> From that point on, there won’t be any more liquid water on Earth
Not so fast - we can build a parasol and place it a bit closer to the Sun than the Earth/Sun L1 point so it'd act as a solar sail to keep itself in place. This can buy us a lot of time.
Moving to Saturn's moons is also an option for a while - the'll be warm and cozy for a couple billion years after the Earth is toast.
If we don't learn how to do things like this (and to travel to other stars and settle Earth-like planets) in these billion of years, well, then we deserve that fate.
Assuming we could stabilize the Earth's climate as it is now, and discarding any questions of resources, I wonder if humanity could remain as-is for a billion years? We'd still be under (non-natural) evolutionary pressure, unless we learned enough to stop that happening too.
If we did become a stable species that decided to stick around the Solar system, maybe we'd be powerful enough to move Earth slowly outwards as Sol expanded? Maybe with the gravitational effects of millions of planetoid flybys.
Makes me wonder if we could do the same with stars, lol! Become a shepherd of our local galactic area, carefully keeping stars away from our precious birthplace over timescales of trillions of years...
I mean, large engineering projects for the greater good of humanity don't really seem like our thing as a species, but the answers to most of your questions are yes in theory. If you can surround a star with a Dyson Sphere/Swarm, you can do all kinds of things to it including concentrating all its energy into a beam to destroy a planet like the Earth in seconds (though you can't blow it apart like in Star Wars that easily).
There's a youtube channel dedicated to this kind of stuff called "Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur".
Not only on "survival of the fittest"; evolution also supposes that species change more-or-less randomly.
TBH, I'm not sure what your point is; my point was that whatever evolution is based on, evolution happens, and on these timescales it happens in the blink of an eye.
No, individual mutations are random. Selection of the mutations in the gene pool happens through environmental constraints. Species don't change randomly, they change in an infinite optimization search for fitness. We humans aren't immune to this just because we have culture and medicine of course.
Frankly, there are no evolution pressure on humans right now. The only "Evolutionary" pressure today is the willingness to procreate, which is generally low across much of the developed world.
This "pressure" is completely different from evolutionary pressure for virtually every other single species on Earth.
In fact for humans the evolutionary pressure has reversed. We're able to save many people who are too "unfit" to have survived without modern medicine and industrial technology.
Said another way, the fitness criteria for survival has shifted. A reversal implies there’s a single linear direction for evolution when we know there definitely isn’t. That’s why there’s a mix of heights, body builds, intelligences, soft skills like charisma, skin colors, etc etc. In fact, ops claim that we could somehow stop evolutionary pressure is itself bonkers. At that point the evolutionary pressure might become for the traits that enable you to maintain some definition of stasis. Above all else, human culture is never static so there’s always a bias for internal evolutionary pressure even if we manage to control external factors (which even then we’re not able to beyond some point).
Anyone who makes a statement like that, basically by definition is not thinking in evolutionary timescales. There are always evolutionary pressures, and they are nearly never visible at the kinds of timescales biological individuals operate at.
There was a book published in the early 70's, called "Musrum", by Thacker and Bradshaw. It inspired in me the idea that Fungus spores are maybe the most-likely way for life to travel star-to-star.
That's not what's best about that book, BTW; it's a magical book. I'd love to see a copy.
I would be astounded if "humanity" exists a million years from now. I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't exist a thousand years from now. The thing is we are a technological species, we don't need to rely on random chance for evolution. We can already create DNA on demand and insert it into microorganisms. AFIAK we currently only do this with already-known proteins, but that is a limit of knowing what will be useful, not a limit of the technique.
As time goes on it seems inconceivable that we will not reach the point we can apply this to human DNA at conception. I expect the first manifestations will be editing out known-bad genes and replacing them with the properly-working equivalents. Next will come replacing ordinary genes with known-superior genes. Then they'll be inventing new superior genes.
I expect in almost all cases they'll make the edits backwards-compatible but we've all seen it with software--backwards compatibility only works over a range of generations. Don't expect v20 to play nice with v2. Once the mods reach the point that reproduction with a stock human is no longer possible we have a speciation event--the results can no longer be considered human even if they would not raise an eyebrow if dropped into today's society.
As for long-term protection of our solar system--I can't imagine why. It would be a lot easier to protect the Earth by moving it rather than moving anything that might threaten it.
