, who's to say that extending the sun's lifetime isn't simpler?
Sommelier
I say we push back a few hundred feet per year to off set for global warming.
I vote for California.
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
Of course the posts are funny when we're talking about the ultimate mass transportation system. I submitted the article, and I was tempted to point out that this might help Linux survive its second billion years. That would have really stirred up the responses...
Perhaps you ought to move off the planet, just in case. Oh, and take Alec Baldwin with you.
"God" is said to speak in many languages. Jesus spoke the now dead language Aramaic.
All the best punk bands come from California. Get rid of the Midwest. All they got is emo.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
I hope they have some extra asteroids laying around when they do this.
"Oops, our calculations were off a wee bit there. Anything we can do to correct this? Nope. Oh well..."
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
...but this seems rather silly. Isn't is just a little odd to try and propose a solution to a problem that won't manifest itself for billions of years? A billion years is enough time for human civilization to rise and fall many times: chances are that by the time this becomes a problem, our technology will make this solution obsolete, or we'll have regressed to a point where it's no longer feasable.
And even if humanity in a billion years is at a point where this knowledge would be useful, would we even recognize it for what it is? What will language, thought processes, ideas and such be like for humans in a billion years? Very different I would guess. Even if future man understood the problem/our proposed solution, would he trust the knowledge?
Consider: if someone today found millions-year-old writings on the cave walls of Africa or France warning about our immenent demise and suggesting a solution, would we trust this knowledge? Or would we dismiss it a legend or fairy tale of ancient man?
To increase the distance between the Sun and the Earth, just use kilometers instead of miles.
If the 100 km asteroid was to collide with the Earth then it would wipe out all life on our planet.
If the 100 km asteroid was to collide with the Earth then it would wipe out all life on our planet.
If the 100 km asteroid was to collide with the Earth then it would wipe out all life on our planet.
If the 100 km asteroid was to collide with the Earth then it would wipe out all life on our planet.
"This danger cannot be overemphasised," the researchers stress.
Ace
What I didn't get from the article is how they think they're going to fetch the asteroid, and move it into a proper orbit. Doesn't seem trivial to control a 100 km big rock
;-)
That was my first question.
And as they say, you don't want it actually hitting the earth.
Well, if you can muster enough energy to swing a 100km asteroid into any orbit you want, then steering it clear of Earth shouldn't be a problem
Ahem, care to backup the 75% of "resources" claim? This always struck me as being rather bogus. What exactly does "resources" mean in this case? And how is it measured?
Now I'm sure we take up vastly more fuel per capita than people in China, India, etc, but what about the real staples, like food and water? If we truely takeup so many resources, then you must also assume that the vast majority of those staples lie in those regions where the "excessive" consumers live, because very little is imported from places like India, China, Russia, etc.
I suspect people are measuring the "resources" by any number of backwards methods, like by GDP, imports and exports, commercial production, etc. They assume zero sum games, they assume that producivity would be as high in the near socialist environment required to make it vastly more "even", and so and so on. These are all invalid for any number of reasons, but I'd like to hear it from the horse's mouth.
"Welcome to Sol Historical Space Museum and Galactic Burger Drivethru! To your left you see the star Sol under which the human race is believed to have evolved. On your right is the counter where you can get your McSpaceslug burgers. Only 39.99 this week only!"
"And this grey planet you see in front is the planet 'Earth'. Were legend has it the human species evolved a billion years ago. Our astroarchaelogists are still trying to find proof that this may be true, but the current findings seems to point to the fact that this planet is totally uninhabitable."
"The scientists are still baffled over the wast remains of a flat round species found all over the surface of the planet. It has strange AOL markings on their back. It is speculated that if there ever was human life on this planet it might very well have been killed off by these weird round specimens."
"Please move through the checkout line to pay for your delicious McSpaceslug. Don't forget to try out the Double Slugger over at Alpha Centauri Burgers next time!"
- the Crazy Fraggle
It's amazing that people are daft enough to believe that humans are still going to be around in 3 billion years. What, we can live as long as we'd like just because we're human. HA!
anacron
Duh, this tells me that you have taken the asteroid idea/proposal seriously. Wow! I have a bridge for sell, are you interested?
