That is certainly possible - and unfortunately the low oxygen itself won't be the problem. The real problem will be that to get to that point we will have disrupted the oceanic algae, allowing their hydrgen-sulfide producing cousins to become dominant. And hydrogen sulfide does strange things to mammals, inducing a hibernation like state in high concentrations, and slowing their metabolism to a pseudo-reptilian state at lower concentrations - incapable of supporting the comparatively large brains so common in mammals. We'll likely survive, every mammal species on the planet is descended from the survivors of several HS events, but an HS-rich atmosphere causes severe brain damage, robbing us of the intellect that gives us such a profound advantage. On the bright side, any trace of civilization surviving in eco-domes won't have to worry about inbreeding - the outsiders may be little more than animals, but they'll still be genetically human, and any children birthed and raised in a normal atmosphere should develop normally. And once the HS event is over the next generation will have human intelligence again (minus any losses to selective breeding for more immediately useful attributes)
We're nowhere close to having the technology to effectively colonize Mars - we might be able to establish an outpost within the next decade or two, but it'll probably take at least a century or two before it grows into a truly self-supporting colony - and that's assuming we're willing to maintain a lifeline from Earth for all that time. And considerably longer than that until "Mars is colonized", rather than just "We've established a few colonies on Mars". It is a whole freaking planet after all, with a surface area roughly equal to the entire land area of Earth. Just as England did not effectively colonize North America with the founding of Roanoke.
The moon is likewise blacker than coal, but like asteroids coming from outside our orbit, reflected sunlight makes them all stand out against the near absolute blackness of space quite well - IF you're looking carefully in the exact location they're at, over a period of days or weeks so that their motion can be detected against the background noise of the camera. If they're coming from too near the sun then yes, they're hard to detect - back-lit coal in a vacuum is very hard to see. On the bright side (hyuck hyuck), that almost doesn't matter - nothing is coming at us from the direction of the sun unless it first fell in from beyond our orbit, where it would have been visible. Even something that screams through the inner system like Halley's comet takes about 20 years to get from Neptune's orbit to Earth's. Plenty of time to spot it opposite from the sun and characterize its orbit before it gets anywhere close to us. Even something from way out in the Oort cloud take several years to cross that distance.
Of course - there's a lot of sky to cover really frequently, which is why there are several proposals for wide-angle telescope arrays designed specifically for the job.
The real sneaky asteroids are our "pseudomoons" - the asteroids that share our orbit and migrate between Earth and our L4 and L5 points, about 60 degrees in either direction from Earth. Except during a near pass, they're virtually invisible from earth, showing only a tiny crescent of illuminated surface. Fortunately that's entirely a limitation of our own position - a telescope looking outwards from closer to the sun could spot them easily.
Fair enough. For a sufficiently impersonal (theologically) definition of God I might even side with you.
I quite agree - that's an incredibly interesting question. Did it take that long for the cellular infrastructure to evolve to the point that more sophisticated organisms could exist, or did some extremely unlikely event take 3 billion years to occur here to trigger the step to sophisticated multicellular life?
One possibility is that single celled life was still evolving too quickly - the advances in internal cellular mechanisms might have still been evolving at a rate sufficient that multicellular organisms, with their much slower reproduction rate, just couldn't compete for long against new, more efficient single-celled organisms. Not until the advances in single-cell "technology" began to plateau could multicelled creatures really begin to carve a substantial ecological niche for themselves. There is some "worm track" evidence in the oldest rocks to that relatively large large organisms may have slithered across the early Earth.
>It is perfectly reasonable to assume that there is life out there which is more primitive, in a similar situation as us or simply different and have no desire to go into space.
Absolutely. The galaxy could be teaming with life no more advanced than us, and we'd have no chance of seeing them at this point. But if they exist, then there should also be others at least a billion years older than any of us. Because our sun is a relative latecomer to the "stars like ours" party.
Nobody is specifically looking for little green men - at interstellar distances they'd be initially indistinguishable from green slime and/or intelligent machines anyway.
Which is a sound philosophical argument, but a lousy scientific explanation - especially once we get into the realm of what we can actually see and measure within the sphere of the observable universe
Yes - sentient life has to arise to recognize its own existence, but why did life arise so quickly on this planet? It may be that there's something physically special about this planet, but the list of possibilities seems quite short and shrinking rapidly as we glimpse other planets and get a statistically better image of the galaxy. And if there is nothing physically special to "jump-start" life here, then there's nothing in the Anthropic Principle to wave away how quickly life arose here.