The thing is, they only need to do it once in all those billions of years, and they become a totally different species. And that's assuming they'll still be fond of organic bodies and not decide to live in simulated environments that are much easier to move than planets.
Inventing a superior gene doesn't itself make them a new species. They only become a new species when the result can't breed with a base human.
However, even that gets fuzzy--there's a "species" of bird whose name escapes me that lives in high latitudes. They can all breed with the neighbors, but birds from the two ends of the span can't breed with each other. I expect to see the same thing happen with humanity--eventually highly modded individuals won't be able to breed with unmodded individuals. (Although, unless immortality is developed there won't be any unmodded individuals to breed with. Why would the genetic engineers care about compatibility with the old version that's no longer around?)
We have removed most of natural selection from our evolution. It's entirely possible we could evolve to be H. G. Well's Eloi, served by mechanized Morlocks, or just that we extinguish ourselves after a couple centuries of Idiocracy.
> We have removed most of natural selection from our evolution.
Ho-ho! So nobody died from COVID-19, because we have defeated disease?
There's a new outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. QE2 just died of "old age". New variants of COVID-19 Omicron are circulating in EU, and killing people vaccinated against the old variants. I've been reading of new polio outbreaks. But it's great that we've defeated natural selection; clearly the Brave New World has arrived.
We'll eventually grow resistance to COVID or Ebola provided enough exposure, the same way we developed resistance against the flu (that, for instance, South American indigenous populations didn't when the Spanish first arrived), as we'll weed out those with propensity not to vaccinate their kids, because their kids may not be able to reproduce.
But you won't die because you are not strong enough to hunt a mammoth.
I think the more urgent question is 50 years from now when we might have general AIs that are smarter and faster than us. Maybe they'll figure something out for us. From there to the end of the solar system and eventually the universe will be quite a bit of a journey that may or may not feature some of the more wacky stuff that Ian Banks and other authors have already imagined. Given how we struggle to foresee even the very near future, I'd say all bets are off that far out.
I saw a paper just a few years ago about how to shift the Earth to a higher orbit to mitigate solar brightening/expansion. It involved a large asteroid in a careful orbit that could gradually pull the whole Earth to a higher orbit.
Probably couldn't do it tomorrow, but sounded like something we might be able to do in a few hundred years instead of tens of thousands.
While interesting and putting perspectives into place I’m having a really hard time following how there can be a black hole merger area (let alone the black hole era) having the model of redshift engrained in my brain.
Serious question: wouldn’t all mass that had time to gravitate towards and convene into galaxies, stars and black holes been drifting too far apart by then to be even remotely close for their gravities overcome these - then - unimaginable distances?
Any group of galaxies that is gravitationally bound will end up in effect putting the black holes into orbit about each other. The orbits will be across incredible distances and move very slowly, but it will happen. Orbital energy over time gets converted to gravitational waves and thus they spiral inwards. (All orbits actually spiral inwards, it's just the effect is so tiny that in all but extreme cases you won't notice it within the current age of the universe.)
Galaxies which are not gravitationally bound won't encounter each other, so it doesn't end up merging the whole universe into a single black hole.
The clouds of Venus reflect most of the sunlight hitting the planet. The 1% that reaches the surface is still enough to keep that surface hot enough to melt lead.
ice only appears at the poles and mountainous regions. the poles are negligable for albedo becuase so little solar radiation reaches them. And the glaciers as a percentage of global area are negligable (glaciers are a minor % of land, and land is only 25% of global area. Clouds cover the oceans).
Someone else in this thread thought differently saying : "It's gotten brighter over even just the last 20 million years. The ice caps helped reflect nearly .39 of it, but soot and melting are lowering that. It's called albedo and that loss will dwarf the CO2 Heat trapping."
Similarly I found that in the geologically recent past, the ice–albedo positive feedback has played a major role in the advances and retreats of the Pleistocene (~2.6 Ma to ~10 ka ago) ice sheets and that the ice at the arctic is in fact not that negligible given the loss of it in relation to the much higher warming at the poles.
Over a timescale of 20 million years there'll be Ice Ages when a significant portion of the planet is covered in ice, so I can see how that will affect albedo then.
As I understand it, the extent of cloud cover affecting the planet's albedo (and whether that offsets the warming from the greenhouse effect from water vapour) is still an open question in meteorology.
