Future of Engineering

I was reading an interesting article (quote old by our standards, 7 years, but very new by astronomical standards)...here is the excerpt:

Experts give the sun some 7 billion years, when it will turn into a bloated red giant. Earth would be first engulfed in heat and light, then vaporized.

Well before then, things will turn real nasty. In just a billion years, the Sun could be 11-percent brighter, scientists say, rendering Earth an inhospitable greenhouse. In 3.5 billion years, the Sun could be 40-percent brighter than it is today.

With our demise so clear on the cosmic horizon, astrophysicist Fred Adams of the University of Michigan and NASA's Gregory Laughlin got to wondering in recent years how the planet might be saved by gravitational interaction with a passing star. They ran computer simulations of possible encounters over the next 3.5 billion years, finding last year that the odds of the Earth being completely ejected from the solar system are one-in-100,000.

So Adams and Laughlin, along with Don Korycansky of the University of California, began to discuss consider how human intervention might bring about a more suitable long-term orbit, one that gradually expands with the aging Sun.

Interesting! Read more from the article

Labels: Astronomy, Geo-Sciences, Sciences