People get killed all the time, life is a 100% fatal condition. I bet you drive, or at least ride in cars, and that's far more dangerous than, say, taking an airplane ride in rough conditions.
Besides, killing people is generally quite expensive, especially the sort of people that can afford first-class ticket prices. Not to mention SpaceX is projecting that the ship itself will cost $200M, with another $230M for the booster - which the SpaceX animations all show being used for suborbital flights. So there's also significant economic incentive to not kill anyone.
And so far as I know, there's not actually any reason a rocket should have any more trouble in rough weather than an airplane - in fact it would probably face considerably fewer difficulties since it doesn't have all those wings and other large aerodynamic surfaces to be stressed by turbulence, and won't care about downdrafts and other problems that can destroy aircraft. The one issue that could be a problem is lightning - since unlike an aircraft there's almost no chance of a controlled glide back to the ground in case of system failure. However, unlike an aircraft a rocket will ride directly up through the storm on a huge plume of plasma in only a minute or two - with the plasma presenting a much larger and more conductive neutrally charged target for lightning to strike. Especially since the ship is going to be carbon-fiber composites instead of metal like most aircraft.
>Rockets currently only fly in perfect weather Fixed that for you.
Rockets launch in perfect weather because they're very expensive, relatively untested under rough conditions, and have very few demands for promptness. A launch window to a particular orbital interception can be very narrow, minutes or even seconds, but it generally doesn't matter if the launch happens today or next Tuesday, so why take the added risk of launching in bad weather - it's a risk with no reward, and thus a guaranteed amortized loss.
Suborbital flights on the other hand have no such launch window, and considerable pressure to be reasonably on-time. If the weather is bad, you wait until it gets better, and then launch. And you've got economic pressure to push those boundaries and run some risks - a rocket would *probably* be fine flying though rough weather, it will only be a couple minutes before it climbs above it anyway, and you've got unhappy customers and wasted money-making potential pushing you to make the attempt.
Presumably you'd test such rough-weather limits carrying sandbags instead of passengers, but not until there's an actual incentive to do so.
Not necessarily - I seem to recall several people running numbers for the BFR, and coming out with passenger-mile carbon emissions as low as 1/3rd that of commercial airliners for a flight halfway around the world - that total lack of friction can make a big difference on long flights.
Turn the question around - why should airlines get priority? They are after all businesses out to make a quick buck. They have no more claim to the airspace than rocket companies do, and yet have routinely been granted quite generous access, even when it causes problems for people on the ground.
Give them equal access? Sure - let's talk about that in 20-50 years when the demands of rocket launches on airspace amount to more than a fraction of a percent of those made by airlines.
Besides which, current rocket airspace demands are almost entirely regulatory - a rocket is perfectly capable of launching straight up until well above airline cruising altitude. So - how close are aircraft allowed to encroach on each other normally? Take that distance, draw a circle around the launch pad, and make that excluded airspace. Problem solved.
Rockets certainly do get going horizontally, but usually not until they're beyond the bulk of the Earth's atmosphere - air is a problem for them. Meanwhile commercial airliners rarely climb above 10-12km.
By all means, let's charge SpaceX for the use of airspace.
But, if we do that we should charge the airlines as well - after all, why should they get subsidized by being given a free ride? It's not their airspace after all.
Go ahead and make the proposal - I bet you the airlines stop complaining so fast the silence creates a sonic boom.
Our civilization has NOT gone to space - we've sent a few robots, and a handful of tourists and researchers to the nearest edge (we've never sent even a single human beyond Earth orbit), but nothing remotely resembling civilization, or even a serious outpost. I assume we will do so eventually, though not necessarily before our current civilization collapses and rebuilds again. (Also, don't make the mistake of projecting the decadence of the U.S.'s decaying culture to the rest of the world - China, India, etc. are quite busy actually building things)
Once you have actual civilization in space (and not just outposts dependent on the home planet) then you have selective pressure at work - pretty much anyone who goes to space is likely to do so because in their vision the promise of space exceeds that of remaining on Earth - that's going to be a fundamental "truth" in spacer culture. And if there's any genetic component at all that biases the colonists vision in that direction, it will be concentrated and amplified in their descendants.