I'm absolutely not an expert on any of this - I was genuinely asking the question out of interest.
We’re doomed if we don’t spread out. Staying on earth guarantees destruction by asteroid, super volcano, coronal mass ejection, war, disease, ecological collapse, etc. Settling the solar system is a bit better but still subject to rogue brown dwarfs or black holes, gamma ray bursts, variability of Sol its eventual death. Even settling our local group of stars could end badly with a big enough super nova. Every year we delay expanding into the universe is another light year of distance we may never get back.
Yup. We're doomed, because we're an evolving species. In a few hundred thousand years we'll be very different - perhaps our overweight brains will have shrunk, and we'll no longer be curious about silly things like the orgin or final fate of the Universe.
"Spreading out" is more likely to happen to fungus and bacteria spores, than bipedal mammals.
Not really. The Eloi seem to be like wealthy students - young, good teeth, straight blonde hair, nice duds, no job they have to do. There doesn't appear to be any significant evolution that could have affected them since the present. Only the Morlocks appear to have changed; there are no contemporary humans that are remotely like Morlocks.
Dammit, this is scifi from 100 years ago; it doesn't throw any light on the future of humanity. I'm going to butt out, because I think this is OT.
science fiction from 100 years ago,
based on the author's observations of the switch from agrarian to urban/mechanized life (i.e. the start of the the epigenetic shift I referred to)
matches biological realities revealed over the last few decades (thank you E O Wilson)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson
doesn't throw any light? Perhaps, thought of course that would depend on what spectrum of light one was sensitive to.
I, for one, have a hard time seeing ultraviolet. Unlike my friends the bees.
> Yup. We're doomed, because we're an evolving species. In a few hundred thousand years we'll be very different - perhaps our overweight brains will have shrunk, and we'll no longer be curious about silly things like the origin or final fate of the Universe.
You might enjoy Vonnegut's Galapagos, if you've not read it. It's a quick and easy read like most of his books.
Yes, I read it. There's a twist in the tail that nobody should spoil.
I haven't yet encountered anything by Vonnegut that I didn't enjoy reading. I want to re-read Breakfast of Champions. My first encounter was Slaughterhouse 5, followed closely by Cat's Cradle.
I disagree. The Earth will end, but not in the timelines they provide. In a million years it is unlikely we won't have the technology to hold the sun back from expansion. All we need are orbiting superconducting supermagnets to hold back the sun, tame volcanos, hold back cosmic radiation, etc. Asteroids would be nothing but mining prospects to humans in 1 000 000 AD.
You're not telling me anything I don't already know. The strongest weapons we have /right now/ have no implications for what we will have in the future. A million years is a lot of time. Long live the Earth! We cannot conceive of how we will contain the suns expansion, just like cavemen could not conceive any of our technological advancements mundane to us.
One would think in a million years if we have that sort of technology, we would no longer be dependent on Earth for humans survival. Whether we would colonize other planets and make them habitable through terraform or build our own planets at that point.
One could imagine an "Earth 2.0" that we can move around the solar system, positioning it perfectly for the right weather.
When you can tune the fusion of the sun using advanced particle physics and as of yet undiscovered branches of science, you don't need to move planets.
That would probably destroy the solar system. Without the moon, the earth would just exit the solar system. Increasing the mass of earth by mining too much asteroids would cause the earth to fall into the sun. It’s a quite delicate balance.
Excuse me, what? Maybe if you somehow added enough energy to immediately jettison the moon from Earth’s orbit or steered every asteroid in the solar system into the surface of the Earth. This is just nonsense otherwise. Any future mega projects can easily account for orbital mechanics, it’s just physics not magic.
The mass of the moon is “not that much” on a solar scale. The comment was about adding another planet and moving it around the solar system to “adjust the thermostat.” We can’t even get a rocket off the ground without blowing it up sometimes… I have little faith that we can move a whole freakin planet around without killing everyone.
The key challenge is getting to 1000000AD intact as a civilization. For that to happen we need to get our collective asses to Mars in the next 50 years and then continue to develop space habitats and colonies on other bodies at a steady clip from there on out. If we stay put something will get us whether it’s nuclear war or just plain apathy.