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Anyways, the columnist proposed using the moon rather than an asteroid, under the assumption that humanity will figure out how to push the moon around long before we'll ever need to move the Earth. The moon was also central to the heating problem: if we also had unlimited energy pretty much figured out, we could blast light from the surface of the moon using huge lamps, as the moon just happens to seem as large as the sun from an observer on Earth. The column was half-joking, but he did work out the physics.
>> If we develop the space technology neccessary to actually harness an asteroid and make it go wherever we want it to, wouldn't that indicate a level of technology that would permit us to live on any damn planet we choose? <<
I believe a similar, scaled-down technique is used on the asteroid first. You alter it's orbit just *slightly* enough to have it swing by something (another asteroid?) that allows it to change course to yet a bigger target.
Thus, a small explosive might be all you need.
Table-ized A.I.
If this is to be used in BILLIONS of years, dosn't everyone assume that A- the human race will not be around B- we will have technology beyond our dreams fantisys
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
Besides, I don't think the Big Bang theory is generally accepted anymore.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Plan for moving earths orbit: 5 billion 500,000,000 miles of titanium cable: 2 billion Knowing that NT cant be used to make the calculations : Priceless
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
Could a concept like this help reverse major
global warming?
What about the other planets?
Could we move Mars in a bit and warm it up?
Somehow this worries me. Anyone remember the last couple NASA screwups (doing measurements in SAE instead of Metric or losing a satellite)?
Sure, we mess with the orbit of the Earth. It in turn throws off everything in the universe, causing much more damage than anyone would have ever thought. Do we trust a couple people to do the calculations that could cause that much unforseen destruction?
I think they should stick a pole in the equator with a few hundred TitanV rockets on the end. That way, we could slow down the rotation of the earth to about a 27 or 28 hour day and get a couple extra hours of sleep every night.
-cbare
There has got to be a way we can park venus into an earth like orbit. I mean hello, Its very close to the size of earth! The only problem is the damn air pressure (it will cool when pushed back towards us). Oh Problem 2...our nuclear weapons. We can just cook off the atmosphere of venus! Problem Solved. The problem with bringing mars closer would be that the extra radiation would kick off whatever atmosphere it has left. Damn inverse square law! It makes gravity really finicky.
IMHO, and please keep in mind that IANAL, the most effervescent way to true celestial seasoning is the fostering of a new, more fluid school of thought. Our evolution of prolific meanderings can enlighten the universe to our great amorphous knowledge base, so that all can proactively celebrate within our circle of influence. Or, that's what Steven Covey told me.
this is fun
News for turds, shit that splatters
will Bruce Willis be involved in this process?
The people who can't quite get a few thousand pounds of satellite into orbit around Mars now want to sling a 62-mile diameter asteroid around Earth? No thanks....
This is one time I'll have to agree with the *NIX grognards in the audience.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
However there are limits to this -- Plants need a certain amount of fixable carbon in the atmosphere in order to grow. A critical CO2 shortage will be reached 500 million to a billion years from now. But life will (knock on wood) have already averted such a potential crisis many millions of years before this. The Trump card will be dealt by either our descendents in a few thousand years or by another intelligent tool user in the next 50-100 million years (assuming intelligent life wasn't just a fluke). OK so what the hell am I talking about? A Dyson Shell of course.
A Dyson shell is a HUGE solar collector that would be dynamically positioned by a level K2 civilization so that the maximum amount of solar energy can be harvested from the sun. (It would be constructed as two opposing geodesic half spheres using Iron and Silicon from Mercury and be positioned at a radius halfway from Sol & Mercury -- outward pressure from the solar wind will cancel inward gravitational forces -- the geodesic configuration will dampen changes in solar wind pressure)
To visualize a Dyson Shell think about this; Take a good sized grape fruit, cut a 2 cm slice through the 'equator' of it, hollow out the two halfs, separate them by 2 cm and try to image the sun as a small marble suspended within the center.
Normally, a Dyson shell would not be visible in the daytime sky of any planet orbiting within the equatorial plane (i.e. the sun would still be a very bright disk surrounded by blue sky). However, the equatorial edges of each half of the shell can be extended to block out any desired portion of the sun as seen from earth.
Presto! Climate control is built into humanities push to populate the solar system.
NOTE: A K2 civilization, is one that has substantially tapped the power of a star. Right now, our civilization is at about K(0.7) -- To attain K1 status we still need to substantially tap the energy available on and around the planet -- without causing significant harm to the worlds ecosystems.