It's both, really. We absolutely need to spot the things first, but then we have to figure out how to deflect them. Currently we don't really have a lot of ideas that wouldn't require intercepting said asteroid in the outer solar system to have a good chance of success, and we don't have any way to reach the outer solar system on short notice.
Actually we are looking, just not very well. But we're also developing telescope arrays specifically for the task, which should improve the situation by several orders of magnitude.
Deflecting such an asteroid though is far from trivial though. Hitting it with nukes is an extremely dangerous idea, as it runs the risk of breaking it up into a cloud of shrapnel that could do even greater damage. Landing on a chaotically tumbling rock a few miles across is also a non-trivial exercise - though if managed to land a BFR, flip it on it's nose, and fire the engines briefly when thefacing in the right direction we could probably push it off course - assuming we spotted it with enough time to spare. And didn't tear the thing apart into a cloud of shrapnel in the process.
Basically we have lots of untested ideas, but won't know if any of them are viable until we start testing them. It'd be nice if our first test wasn't in the face of the imminent destruction of most life on Earth.
Sure, though it's unlikely that anything we do with a few tiny pebbles is going to make much difference to the sun. The sun is 99.9% of the mass of the solar system, and Jupiter alone is around is around 70% of the remaining mass. All the rocky planets combined are barely even a rounding error in comparison.
You do get orbital resonance between planets though that certainly will destabilize things over a sufficiently long time period - it's already doing so, the planets have been migrating around since long before the Earth's surface solidified. However, if you're capable of moving planets around, you're capable of correcting such resonance drift. You can even make that resonance work for you by intentionally putting things into some of the more stable resonances to begin with, so that the system will tend to self-correct.
And of course there's Lagrangian-inspired arrangements if you actually wanted the planets to share the same orbit - though that might take a full six equal-mass planets to actually be stable, and I'm not certain even that would work.
Maybe. Cleaning up radioactive and nanotech pollution might prove considerably more difficult than we'd like though, to say nothing of engineered pathogens. And it may turn out that humans actually take quite well to 40% gravity. Not to mention we may find there are serious problems caused by fracking, mining, and other practices that damage geologic structures that are potentially irreparable on less-than-geologic timescales.
That is rather the point - we're not knee-deep in cats because there are equilibrium forces on cats (namely starvation and predators). The Fermi paradox essentially asks, "What are those equilibrium forces on galactic civilizations?" An embargo might be possible - but it would require 100% compliance of every single individual in the galaxy, which seems unlikely.
Basically it's not trying to reveal some great truth - it's prompting the asking of questions, which might eventually do so.
As for maybe half the galaxy already being part of a galactic civilization, that doesn't really answer anything - why would such a civilization stop expanding? The sort of head start they could have would make crossing the entire galaxy look like crossing the street.
And heck - the answer may even be that we've grossly overestimated the probability of intelligent life arising in the first place, and really are the first potentially space faring species to arise in this galaxy. Even that answer would be immensely informative, as it leads us to more critically analyze our assumptions of the preconditions.
>which will always be the most suitable place for human habitation
Lets not make any assumptions - after a few million years of terraforming, Mars and Venus might be every bit as suitable - especially after being relocated to more hospitable orbits.
I'm not sure it's all that antropocentric to call it destruction, when of all life on Earth we will be among those to die last. We're omnivores at the top of the food chain - we won't die out until there's no other life left to eat.
And while other forms of life do indeed push beyond existing boundaries, we're fairly unique in the sheer scale and effectiveness of the destruction we can wreak on other life. The only other species I can think of that has demonstrated anything similar was the blue-green algae that first wiped out most life on the planet by poisoning it with toxic free oxygen.
In fairness, if we have the technology to effectively colonize Mars, then deflecting an "planet-killer" asteroid should be fairly trivial. And if we're able to travel between stars at even a few percentage of light speed, then it's probably easy enough to just keep moving the Earth further from the sun to maintain a pleasant environment - some size large ion drives on the moon, firing for several million years, should tow the Earth along just fine.
Of course, once you've done that it's not such a stretch to put some size-large lights on the moon as well, to illuminate the Earth in lieu of the sun, and head into interstellar space. With the aid of some mildly efficient mass-energy conversion the moon should provide plenty of power for the journey. The real question is, do all the terraformed planets head to the same star, or do we scatter in all directions?