If you define "we" as "homo sapiens", or even "biological creatures evolved (and therefore specialized) for survival on earth" then you are almost certainly correct. And such a "we" is almost certainly doomed even if "we" do spread out because a "we" defined as organisms specialized for survival on earth cannot survive anywhere except some place that is very similar to earth. This is true by definition. This does not necessarily mean that "we" have to find other earths. "We" can engineer earth-like environments. But that is a lot of work.
You can make the problem a lot easier simply by redefining what you mean by "we". If by "we" you mean "systems that think in a manner akin to what we (humans) do" that dramatically expands the scope of possible solutions. Being biological is (almost certainly) not a pre-requisite to thinking. By redefining "we" in this way we open the door to solving the problem by sending robots or even just raw information out into the universe. That is still a significant challenge of course, but it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to keep bags of water and meat alive (to say nothing of mentally competent) in interstellar space.
I’m always amazed when people seem to miss the obvious answer. Robots won’t get us there. Digitizing consciousness won’t either. We already have perfectly good nanotechnology capable of adapting to any environment. It’s staring us in the face, literally when you look in a mirror. DNA and proteins are how you do nanotechnology right. Add to that a guiding consciousness so we don’t have to wait millions of years for the slow search algorithm of evolution to find the answer and there’s nothing we can’t do. Our biggest task is reverse engineering the machine and learning to control it but given the tools we have now I believe we can master it within this century.
Interstellar distances at sub light speed are no obstacle if you have complete control over your biology/lifespan/metabolism. Just bring a big enough pile of enriched uranium, water and biomass and you’re good to go for hundreds of years.
Yes we do still need mechanical and electrical machines where they are more efficient but biology can provide for the lion’s share of our needs once it is under our control.
We're all going to be gone at some point regardless. We shouldn't make the effort to spread out if it's going to make the average person's life worse over the course of humanity's existence.
The continued existence of humanity and life in general is a good in itself. Besides that, why would you think that space exploration and colonization would reduce living standards?
The continued existence of humanity is only a good to the degree that it brings good. The continued existence of a species of psychic vampires that draw sustenance from causing pain to other conscious beings would very much not be a good in itself, and with habit and environment destruction and worker subjugation/disenfranchisement our species causes in the name of unfettered capitalism we're not so far off from that.
Big goals take sacrifice and hard work. Any cosmic human diaspora would require sacrificing earthly abundance and leisure, and the colonists wouldn't be having a good time either, so the main beneficiaries would be the billionaires and politicians that could wave their dicks around about how they're responsible for sending man to the stars.
Plenty of people choose sacrifice, hard work and discomfort because they find more fulfillment in it than idle leisure. Those who wish to remain behind can stay put, just don’t stand in the way.
Except that moonshots on the level of stellar diaspora require that sort of sacrifice from an entire society. If the 5% of the population that actually gave a shit about the idea of humans in the stars could do it by themselves I'd say go for it, but if it's going to happen they'll have to con people who will get nothing out of it into going along, which is obviously problematic.
It may only be 5% of people that care about space exploration by itself but a lot more will care if we’re lucky enough to only get a house sized impactor as a warning shot. At that size there’s a hope that there would only be severe property damage and no loss of life.
Chelyabinsk should have been that wake up call but most people don’t think about it deeply enough to realize how much worse it can be.
If we’re unlucky then the first big impact we experience will be our last.
Of course we’re doomed, on a long enough timeline our only fate is extinction. The only question is how long it will take to reach that point, it’s not a matter of “if”.
This is new for me, I have never thought about the fusion in the sun and that its energy emission is actually increasing. Makes total sense but never thought of it. However since we know this is going to happen, over the next billion years, can we not build some kind of “cover” in space away from the earth’s atmosphere to block or deflect this extra energy from entering the atmosphere? I somehow believe humans will be capable of that in that time.
It's gotten brighter over even just the last 20 million years. The ice caps helped reflect nearly .39 of it, but soot and melting are lowering that. It's called albedo and that loss will dwarf the CO2 Heat trapping.
> I somehow believe humans will be capable of that in that time.
Why? Because we've done stuff before? We live past the times of flying cars and meals in pill form. We are 40 years from the Jetsons, three years past the original Blade Runner, etc.
This is just handwaving away all of the hard parts of the solution and saying that otherwise, it would be simple. Yes, yes it would. It would definitely be easy if it weren't hard.
There's also the logistical practicality of what is being proposed. We don't have flying cars for many reason, one of them being that any benefits they may have is outweighed by all of the very real logistical issues they have.