In a billion years we will most certainly have perfected interstellar travel and extraterrestrial populating. Who says we'll use Earth in a billion years? There's bound to be better planets that don't have bad seasonal variation, better sunsets, and other such amenities. In a billion years, Sol will be forgotten in the annals of human history.
---
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
A billion years early, and there will still be a rush at the last minute to make the Earth Y1B-compliant.
:)
-- Criggie
I missed it, did anyone else find any mention of where the astronomers plan to find a large 100km asteriod with just the right trajectory/orbit to perform this orbital transfer?
Oh right, just call the A-Team, or McGyver, one of these chaps always seem to have just the right tools to do the trick.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Instead of stealing angular momentum from Jupiter, why not steal it from Mars? Whether there are little bugs on Mars or not, having Mars closer to the Sun couldn't hurt. Such a move could be the long-term solution to maintaining Mars terraforming. It's their dirty little secret, but current plans for terraforming Mars don't plan for maintaining its biosphere for more than about 1 million years. Over time, the solar wind will strip any generated atmosphere away, as the original Mars atmosphere was stripped away. Moving the planet closer to the sun would cause more CO2 and H20 to be released from the ground, extending the lifetime of the biosphere. However, the real solution to maintaining a Mars biosphere is to restart the dynamo in Mars' core, and I have absolutely no idea how to do that. While we're thinking long-term and re-engineering the solar system, I have a few suggestions: * Use a solar sail soletta to block all light to Venus for a few millenia. Meanwhile, figure some way to get it rotating at a decent speed. Finally, somehow isolate/convert to carbonates all the CO2 glaciers that will form. Now, move Venus outward using Jupiter to steal angular momentum. The result should be a terraformable Mars-like planet. * Strip Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto from Jupiter and bring them into habitable zone orbits. There's nothing wrong with these worlds, except (1) weak magnetosphere -- OK, put them in Earth orbit; (2) they're just too damn cold. Melt the ice and move right in. But be sure to leave Jupiter where it is. And don't bother with Io, unless we have this incredible need for sulfur. Wow! What a world it would be if Earth had four or five habitable moons!
Your friendly neighborhood nitpicker
I would think that an asteroid would make a better shield than a tow-truck. with the proper topology and an orbit to match, an asteroid would deflect much of that direct radiation, leaving us quit comfortable with only the incidental radiation to worry over. of course this would have two side effects: one) a permanent eclipse-like effect would alter floral biology, and two, the eclipse would let a greater proportion of UV in as compared to the mix today. you know, when there is an eclipse you can look at it but still burn your eyes out. this would cause a shift in visual organs across the biosphere, either encouraging wide spread adaptation to UV or allowing creatures already comfy in the UV ranges to dominate.
Another idea might be to put up EM lenses at the Earth->Sun libration points, to refract the bulk of energy around the earth, and allow 'normal' sunlight levels to intersect.
Either way, this tow-truck plan would just about flip the crust right over with earthquakes. imagine the corialis forces at work in the mantle and core going out of wack!
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
Terrrific! Except that they don't explain how they're going to move the planet mover. Eventually, we get down to something we CAN move and the unpredictability effects of chaos means that we're about as likely to succeed as drop to billion ton rock in what's left of the Pacific (which will have changed shape by then.)
What are these mooks smoking? Its faster and easier to just leave the dirt ball behind.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
What I didn't get from the article is how they think they're going to fetch the asteroid, and move it into a proper orbit. Doesn't seem trivial to control a 100 km big rock.
And as they say, you don't want it actually hitting the earth.
How long before this appears as a line item in the US military budget?
Under Clinton, the step from "world's policeman" to "world's ambulance service" would have been automatic. Bush may figure out a way to save the United States alone (and possibly such American allies as will help out with the expenses).
Delay could be fatal. How long will it be before some third-world maniac threatens to deploy this "alarmingly simple" techinque to our detriment? The first priority must be to deploy an "anti-directed-asteroid" defense system. Second, if we have any money left, will be to design such a system.
It's fooking cold here in Chicago.
Not even Natalie Portman and a steamy bowl of grits can keep me warm for long.
Three cheers for forward thinking, but if we're still tethered to a single planet a billion years from now, then something is drastically wrong. If we develop the space technology neccessary to actually harness an asteroid and make it go wherever we want it to, wouldn't that indicate a level of technology that would permit us to live on any damn planet we choose? We should be all over the freakin' galaxy by the time this becomes an issue. (Provided that we haven't become extinct via some other means - including by our own hands.)