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That is certainly possible - and unfortunately the low oxygen itself won't be the problem. The real problem will be that to get to that point we will have disrupted the oceanic algae, allowing their hydrgen-sulfide producing cousins to become dominant. And hydrogen sulfide does strange things to mammals, inducing a hibernation like state in high concentrations, and slowing their metabolism to a pseudo-reptilian state at lower concentrations - incapable of supporting the comparatively large brains so common in mammals. We'll likely survive, every mammal species on the planet is descended from the survivors of several HS events, but an HS-rich atmosphere causes severe brain damage, robbing us of the intellect that gives us such a profound advantage. On the bright side, any trace of civilization surviving in eco-domes won't have to worry about inbreeding - the outsiders may be little more than animals, but they'll still be genetically human, and any children birthed and raised in a normal atmosphere should develop normally. And once the HS event is over the next generation will have human intelligence again (minus any losses to selective breeding for more immediately useful attributes)
We're nowhere close to having the technology to effectively colonize Mars - we might be able to establish an outpost within the next decade or two, but it'll probably take at least a century or two before it grows into a truly self-supporting colony - and that's assuming we're willing to maintain a lifeline from Earth for all that time. And considerably longer than that until "Mars is colonized", rather than just "We've established a few colonies on Mars". It is a whole freaking planet after all, with a surface area roughly equal to the entire land area of Earth. Just as England did not effectively colonize North America with the founding of Roanoke.
The moon is likewise blacker than coal, but like asteroids coming from outside our orbit, reflected sunlight makes them all stand out against the near absolute blackness of space quite well - IF you're looking carefully in the exact location they're at, over a period of days or weeks so that their motion can be detected against the background noise of the camera. If they're coming from too near the sun then yes, they're hard to detect - back-lit coal in a vacuum is very hard to see. On the bright side (hyuck hyuck), that almost doesn't matter - nothing is coming at us from the direction of the sun unless it first fell in from beyond our orbit, where it would have been visible. Even something that screams through the inner system like Halley's comet takes about 20 years to get from Neptune's orbit to Earth's. Plenty of time to spot it opposite from the sun and characterize its orbit before it gets anywhere close to us. Even something from way out in the Oort cloud take several years to cross that distance.
Of course - there's a lot of sky to cover really frequently, which is why there are several proposals for wide-angle telescope arrays designed specifically for the job.
The real sneaky asteroids are our "pseudomoons" - the asteroids that share our orbit and migrate between Earth and our L4 and L5 points, about 60 degrees in either direction from Earth. Except during a near pass, they're virtually invisible from earth, showing only a tiny crescent of illuminated surface. Fortunately that's entirely a limitation of our own position - a telescope looking outwards from closer to the sun could spot them easily.
Nope, but they aren't biased against robots.
Fair enough. For a sufficiently impersonal (theologically) definition of God I might even side with you.
I quite agree - that's an incredibly interesting question. Did it take that long for the cellular infrastructure to evolve to the point that more sophisticated organisms could exist, or did some extremely unlikely event take 3 billion years to occur here to trigger the step to sophisticated multicellular life?
One possibility is that single celled life was still evolving too quickly - the advances in internal cellular mechanisms might have still been evolving at a rate sufficient that multicellular organisms, with their much slower reproduction rate, just couldn't compete for long against new, more efficient single-celled organisms. Not until the advances in single-cell "technology" began to plateau could multicelled creatures really begin to carve a substantial ecological niche for themselves. There is some "worm track" evidence in the oldest rocks to that relatively large large organisms may have slithered across the early Earth.
>It is perfectly reasonable to assume that there is life out there which is more primitive, in a similar situation as us or simply different and have no desire to go into space.
Absolutely. The galaxy could be teaming with life no more advanced than us, and we'd have no chance of seeing them at this point. But if they exist, then there should also be others at least a billion years older than any of us. Because our sun is a relative latecomer to the "stars like ours" party.
Do they really though? How much have the deaths really cost them?
Nobody is specifically looking for little green men - at interstellar distances they'd be initially indistinguishable from green slime and/or intelligent machines anyway.
Which is a sound philosophical argument, but a lousy scientific explanation - especially once we get into the realm of what we can actually see and measure within the sphere of the observable universe
Yes - sentient life has to arise to recognize its own existence, but why did life arise so quickly on this planet? It may be that there's something physically special about this planet, but the list of possibilities seems quite short and shrinking rapidly as we glimpse other planets and get a statistically better image of the galaxy. And if there is nothing physically special to "jump-start" life here, then there's nothing in the Anthropic Principle to wave away how quickly life arose here.
