What is the more realistic option?

[Drakheim]

Hopefully humanity will survive throughout the ages. I like to think that we do which leads me to this question.

What is more feasible?

Developing the technology to "fix" the sun so that it gets a full tank of hydrogen so-to-speak.

--OR--

Relocating our civilization to another world somewhere?

[skrap1r0n]

both!

We are explorers and problem solvers. Sounds like a Plan A and a Plan B.

Actually its more like Group A says "We're gettiing the hell out of dodge before you blow up the sun"

and group B Is saying, "Don't let Pluto hit you on the way out"

[Drakheim]

both!

We are explorers and problem solvers. Sounds like a Plan A and a Plan B.

Actually its more like Group A says "We're gettiing the hell out of dodge before you blow up the sun"

and group B Is saying, "Don't let Pluto hit you on the way out"

ROFL

Don't forget about Group C. You know the ones that will call it cruel and unusual to upset the ecosystem of another planet with relocation or interfering with the natural order by harvesting hydrogen from a stellar nursery.

[skrap1r0n]

both!

We are explorers and problem solvers. Sounds like a Plan A and a Plan B.

Actually its more like Group A says "We're gettiing the hell out of dodge before you blow up the sun"

and group B Is saying, "Don't let Pluto hit you on the way out"

ROFL

Don't forget about Group C. You know the ones that will call it cruel and unusual to upset the ecosystem of another planet with relocation or interfering with the natural order by harvesting hydrogen from a stellar nursery.

Does Group C even Count?

Sorry it reminds me of the joke about why conservative politcal rallies have such low turn out because They all have jobs they have to be at.

(Sorry, I forget I am Now a Terran and not a conservative libertarian)

#-o Ditch the label, Ditch the label...

[eburacum45]

Definitely both.

To extend the life of our Sun you could use its own radiated energy to lift some of its mass out of the gravity well, and utilise that mass for various projects, like the construction of habitats, starships, dyson spheres, satellite stars;

this process is called Starlifting.

Also we could go to other suns; some of which will last for hundreds of billions of years; every scrap of energy and mass could be used to best effect eventually.

Such a strategy could ensure the survival into the far future of humanity (unless the Big Rip scenario is correct, in which case-)

(private Fraser) We're all doomed (/private Fraser)

[Swift]

I'd vote probably not A, probably B and C (D, E....
I'm not sure how you re-fill the sun's gas tank. Where would you get the hydrogen from, 90+% of the mass of the solar system is in the sun, so to get meaningful amounts you're going to have to go to other systems and bring it back. If you could do that, then why stay.

I think B is the more likely. Even if we never get FTL drives, you could move your civilizations with things like generational ships.

There are also other options. Even if the sun goes red giant, that will just destroy the Earth. I don't see any reason you couldn't move within the solar system, such as to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, to asteroids, or to free-floating space habitats. Heck, maybe you even move the Earth to a more distant orbit (don't ask me how, but the Puppeteers did it).

[Drakheim]

Where would you get the hydrogen from, 90+% of the mass of the solar system is in the sun, so to get meaningful amounts you're going to have to go to other systems and bring it back. If you could do that, then why stay.

Aye, you would have to go to a stellar nursery or some other area where you could harvest the vast amounts of hydrogen that you would need. As for why bother if you can do that... I would think it would remain an option for the people of then who want to keep Earth as the human home-planet instead of letting the sun fry it to a blackened cinder.

[Ut]

I hate to ask, but...
Even if one had the hydrogen to dump into the sun, how would one get it into the core? To the best of my knowledge, the surface convection currents don't go down that far.

[eburacum45]

No, no, no, you don't add hydrogen, you take it away; a lower mass star will have a longer life- you can add it again later if you want...

just keep it safe for a few billion years...

[Drakheim]

I hate to ask, but...
Even if one had the hydrogen to dump into the sun, how would one get it into the core? To the best of my knowledge, the surface convection currents don't go down that far.

Uhhh...... #-o

Well... "the end" is not for another 4.5 - 5 billion years. Thats a LONG time to figure it out.

[mike alexander]

But unmodified life probably won't survive more than another billion years on the earth's surface, given the increase in solar output. Maybe less.

Who wants to live forever anyhow? Huddling closer and closer to the glowing embers?

'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.' There comes a time for everything when it's time to turn out the light and go to bed.

[Wiley]

I voting for plan B. Looking at past human behavior, the "use up all the resources and then get the hell out of Dodge" scenerio seems the most likely.