This is not a Fugazi
Sure, to the layman, changing the orbit of the Earth sounds like a "Get rich quick" fix to the global warming problem, but we first must remember our basic physics. If I'm not correct, the asteroid must first have more mass than the Earth it self, and one must also ask, "how does one control such an object." As well as that, this object must also move from wherever its source may be, and in this situation we must ask, "where do we get the thrust to move such an enormous object..." Then someone would say, "Couldn't we nuke the asteroid in our direction?" and I'd have to answer that with 1. "How do you propose to keep the asteroid in one peice?" But then I suddenly remember that the asteroid has to be enormous, so nuking it wouldn't even cause the object to move. So lets assume we can get it moving? 2. "How do you plan to keep the object on its planned trajectory?" This would be impossible without using subsequent charges to keep it in the proper direction. Let's say we don't even use nukes? Let's postulate for a moment the amount of rocketry and fuel to get the object to move even slightly. Enormous, huh? I'd say that even a high school student taking a basic course in physics could tell you that this wouldn't even be remotely possible.
ok now well simply try this on the First habitable planet we find, and then theyll give us scientist the Go for the Real thing on earth... *after the shift* "why didnt we calculate inertia into it?" "its getting colder" "are we traveling away from the sun?" "No, Hilary clinton is coming to congratulate us..."
You mean that Anonymous Cowards would post at Score:1 instead of 0?
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People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
I was just trying to be funny as I don't believe the idea of using an asteroid can ever work (I take it as a joke) -- and the fact that those scientists who are proposing it are thinking about issues a billion year from now. Lets get real, there are much more critical things to wary about 1 year from now leave alone a 1000 year or a million.
:-)
The whole point of using an asteroid to change the Earth's trajectory, is just pure science-fiction and so is using rockets. Using rockets is not my idea, but years ago when I was a kid and used to watch those Japanese "Godzilla" movies, in one of those movies, they used rocket to move the Earth away from a collusion with an asteroid -- it was sooo funny watching those movies.
So as you can see, this whole thing is a pure joke to me (ridicules if anyone is taking it seriously), and I was trying to be funny. Reading your reply, you sounded like taking my rocket offer seriously. Or were you not?
As for the bridge, don't wary, I can find other customers.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
why not just make everyone and their pets meet in one place and then jump all together?
Liberty.
What most people would find obnoxious to adjust to, even if it is a super-gradual thing, is the fact that the year will slowly increase. Daily life will never be the same.
- http://pakman.sytes.net/
If the 100 km asteroid was to collide with the Earth then it would wipe out all life on our planet. "This danger cannot be overemphasised," the researchers stress.
Ha, funny one. I guess you're just being too obvious if you wait until April 1 to propagate this sort of nonsense.
It's about time we built redundant planets in various orbits around the sun. Everyone else is doing this.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Of course, there is no conceivable way anyone alive could imagine our technology in the year 1000002001. Maybe we won't have to move the Earth... we'll just turn down the sun!
Mr. Ska
I slit a sheet
A sheet I slit
Mr. Ska
Why don't we just ask the mices to let us build a new solar system when the sun is about to collapse?
- yasa
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How many roads must a man walk down?
All it would take is one metric conversion error or something to slam the asteroid into Earth.
Don't be stupid. No one involved in the space program would be dumb enough to make a mistake converting English measurements to metric or vice versa.
Sheesh...
Dancin Santa
They don't slingshot Earth out of the Sun's orbit. That sure would suck...
I don't really feel comfortable with anyone changing the orbit of my planet. I mean, astronomers are on thing, but imagine the global cooperation involved in doing this. Of course, the good ol' US of A will have to take charge of this operation, and they'll mess things up. Without a doubt. If they can't get their units right on moving an expensive of equipment through space, how are they going to be able to coordinate moving a giant rock close enough to earth.
"Okay, Houston. I've moved the rock 2 thousand kilometers closer to the earth, like you've asked."
"You moron, that was 2 thousand miles. It's too close now. It's being pulled in by the earth's gravity."
The first thing that popped into mind is a scene I think I recall from the old Leave it to Beaver show where two of the kids are trying to roll a car tire down hill. . .
"Ummm, we seem to have miscalculated a tad... we are still too close to the sun and the asteroid we wanted to move is actually on a collision course with our planet. We attribute this to Y10K errors in some computer software..."
