What do you mean by 'we have' 4-5 billion years? A lot happens in that time. Theres a several percent chance of destructive orbital dynamical chaos in the inner solar system during that timeframe coming from the eccentricity of Mars or Mercury, the Earth will almost certainly pop into Venus mode from the increasing solar luminosity by 1.2 gigayears from now (if some parameters are overly harsh maybe as little as 300 megayears and DEFINITELY by 2 gigayears from now). And amusingly enough if we have a longer period of time before popping into the runaway greenhouse, there is a reasonable chance of a carbon crisis in which atmospheric carbon falls low enough that it becomes the limiting factor in biomass production due to the slowing geosphere and increasing burial of carbonate rock. And the average mammalian genus lasts what, ten, twenty million years?
This being said, I again point out that events like this have almost certainly happened many times over the history of the solar system. Even if events like this are rarer than every few tens of megayears due to the larger than average mass of this star, the sun was only 1% dimmer a hundred million years ago. Runaway greenhouses aren't THAT easy to get going and I believe there is evidence from the KT impact that the atmosphere was only strongly disturbed for a short time, potentially single digit years. And there are large impacts not associated with mass extinctions, leading some paleontologists to suggest that they only are associated with mass extinctions when the biosphere was already strongly stressed by something chronic like a large flood basalt eruption. (I myself am partial to the idea that the KT event in particular represents an ongoing low-level flood basalt eruption that got kicked into high gear for a few thousad years by the more or less worldwide 9-pointer earthquake the impact would've generated, providing a double punch). The biosphere and complex life in general is not threatened by impacts.
4-5 gy is stellar lifetime that most astrophys guys throw out there when discussion of solar sys/Earth comes up.
I agree with the flood basalt/ volcanics postulation, i was never convinced they were extinction driver by themselves.
I thought the orbital danger was Venus, as it is still so close to us on perihelion that it has gravitational interaction.? Reminds me of the exoplanet system found with 5 planets inside the orbit of Mercury, we are a pretty unusual system...
I was tracking these runaway stars for a SF story i had in mind, but this is the closest one i have heard of yet, and the ArXiv paper describes one that also passed thru 2.5 mya.
Gliese 710 will pass the Sun even closer
Close approach parameters recalculated based on the first Gaia data release
http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2016/11/aa29835-16/aa29835-16.html
Close encounters of the stellar kind
https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3648
tl:dr article
http://www.businessinsider.com/star-hurting-towards-solar-system-2016-12\
"Gliese 710 is about half the size of our sun, and it is set to reach Earth in 1.35 million years, according to a paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics in November.
And when it arrives, the star could end up a mere 77 light-days away from Earth — one light-day being the equivalent of how far light travels in one day, which is about 26 billion kilometers, the researchers worked out.
As far as we know, Gliese 710 isn't set to collide directly with Earth, but it wil be passing through the Oort Cloud, a shell of trillions of icy objects at the furthest reaches of our solar system. "
Seems like a great opportunity to send out some interstellar probes. The star will be trailing lots of ISM, free gas that would help bring a ramjet up to speed, and track till you could curve towards another destination. Likewise, a solar sail probe launched out in front of it by laser could "hitchhike" , and get some deep space ISM , and EM measurements.
Can we think of some other opportunities that this might present ? If we are past the filter by then, then we will already prob have samples of the Oort objects, but looks like they will be delivering then...