People get killed all the time, life is a 100% fatal condition. I bet you drive, or at least ride in cars, and that's far more dangerous than, say, taking an airplane ride in rough conditions.
Besides, killing people is generally quite expensive, especially the sort of people that can afford first-class ticket prices. Not to mention SpaceX is projecting that the ship itself will cost $200M, with another $230M for the booster - which the SpaceX animations all show being used for suborbital flights. So there's also significant economic incentive to not kill anyone.
And so far as I know, there's not actually any reason a rocket should have any more trouble in rough weather than an airplane - in fact it would probably face considerably fewer difficulties since it doesn't have all those wings and other large aerodynamic surfaces to be stressed by turbulence, and won't care about downdrafts and other problems that can destroy aircraft. The one issue that could be a problem is lightning - since unlike an aircraft there's almost no chance of a controlled glide back to the ground in case of system failure. However, unlike an aircraft a rocket will ride directly up through the storm on a huge plume of plasma in only a minute or two - with the plasma presenting a much larger and more conductive neutrally charged target for lightning to strike. Especially since the ship is going to be carbon-fiber composites instead of metal like most aircraft.
>Rockets currently only fly in perfect weather
Fixed that for you.
Rockets launch in perfect weather because they're very expensive, relatively untested under rough conditions, and have very few demands for promptness. A launch window to a particular orbital interception can be very narrow, minutes or even seconds, but it generally doesn't matter if the launch happens today or next Tuesday, so why take the added risk of launching in bad weather - it's a risk with no reward, and thus a guaranteed amortized loss.
Suborbital flights on the other hand have no such launch window, and considerable pressure to be reasonably on-time. If the weather is bad, you wait until it gets better, and then launch. And you've got economic pressure to push those boundaries and run some risks - a rocket would *probably* be fine flying though rough weather, it will only be a couple minutes before it climbs above it anyway, and you've got unhappy customers and wasted money-making potential pushing you to make the attempt.
Presumably you'd test such rough-weather limits carrying sandbags instead of passengers, but not until there's an actual incentive to do so.
Not necessarily - I seem to recall several people running numbers for the BFR, and coming out with passenger-mile carbon emissions as low as 1/3rd that of commercial airliners for a flight halfway around the world - that total lack of friction can make a big difference on long flights.
Turn the question around - why should airlines get priority? They are after all businesses out to make a quick buck. They have no more claim to the airspace than rocket companies do, and yet have routinely been granted quite generous access, even when it causes problems for people on the ground.
Give them equal access? Sure - let's talk about that in 20-50 years when the demands of rocket launches on airspace amount to more than a fraction of a percent of those made by airlines.
Besides which, current rocket airspace demands are almost entirely regulatory - a rocket is perfectly capable of launching straight up until well above airline cruising altitude. So - how close are aircraft allowed to encroach on each other normally? Take that distance, draw a circle around the launch pad, and make that excluded airspace. Problem solved.
Rockets certainly do get going horizontally, but usually not until they're beyond the bulk of the Earth's atmosphere - air is a problem for them. Meanwhile commercial airliners rarely climb above 10-12km.
By all means, let's charge SpaceX for the use of airspace.
But, if we do that we should charge the airlines as well - after all, why should they get subsidized by being given a free ride? It's not their airspace after all.
Go ahead and make the proposal - I bet you the airlines stop complaining so fast the silence creates a sonic boom.
Our civilization has NOT gone to space - we've sent a few robots, and a handful of tourists and researchers to the nearest edge (we've never sent even a single human beyond Earth orbit), but nothing remotely resembling civilization, or even a serious outpost. I assume we will do so eventually, though not necessarily before our current civilization collapses and rebuilds again. (Also, don't make the mistake of projecting the decadence of the U.S.'s decaying culture to the rest of the world - China, India, etc. are quite busy actually building things)
Once you have actual civilization in space (and not just outposts dependent on the home planet) then you have selective pressure at work - pretty much anyone who goes to space is likely to do so because in their vision the promise of space exceeds that of remaining on Earth - that's going to be a fundamental "truth" in spacer culture. And if there's any genetic component at all that biases the colonists vision in that direction, it will be concentrated and amplified in their descendants.