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No the game never ends when your whole world depends
crazy dynamite monkey
heh, kinda funny, in a billion years when we've finally fixed the ecosystem after damaging biological diversity by intoducing plants and animals into foriegn ecosystems, dumping our trash, ddt, cfc's, smog, intoducing more plants and animals into foriegn ecosystems to fix the damage to biodiversity from introducing plants and animals into foriegn ecosystems, oil spills, over hunting/fishing, too much farming, nuclear fallout, global warming, intoducing more plants and animals into foriegn ecosystems to fix the damage to biodiversity from introducing plants and animals into foriegn ecosystems that was supposed to fix the damage from introducing plants and animals into foriegn ecosystems, and my 7th grade art teacher's bad breath, strip mining, water pollution, depleted ozone layer, and finally intoducing more plants and animals into foriegn ecosystems to fix the damage to biodiversity from introducing plants and animals into foriegn ecosystems that was supposed to fix the damage to biodiversity from introducing plants and animals into foriegn ecosystems that was supposed to fix the damage from introducing plants and animals into foriegn ecosystems ...
we can fling the earth into a new orbit with an astroid and start all over screwing everything up
jeez, these humanoids, can't live with them, and they just won't die:)
I've been looking for a loooooong term investment.
Only 10 billion years off. It's never too early to plan for your retirement!
To bring religion into a discussion where it has no place: what if we were meant to be in this orbit, and therefore meant to die in a few billion years. Would be we morally in the right to try and change this and play god?
Cue The Sun...
"It is an unequivocal fact that the Earth is heating up due to global warming"
Some other astounding unequivocal facts:
- People who are paid more make more money.
- There's pollutents in the air because of polluting.
and last but not least,
- Most people vote for who is going to win.
(OK not always)
Mod this up! That was way funny.
...is the fact that so few people read or understood the article before posting about it. The majority of comments I've read are from people who seem to think that the article proposed moving the Earth with one large asteroid. That's not right. They're talking about using a series of small asteroids (or the same one over and over, whatever) over a long period of time to produce a series of gentle tugs. C'mon guys, pay attention.
Now, here's a cool thought: they mentioned the necessity of moving Venus and Mars at the same time to prevent orbital instability. Why not move all three planets into the same orbit? That is, each planet would have the other two sitting in its trojan points. Perhaps that would make subsequent orbital adjustments trickier, though. I don't know, my orbital mechanics class was a long time ago.
As somebody else pointed out, this does sound quite a bit like the Puppeteer homeworlds in Larry Niven's "Ringworld".
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
TOP TEN WAYS TO ATTRACT AN ASTEROID
10). The biggest frelling horseshoe magnet you've ever laid eyes on, hitched to a coil of wire that would make every Tesla coil put together look like a grade-school science experiment.
9). Find a slightly smaller asteroid than the one you want to attract. Equip said asteroid with bikini briefs and a slingshot that even Playtex would boggle at.
8). Lay down a trail of mineral-bearing ice crystals leading past the planet. Asteroids have to eat too...
7). Find an asteroid of the required size that has huge chips on its rocky shoulders. Call it things like "half-rate pebble" and "quartz queer," then duck behind the far side of Earth and wait for it to chase you.
6). Announce a casting call for the next Bruce Willis space movie.
5). Have three dozen Nobel prize-winning scientists announce, simultaneously, that there is no way any asteroid would ever come close enough to the planet to get the job done without causing irreparable damage. Murphy will do the rest.
4). First, we had dog whistles that no one but dogs could hear. Asteroid whistles can't be that hard to do.
3). Brew a nice pot of fresh Columbian lava. Gets 'em every time, but don't tell Juan Valdez (or his burro).
2). Install a giant 'Rock'ing chair in orbit. Rushing around the planets does get tiring.
And the Number One way to attract an asteroid...
1). Boost forty-two thousand metric tons of dinosaurs, fossilized or otherwise, into orbit. Attach a large sign saying "Ha! Missed the first time!!!"
If they just could figure out how to move France away from the Earth, then they might have something.
Someone you trust is one of us.
If we do survive even a million years... I think we will have enough nuclear waste to fuel a huge retro rocket to take earth wherever we want... now only if someone can make a warp drive by that time.....
Did the customer "wanted this solution yesterday"? So aren't the scientists who figured this out today are billion years too late?
