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DaFranker comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Is there any plausible way the earth could be moved away from the sun and into an orbit which would keep the earth habitable when the sun becomes a red giant?
I'm curious about the thought process that led to this being asked in the "stupid questions" thread rather than the "very advanced theoretical speculation of future technology" thread. =P
As a more serious answer: Anything that would effectively give us a means to alter mass and/or the effects of gravity in some way (if there turns out to be a difference) would help a lot.
I wasn't sure there was a way to do it within current physics.
Now we get to the hard question: supposing we (broadly interpreted, it will probably be a successor species) want to move the earth outwards using those little gravitational nudges, how do we get civilizations with a sufficiently long attention span?
If we haven't gotten one by then, we're doomed. Or at least, we don't get a very good planet. We could still have space-stations or live on planets where we have to bring our own atmosphere.
I heard Ritalin has a solution. Couldn't pay attention long enough to verify. ba-dum tish
On a serious note, isn't the whole killing-the-Earth-for-our-children thing a rather interesting scenario? I've never seen it mentioned in my game theory-related reading, and I find that to be somewhat sad. I'm pretty sure a proper modeling of the game scenario would cover both climate change and eaten-by-red-giant.
I don't see the connection to killing the earth for our children. Moving the earth outwards is an effort to save the earth for our far future selves and our children.
I think "for our children" means "as far as our children are concerned" and failing to move the earth's orbit so it doesn't get eaten by the sun (despite being able to do it) would qualify as "killing the earth for our children". (The more usual referents being things like resource depletion and pollution with potentially disastrous long-term effects.)
Thanks. That makes sense.