Moving the earth

[Tim]

our Sun is just destined to become an Earth size ball of cold lifeless Carbon.

as opposed to a sun sized ball of lifeless hydrogen

[Macavity]

With a much shorter timescale for galactic collision with Andromeda, maybe our stellar neighbours will be "uprated" or the planets (Oort cloud) favourably changed. Ever the optimist.

[brantuk]

Mars would be no good as the sun will expand to a diameter that consumes Mars orbit, and it too will be fried.

[calibos]

What will We do when this happens in 4 or 5 billion years??

Nothing

What will the intelligent humanoids called the L.Casei Immunitas that evolved from my gut bacteria do in 5 billion years when this happens. Who knows!!

Remember all life on earth evolved from an ameoba a mere 3.5 billion years ago. So if the 'we' refered to means humans then its a silly question. It only makes sense if the 'we' refers to any future lifeform that evolved on Earth. Similarily. Imagine Yellowstone blows in 100 years wrecking the environment, the world economy and civilisation. We are back to the stone age. Things get so bad that natural selection means we evolve into a simpler form of primate again. (Evolution doesn't have to be forwards so to speak towards bigger, faster, stronger, more intelligent.) Things pick up in the world again in a million years and we start evolving intelligence again. Even those these creatures evolved from us. Can it be said that they are 'We'.......

[perrin6]

By the time we need to change the orbit we would have engineered new bodies that could travel and live in space I should think. We might even be ethereal ie. with no physical body if that's possible. Imagine - a billion years of technological development !?!?!?!

[Nick R]

I personally think that the human race as we know it will have destroyed the mother planet well before then . iWill we will get to the next millennium even

[LukeSkywatcher]

Mars would be no good as the sun will expand to a diameter that consumes Mars orbit, and it too will be fried.

You have just ruined my weekend.

LOL..

[Demonperformer]

Will we will get to the next millennium even

With the way some companies still refuse to allow their customers to communicate with them via email, I wonder if some of the human race will ever make it into THIS millennium:D

[yesyes]

Isn't the Earth's orbit (or any planet's orbit) determined by its mass, its speed and resulting centrifugal force and the mutual gravity between it and the star it orbits? So if we changed the orbit to be further away from the star, would we not also need to change its orbital speed to keep it in a stable orbit?

BTW, that reminds me of that silly Earth Jump Day a few years back...

[roboticsound]

Isn't the Earth's orbit (or any planet's orbit) determined by its mass, its speed and resulting centrifugal force and the mutual gravity between it and the star it orbits? So if we changed the orbit to be further away from the star, would we not also need to change its orbital speed to keep it in a stable orbit?

BTW, that reminds me of that silly Earth Jump Day a few years back...

Yes. In fact from what I've heard it's by speeding it up that the orbit would move further out.

[Thomas]

No, that's not how it works. Increasing the Earth's orbital velocity would push the Earth out of orbit or into an eccentric and possibly unstable orbit. Orbital velocity is the square root of GM/r . Therefore as radius increases, the velocity decreases by the inverse square. For example, Venus orbits at 35,000 m/s, Earth at just under 30,000 m/s and Mars at just over 24,000 m/s. The idea that placing an asteroid in front of the Earth would speed it up is laughable nonsense, since the mutual gravitational attraction would soon result in a collision.