I guess we are now all domed. Good bye people, it was nice getting to know you all but ate least I know who to blame it on.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Two: What sort of implications does a "slight shift" in the earth's orbit have in light of Chaos and Complexity Theory. I mean, if a butterfly flapping it's wings can have such a drastic effect on the earth, what could we do to the galaxy? Probably not much, but who knows what sort of cosmic tangle we could stumble into...
If this is ever going to be done, it would have to be a unanimous vote from every country, holding majority elections in the country to decide the nation vote. Because this could easily fuck up and you don't wanna fuck up the planet unless everyone agrees it will be fun.
Not bloody likely.
I don't there there is any law, proposal or suggestion that could get unanimous consent on this planet. Even the most obvious thing has to be debated by two "sides". Even when one side of the argument is just plain silly. (Certain Republicans come to mind...)
Reality has a liberal bias
"Runaway greenhouse" state?? It will take three billion years to reach this point and they're calling it "runaway"? I think a more accurate adjective could have been used as not to cause panic. Why not an "over 100 million generation" greenhouse state.
There, that's better. We can all sleep tonight knowing that people 100 million generations from now will not fry.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Well, building huge rockets on earth and using them to push Earth is a much simpler and better idea.
If we use the rocket idea, we can push Earth to another sun, that way after the sun has dries out, we can keep earth around, moving it from one sun to another.
I believe my rocket idea is a much better solution; it is a solution that looks into the future much further and can be re-used over and over.
So, when do we start building the rockets?
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Not to knock the science of the article but the whole thing sounds like something Lex Luther and the Legion of Doom would come up with.
It sounds both as aweful and alien as the concept of a Dyson sphere, but I know that it is fully within the laws of physics, if not reason. The main issue is that we are dealing with a COMPLEX system here. Like the article said, without the Earth where it is, the orbits of Mercury and Venus would soon destabilize. I can only imagine the chaos...
It comes down to this: is it worth the gamble? Granted, that in a billion years we will probably understand a little more about the world, but the cost of failure...
Even if we are already living in other star systems, wouldn't the cradle of humanity still have a special place in our hearts? We could make it a living museum: only eco-tourists would be allowed to visit. Sounds good to me. Just don't get the same guys to do this that built that bridge on the Tacoma Narrows.
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
You got modded down because you didn't pay attention as you read the article. These scientists aren't talking about a collision. They're talking about a close pass to pull the Earth to a different orbit via gravity.
Virg
Computer: Warning! The Earth is now on course for instant combustion to take place in exactly 216,438 years, 4 months, 2 weeks, 11 days, 12 minutes and 42 seconds!
Dr. Robinson: DAMN!
Dammit! And I was so looking forward to the extinction of our race. If anything, we should be planning for a fiery apocolypse rather than gradually dying out. We should be flung directly into the sun. Now that's action! Who needs more of this clockwork, machine existence we've made for ourselves.
-Tyler
"Birds and deer are a silly luxury and all of the fish should be floating."
Happy people make bad consumers.
In a billion years humanity will not exist. Our species (humans that is) is just another resting spot on the ladder of evolutionary progression.
How many species are in existance today were also in existance a Billion years ago? Cockroaches ?
Are we gonna need global buy-in on this project? Whomever facilitated the communication needed for everyone concerned (read "EVERYone") would deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.
Aside from that not insignificant task, let's hope the modelling for this scheme has little or no margin for error. I feel pretty shaky about missing the goal on the first try...
Lets see...
Asteroid hitting the earth,
Another Ice Age,
Global Warming,
Economic Recession/Depression,
"Grey Ooze",
World War,
etc...
These will all likely happen within a million years, and there are scientists worrying about stuff that will happen in a billion years?
My guess is, they'll all give themselves a coronary worrying about this stuff in about 2 years.
--
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Read the article. The asteroid would pass by earth twice.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Considering that when the sun goes Red Giant on us, we'd have to be at an orbit the distance of Triton in order to maintain an environment similar to what we have now, we'd have to move at a pretty good clip to make it. Especially since we couldn't get much of a head start since we'd then freeze the entire planet on the way if we didn't time it with the sun's expansion. And then what happens when the sun goes white dwarf? We move back again? Not to mention the fact we'd by MUCH closer (as in right next door) to the gas giants, and their gravity would probably do some crazy stuff with us.
