What if we moved Earth? Solar oven
Ready yourselves. Steady yourselves. In 5 billion years, give or take, the Sun will run out of fuel, expand, and engulf Earth. I’m not talking about hot-summer-hot, I’m talking about barbecued-planet-hot. All life will be eliminated and Earth will be scoured clean without even plant fauna or bacteria making it out alive. That sounds a bit grim, doesn’t it? I feel you. We do have 5 billion years until then, of course, so our descendants (who have evolved to have giant heads and are 300cm tall) have plenty of time to prepare, though there is a chance we’ll be extinct by then if we’re not careful. But how about relocating Earth?
85%
Remember escape velocity? That’s the speed at which you must travel to escape the gravity of Earth. If you recall, all mass has gravity and exerts a pull on other objects. Your head is attracting dust particles. Earth attracts air molecules to maintain our atmosphere. A rocket must travel 11.186 km/s to get off this gorgeous rock. If we take the most powerful rocket we’ve sent into space so far, Space X’s Falcon Heavy, you’d need about 300 billion billion (really - billion billion) rockets to move Earth through space to a different orbit. To make 300 billion billion rockets, we’d need to use 85% of EARTH to do so. We’d only have 15% left. Thus, it’s a bit difficult, so let’s just invent something far, far more effective. Let’s call them Unicorn Rockets. We’ll attach them to Earth and power ourselves away.
Where to, Space Captain?
Let’s be logical. The Sun will expand relentlessly and there isn’t much we can do. Feeding it fuel would be counterproductive, so we need to find another sun in another solar system. We know how the Goldilocks Zone concept works (close enough to have liquid water, but not far enough for it all to freeze), so we could, feasibly, jet off into space to find a younger star or simply a different star. Our great friend Betelguese isn’t so far away, if we can just make Earth travel at lightspeed to get there, though it is absolutely huge and older - oh no! It’s so large that if we put it in our solar system, it would swallow everything up to Jupiter’s asteroid belt. We could find the Goldilocks Zone further away and …BREAKING NEWS…Betelguese is probably going to explode within 100,000 years, so we can’t go there. What a terrible idea! Whose idea was that?
A new Sun called Earth
You know, moving Earth is brilliant and all, but perhaps we need to think about this differently. Possibly, we need to think of Earth constantly moving. An electrically-powered lamp can generate light for plants to grow without a sun’s rays, so why can’t we turn Earth into a planet that doesn’t need a star to survive. Our Earth could turn into a perpetually floating, star-faring globe. We can insulate it to protect it from the brutally cold temperature of deep space. We can find a way to hold onto our atmosphere (a giant bubble? Eh? Eh? eh?). There is nothing we can’t do as long as we can dream it up. Well, more accurately, I can dream it up and then you can actually DO it! You see, one day, the lights in the universe will go out. Every star will be extinguished. The fuel will be used up. No stars will shine and no moons will reflect their light. Imagine if Earth remains, alone, hurtling through space with squirrels, toads, cows, spiders, and all manner of lovely creatures. An arc of life!