I find this level of "techno-optimism" just flat out naive. It's a bet you never have to worry about being called. On the time scale of thousands of years, neither you nor I will be alive to find out who was right, but you are willing to say with unwavering faith that we will be able to do it.
Simply because you believe smarter people than you will be able to solve the hard problems. Including problems we don't even know exist yet. Just to get to the moon, we had to first discover just how ill-equipped the human body is for travel outside of our atmosphere.
But you talk as if building a giant shade in space is going to be relatively trivial in the future. There is nothing trivial about leaving the Earth. And it's quite possible that it will never be trivial. Before we worry about solar shades, we should wonder how we're first going to solve those hard problems.
The evidence is all around you. We are talking about 100s of millions of years. You seem to be way too fixated on flying cars for some reason. Look at the progress in just the last 100 years, it's astounding. I am more than comfortable to extrapolate from there. Also, it's not like we haven't done space travel, unlike flying cars, we are able to go to Mars too. Entering and living in space outside the earth's atmosphere is something we do on a continuous basis. I understand the problem is hard, but given the timescales involved I am more than happy to be optimistic about the human race. If anything I find your take incredibly shortsighted. It's ok we can differ in our outlooks.
I'm not fixated on flying cars. I brought it up initially, along with meals in pill form, and shows set in the future that have either already passed or will pass soon, to show how shit we are at predicting the progress of progress.
You then said we haven't done flying cars yet. You singled it out and made it the point of your response to me.
So I was supposed to not respond? Because there are good reasons to not have flying cars. And I mentioned that. But most of all of my posts have been about things other than flying cars.
We may feel comfortable to extrapolate on timescales humans haven't even existed on yet, that doesn't make that extrapolation good. You want to look at just the last 100 years and extrapolate from that. First by assuming that the last 100 years is geometric progress and not linear. But even given that it is geometric, where's the evidence that it will continue being geometric. Look at the last 50 years. We haven't done much more. We went to the Moon in 1969. We've thrown some robots at Mars since then. It's possible that progress isn't a vertical asymptote, but a sigmoid with a hard upper boundary. We don't know.
And we can't get to Mars. As in actual people. It will take a person 9 months to make it to Mars, assuming all of the other problems are solved. Because there are other problems. We are not built for space travel. The radiation and lack of gravity are real problems with no good solutions at the moment. We haven't been to space (depending on your definition of space) since the Moon missions. Everything we do now is technically in the atmosphere and protected by the Earth's magnetosphere. Yes, the ISS is above the Karman line, but it's still within the thermosphere. And I'm not completely sure about the Apollo missions, but the Moon spends some time within our magnetosphere as well, so they may have done those missions during the time when the Moon was under Earth's protection.
And that magnetosphere is important. Like all life on the planet would die without it important.
So, living outside the Earth's atmosphere is not something we do. Ever.
I find this extreme long term techno futurist optimistic thinking worse than useless. This is navel gazing at its most extreme. It either wants us to ignore the problems of today or ignore very real limitations imposed on us by various aspects of reality. Thinking ahead is fine. But techno-optimism forecasting out millenia is not thinking ahead. It's wishing.
I agree. 1 billion years is a lot of research and development time. It only took us a few hundred years to go from agricultural society to spacefaring. 10 million X that amount of progress and we can either fix the sun, move the earth, or repopulate on other stars. This will be a non-issue.
> It only took us a few hundred years to go from agricultural society to spacefaring.
Arguably, since less than 600 individuals have made it to LEO with 2 dozen going around the Moon, this doesn't translate to "spacefaring society." If only 600 people had cars among 8B, we wouldn't describe this as an automotive society. When thousands are regularly traveling outside the Earth-Moon system, then we will be spacefaring. Troubles are lowering the expense and having the practical incentive beyond discovery.
Well, replace with borderline spacefaring if you prefer. On the timeframes people are throwing around here, neither the "borderline" nor our previous false start, or not even a few more false starts in our future make any difference.
It's still incredibly optimistic. It may very well remain the domain of only a precious few career experts for quite some time, if not indefinitely, unless space begins to generate absurd revenue unavailable on Earth. There are valid and practical reasons for LEO. Beyond that, the Moon, Mars, Asteroid Belt, moons of Jupiter, etc., I don't see any advantage other than discovery and the benefit of working out how to do something (but not how to do something cheaply). Somehow ferrying back a massive asteroid made of pure gold matching the amount already on Earth would likely not even be profitable.