And what about Mars? Won't we have colonized it by then? Along with probably the rest of the Milky Way? Why would we move Earth? For nostalgic purposes? Of course, that's assuming the human race even exists then, in any form.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
- The Earth-Luna pair must be considered a double planet system. If these scientists expect to significantly alter the orbit of Earth, then similar plans must be taken to ensure that Luna's orbit is matched throughout this change. Any instability or gravitational pull on Earth must also affect Luna, due to its relatively near orbit.
- Without planning for this, assume that Luna will be affected by such a large asteroid even more so than Earth, or even less so, depending on exactly how they plan to use the gravitational slingshot effect. In that case, one of many outcomes might happen:
- Luna will be drawn closer to Earth and enter a nearer, faster, and possibly more eccentric orbit. This will wreak tidal havoc.
- Luna will be pushed farther from Earth and enter a slower and more eccentric orbit. This will also cause many problem.
- Luna's orbit will be unperturbed, but this is not likely.
- Luna will be ejected from its present orbit altogether, and become an unpredictable planet-like object with its own orbit. This clutters up the inner solar system immensely.
- Luna may collide with Earth.
- The inner solar system is a VERY busy place. We have three other planets (Mercury, Venus, and Mars) to worry about. Significant research has been done (and I don't remember by whom, but it was very well computed and presented) to show that the Earth-Luna system plays a stabilizing role in the orbits of Mercury and Venus, and also Mars to a lesser degree. The conclusion by this astronomer was that were Earth in a different location, then the orbits of Venus and Mercury would eventually destabilize and become unpredictable in a short time, possibly even tens of thousands of years.
- Some of the ramifications of moving Earth-Luna would mean similar effects upon Venus and also Mercury, over time. Any change to the gravitational balance of our solar system may cause these orbits to become destabilized or eccentric, and eventually lead to any of these outcomes, listed in order of likelihood:
- planetary collision with Sol
- planetary collision with another planet
- planetary collision with Earth-Luna system
- planetary collision with Mars
- planetary ejection
- planetary collision with Jupiter, or capture by Jupiter
- any other possible catastrophe
- As mentioned before, the inner solar system is a very busy place. Thousands of asteroids, micro-planets, and comets have been discovered, some only within the last decade. Earth-Luna itself is subjected to periodic meteor showers (e.g., Perseid, Leonid, etc.) whose exact nature and orbital stability are unknown. Moving Earth-Luna might mean subjecting Earth to heavy bombardment from any one of these inner solar bodies. The consequences of such an impact/collision would be far worse than any perceived solar output delta, and would have much shorter-term and more catastrophic impacts upon Earth's biosphere.
- Finally, the outer solar system does exert measurable gravitational control over the inter solar system bodies. Jupiter is theorized to have played a stabilizing role in the formation (and further development) of the early solar system, with its near-circular orbit and huge mass. If Earth-Luna were moved, then the system might be gravitationally affected in a different way by the gas giants.
- Bode's Law has not been the end-all authority over planetary configuration, but there is a certain harmonic resonance seen in the orbits of the planets. Moving Earth-Luna would change and possibly destroy this resonance, which would change the nature of the solar system.
- Planetary stability in the current solar system configuration, over the very long term (>10,000,000 years) has not yet been proven! Astronomers are still working to solve the N-body problem with the data that we have about the planetary bodies that we know.
- The current cycle and mechanism behind global cooling (ice ages) is not completely known. We may be on the upswing from a recent ice age, and there is some evidence to prove this. If Earth-Luna is moved, this may drastically change the cycles and the weather patterns, even over the long term.
- The current Solar trends have been measured for a very short time (astronomically, only an eye-blink) and cannot be predicted or planned with any great certainty. We still know too little about our own sun to know whether its output delta is cyclical or constant. Also, we know too little about the surrounding space around the heliopause to be able to predict how extra-solar galactic space (and matter) may affect Sol in the long-term.
- Europa appears to be vacant.
These are just some, but not all, reasons against messing with the orbit of Earth-Luna. My facts may not be complete or entirely accurate, but I don't really think this is a good idea. Our Solar system is not a landscaping project -- we just shouldn't be moving the big rocks around until we really know how everything will be affected.Just because people read Larry Niven's books (which are generally very good, by the way) about the Puppetteers moving their homeworlds away from their sun, doesn't mean it can actually be done. There are perfectly good places to settle and colonize that don't involve moving planets and wreaking havoc.