It's both, really. We absolutely need to spot the things first, but then we have to figure out how to deflect them. Currently we don't really have a lot of ideas that wouldn't require intercepting said asteroid in the outer solar system to have a good chance of success, and we don't have any way to reach the outer solar system on short notice.
Actually we are looking, just not very well. But we're also developing telescope arrays specifically for the task, which should improve the situation by several orders of magnitude.
Deflecting such an asteroid though is far from trivial though. Hitting it with nukes is an extremely dangerous idea, as it runs the risk of breaking it up into a cloud of shrapnel that could do even greater damage. Landing on a chaotically tumbling rock a few miles across is also a non-trivial exercise - though if managed to land a BFR, flip it on it's nose, and fire the engines briefly when thefacing in the right direction we could probably push it off course - assuming we spotted it with enough time to spare. And didn't tear the thing apart into a cloud of shrapnel in the process.
Basically we have lots of untested ideas, but won't know if any of them are viable until we start testing them. It'd be nice if our first test wasn't in the face of the imminent destruction of most life on Earth.
Sure, though it's unlikely that anything we do with a few tiny pebbles is going to make much difference to the sun. The sun is 99.9% of the mass of the solar system, and Jupiter alone is around is around 70% of the remaining mass. All the rocky planets combined are barely even a rounding error in comparison.
You do get orbital resonance between planets though that certainly will destabilize things over a sufficiently long time period - it's already doing so, the planets have been migrating around since long before the Earth's surface solidified. However, if you're capable of moving planets around, you're capable of correcting such resonance drift. You can even make that resonance work for you by intentionally putting things into some of the more stable resonances to begin with, so that the system will tend to self-correct.
And of course there's Lagrangian-inspired arrangements if you actually wanted the planets to share the same orbit - though that might take a full six equal-mass planets to actually be stable, and I'm not certain even that would work.
Maybe. Cleaning up radioactive and nanotech pollution might prove considerably more difficult than we'd like though, to say nothing of engineered pathogens. And it may turn out that humans actually take quite well to 40% gravity. Not to mention we may find there are serious problems caused by fracking, mining, and other practices that damage geologic structures that are potentially irreparable on less-than-geologic timescales.
That is rather the point - we're not knee-deep in cats because there are equilibrium forces on cats (namely starvation and predators). The Fermi paradox essentially asks, "What are those equilibrium forces on galactic civilizations?" An embargo might be possible - but it would require 100% compliance of every single individual in the galaxy, which seems unlikely.
Basically it's not trying to reveal some great truth - it's prompting the asking of questions, which might eventually do so.
As for maybe half the galaxy already being part of a galactic civilization, that doesn't really answer anything - why would such a civilization stop expanding? The sort of head start they could have would make crossing the entire galaxy look like crossing the street.
And heck - the answer may even be that we've grossly overestimated the probability of intelligent life arising in the first place, and really are the first potentially space faring species to arise in this galaxy. Even that answer would be immensely informative, as it leads us to more critically analyze our assumptions of the preconditions.
>which will always be the most suitable place for human habitation
Lets not make any assumptions - after a few million years of terraforming, Mars and Venus might be every bit as suitable - especially after being relocated to more hospitable orbits.
I bet you don't consider our rodent-like ancestors "we" either, do you? To say nothing of the primordial slime that started everything off.
That's fine, just don't try to project your own small-mindedness on everyone else.
I'm not sure it's all that antropocentric to call it destruction, when of all life on Earth we will be among those to die last. We're omnivores at the top of the food chain - we won't die out until there's no other life left to eat.
And while other forms of life do indeed push beyond existing boundaries, we're fairly unique in the sheer scale and effectiveness of the destruction we can wreak on other life. The only other species I can think of that has demonstrated anything similar was the blue-green algae that first wiped out most life on the planet by poisoning it with toxic free oxygen.
In fairness, if we have the technology to effectively colonize Mars, then deflecting an "planet-killer" asteroid should be fairly trivial. And if we're able to travel between stars at even a few percentage of light speed, then it's probably easy enough to just keep moving the Earth further from the sun to maintain a pleasant environment - some size large ion drives on the moon, firing for several million years, should tow the Earth along just fine.
Of course, once you've done that it's not such a stretch to put some size-large lights on the moon as well, to illuminate the Earth in lieu of the sun, and head into interstellar space. With the aid of some mildly efficient mass-energy conversion the moon should provide plenty of power for the journey. The real question is, do all the terraformed planets head to the same star, or do we scatter in all directions?