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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."
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'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
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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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* 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?"
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...
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
...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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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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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
No.. I think it Space:1999...
Remember,..the moon base..
Dirty Pirate Hooker
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
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.
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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 =)
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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Ah yes, that was it
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
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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?
...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.
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)
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.
It's actually quite an old (and not racist, but humorously flawed) proposition.
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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
Actually considering the average weight of Modern Americans, you would get the same net effect if you had the yankees do this.
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
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
...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.
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
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.
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
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.
And who is anyone else to say that its perfect?
It is...and it *IS* "broke". In a billion years or so... no matter what we try to do locally, will be uninhabitable.
The Sun will begin to die out. It will get hotter, its output will increase...we WILL be incinerated.
Until I have a written copy of "Gods Great Plan" which states that this is a "Good thing", and necissary to the universe at large... I vote "Lets get this fucker out of the way"
Now... noone is saying we have to do it now. We have thousands of years before we have to DO anything. However, there is no point in refusing to talk about it and explore our options NOW.
I mean hell, assuming for a min that there is a "creator" (God, Gods, whatever) perhaps this is exactly what he would expecty us to do...I mean, any such being would be the same being that gave us the very intellect and resources that we need to solve such a problem...perhaps we are expected to solve it in time...maybe that is "the plan".
The fact is, we don't know what "His Plan" is, much less whether "He" is. (or at least, we can't all agree on it). So its insane to take "His Plan" into account...until we have a written copy in hand.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
(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?
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!
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
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?
.. and change the gravitational constant of the universe.
What do you mean, "how"? You just DO it!
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!
Um, actually... they're not COMPLETELY independent.
The earth rotates on its axis every 23 hours 56 minutes, rather than 24. You can check this by using the stars.
The 24 hour bit is caused by the fact that the earth is in orbit around the sun causing the sun to illuminate the earth from different angles at different times of year.
Basically the earths orbit ends up subtracting off a day from the year. Kinda like the same way that they lost a day if you've ever read "Around the world in 80 days." - the sun is moving east all th e time in the sky.
Therefore if the year's length changes the length of the day would change too, probably shorter by a minute or two.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
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.
> Sorry, but I just can't have the kind of faith
> required to think I'm just a product of
> extraodinary chance. What hope of a fulfilling
> life is there in that?
Reality exists the way it is completely without regard to your ability to accept it.
If you must participate in wild fantasy based on the speculations and ghost stories of ages past,to feel "Fullfilled" in your life... then enjoy I supose.
Do not, however, expect that everyone else will honor your ghost stories when it comes time to make decisions and shape plans to avoid the destruction of our home planet (which is currently the only one we have).
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
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.
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
> Why worry about moving the earth 1 million years
> from now. If we survive that long, why would
> we use a 1 million year old technology?
And noone is arguing that we should. All I am advocating is that this idea be researched, becuase when the time comes that it has to move, thats not the time to START the research.
Thats exactly the kind of thinking that caused the "Y2K Craze"... "Oh plenty of time, this stuff will be long since replaced by then, no need for us to store dates right now".
> At least my 'ghost stories' (which I take
> literally from the Genesis account in the
> Bible) have never been proven false,
Whats to prove false? Its a story. A story with an all powerful God that can change the entire universe at his whim... makes it very easy to explain away just about anything. How convinient!
I supose the dinosaur bones we find are just Gods little practical joke to test our faith then? Or maybe whoever recorded the story simply forgot about the monstorous flesh eating lizards?
> while you choose to believe in Big Bang theory,
> also based on faith.
The only faith in science is the faith that reality exists, and we are not brains in jars being fed a virtual universe (like the matrix).
And even then... science would still be valid within that universe. (unless the program suddenly changed all the rules).
The "Big Bang" theory is just the best theory we have so far. The one that fits the most of the empirical evidence. When new empirical evidence is found that contradicts it, a new theory will replace it.
No Theory is written in stone.
> technology a 10-20 years from now will
> undoubtedly have much better solutions to global
> warming than this.
This is not the same global warming that environmentalists are going around talking about. This is not about the earth holding in heat.
This is global warming due to the Sun begining to die out. As it dies out, it gets hotter. Its output increases drastically. When it happens, it will FRY this planet.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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
> And contrary to popular belief, dinosaur
> fossils have not proven evolution, but rather
> a massive flood or other catastrophe. If you
> really want me to find a link
> for it online I will try to do so for you.
Yes a massive flood that killed off even the large dinosaurs that lived in the sea. That sounds very plausable.
No need to find a link, ive seen the pseudoscience before. Perhaps you would like to know how it all relates to the law of fives? Really fascinating stuff.
> At least I've got some solid ground to stand
> on for my beliefs both scientific and
> spiritually. It is an amazing story, but hey,
> I'm not God so it's not my job to understand
> it, just believe it.
I supose if that ground feels solid to you, then it must be solid. Even if it looks and feels alot like sand to me.
As I said before... feel free to believe what you want. Just don't expect your beliefs to affect my decisions on what types of research or plans of action to support.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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 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
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.
By the way, what was that other show from the same people that was with Space Ghost? The family that had the dragon thing, the rock monkey, and the big and little blobs? They were cooler I think.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
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.