I suppose that climbing Everest never had any practical purpose, and an economy has developed around it. But still, cost per person is a fraction of $1M to do so. It costs an average of $58M/person to get to orbit and back safely for a short trip, and that is just LEO for a few days or maybe a couple weeks. Economies of scale may never materialize for space travel. Even if we do legitimately become spacefaring and stretch out into the Solar System for some reason, high costs and accidents may, like nuclear energy, cause it to scale back and diminish to its current state of roughly 50 people per year to LEO.
Without the incentive of profit, which I doubt tourism could sustain by itself, I don't see how spacefaring ever gets off the ground. Maybe mushrooms found on Europa become an insanely expensive delicacy, or similar. But it seems astronomically unlikely. If the profit incentive can be found, then it could not be stopped, but it really needs to do more than pay for itself, and at a current pace of sinking $20B/yr into it without a return, ever, who knows if it will ever even break even?
Well, with the timeframes here, there exist only two options: "never" and "very soon".
So, yeah, if you want to argue for "never", it's valid. It's just talking about delays that isn't.
(But somehow the "no large enough group - and it means 100 or 200 people - will ever want this" argument doesn't look reasonable either. We are talking about an empty ecological niche and a timeframe large enough for biologic kingdoms to appear.)
> But somehow the "no large enough group - and it means 100 or 200 people - will ever want this" argument
idk who argued that, but it wasn't me. My argument is economic. I didn't make it but would make further argument(s) basically that 1) it's insanely dangerous, and 2) there's nothing out there, which together is really the same risk vs reward argument that is notably top heavy with a wide spread.
> An economic argument is exactly the same as saying the people don't want it badly enough.
This is false equivalence. Assume everyone wanted it to the maximum possible level of desire, and it is still possible that desire will be unfulfilled due to economics, namely, expense. You can't say of a home that a someone can not afford means they did not want it badly enough. No matter how badly they want it, it is not possible for them to get it if it is beyond their means. Humanity may not be able to afford human-attended space exploration beyond LEO and, vanishingly rarely, the Moon simply due to expense no matter what the level of desire is.
Considering basically all of modern technology has been invented in the last 150 years, and just how far we have come in that time, i think it’s relatively safe to assume that in 100x that time (say 15000 years in the future) we will have either destroyed ourselves, colonized other portions of the solar system, or significantly terraformed earth and/or built megastructures in space in such a way as to be able to better control the environment.
We could also remove, a process called star lifting, part of the sun's matter to decrease its burning rate, retain its current output, and consequently increase its main sequence lifetime. Depending on the amount of material removed, we could even alter its destiny from becoming a red giant to becoming a white dwarf.
I actually don't care what happens in a thousand years and beyond that. I'm fine with humanity going extinct. This obsession with getting to Mars for the sake of surviving the collapse on our planet is beyond me. I find those ambitions rather cheesy.
But humans thousands of years ago made decisions that make our lives today possible. Aren’t you glad that you had the chance to exist and enjoy your own life?
I highly recommend Ian McCaskill‘s recent book “ what we owe the future.” He makes a compelling rational argument that it makes no less sense to discount future generations than it does to discount physically distant people who are suffering today.
> in your nihilistic worldview where humanity going extinct is no big deal, what drives you to do your every day things?
Having a nihilistic worldview doesn't mean that a person doesn't have the same drives, emotions, desires, etc. as other people. It's not a contradiction to both enjoy being happy and be a nihilist.
> If [something impossible], would you ...?
The answer to questions like this is always "maybe." If the impossible is possible, who knows what other considerations there are?
That cookie wall uses a font too small to read without zooming. Anyone pressing the 'go away' button on such screens can probably not be considered to have freely given consent and their data should be... Ah, who am I kidding.
Not so fast - we can build a parasol and place it a bit closer to the Sun than the Earth/Sun L1 point so it'd act as a solar sail to keep itself in place. This can buy us a lot of time.
Moving to Saturn's moons is also an option for a while - the'll be warm and cozy for a couple billion years after the Earth is toast.
If we don't learn how to do things like this (and to travel to other stars and settle Earth-like planets) in these billion of years, well, then we deserve that fate.
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