[Brady Yoon]

Option B is much more likely. Option A? I think it's pretty much close to impossible. The sun burns millions of tons of hydrogen every second. How could we refuel such a gas guzzler... :roll: However, traveling to another star system is extremely difficult, but still feasible. If we can get a ship that travels at maybe .1c, we should be able to get to the nearest stars in a reasonable time (less than 1,000 years).
And what Drakheim said...

Well... "the end" is not for another 4.5 - 5 billion years. Thats a LONG time to figure it out.

The end is actually much nearer, according to some astronmers. They say that the Earth's atmosphere and oceans will boil away in less than a billion years. However, this is still very far away, so Drakheim has a good point.

[Andreas]

I'm not sure how you re-fill the sun's gas tank. Where would you get the hydrogen from, 90+% of the mass of the solar system is in the sun, so to get meaningful amounts you're going to have to go to other systems and bring it back.

I don't think that would be the problem. The sun runs out of fuel in the fusing core, most of the sun is still hydrogen that will never be used because it just isn't in the core.

Now all you need is a giant heat-resistant blender and hope that the planets won't be flash cooked in the process...

[Mars]

Just move Earth to a safer orbit.

[Drakheim]

Just move Earth to a safer orbit.

True, true.

But what would they do after the sun finishes its helium fusion phase and turns into a white dwarf? Granted that is still WAY hot for any object IMO, but would that be enough to warm earth.

Then you would also have to worry about the planetary nebula. Would it affect Earth or no?

[Amadeus]

Simple. Create a wormhole around the earth and transport it to another star. Actualy if wormholes are in the futures creatable this should not be too hard!

Send a ship with a FTL drive out to a suitable star have it establish a wormhole with the tail in our orbital path and hey presto intstant move. You would have to collapse it again though unless you want to go back to Sol the next year.

[Drakheim]

Simple. Create a wormhole around the earth and transport it to another star. Actualy if wormholes are in the futures creatable this should not be too hard!

Send a ship with a FTL drive out to a suitable star have it establish a wormhole with the tail in our orbital path and hey presto intstant move. You would have to collapse it again though unless you want to go back to Sol the next year.

That would be sooooooooo cool to see from Earth's viewpoint. 8)

[Hamlet]

I hate to ask, but...
Even if one had the hydrogen to dump into the sun, how would one get it into the core? To the best of my knowledge, the surface convection currents don't go down that far.

You are correct. The convective zone exists in the outer 15% of the Sun. The radiative layer exists below the convective zone and is responsible for transporting energy from the interior to the convective zone by photons generated in the fusion process.

The Sun in total doesn't run out of hydrogen, it's the core where fusion is ocurring that does. The core makes up about 10% of the Sun's mass so there is a great deal of hydrogen "left over" even after the core has exhausted its supply. As we understand it there is no known way for the hydrogen in the outer layers to migrate to the core. Once the hydrogen in the core has fused to helium the Sun will begin its evolution to the Red Giant phase.

So the big problem for our descendants would be to find a way to remove the "helium ash" from the core and inject new hydrogen from the outer layers.

Sounds like a fun project.

[Amadeus]

yeh.. not sure what to do about the moon though. Might have to leave it behind

Is anyone trying to work out how to make a wormhole?
I dont mean the ones that involve making a rod of infinate length etc..
but something practical?

Also has anyone worked out what they would look like? I remember back when I was a kid "Black holes" were the stuff of science fiction and now that we have worked out how to "see" them we are finding them.

[SeanF]

Simple. Create a wormhole around the earth and transport it to another star. Actualy if wormholes are in the futures creatable this should not be too hard!

They did that in one of the Star Trek: The Next Generation novels: A Fury Scorned, by Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski.

(Not to the Earth, mind you - it was another planet around another star. If I recall correctly, the destination star was about 15 light-years away)

[eburacum45]

Although we use wormholes in our particular science fiction universe, I personally doubt they will ever be useful unless for telecommunications, as they are unlikely to be big enough to allow particles bigger than a photon in real life.

Still that is enough to transfer an entire civilisation byte by byte to another star.

Oh and here is a link to our entry on Star lifting; you don't need to add hydrogen, just make sure the hydrogen that is there is used efficiently.

[HoffaXVIII]

Even if we never get FTL drives, you could move your civilizations with things like generational ships.

Is there any feasibility to the concept of stasis?

[eburacum45]

More feasibility in the concept of biostasis, as described by Eric Drexler, than in the concept of moving gigantic generation ships around;

http://www.orionsarm.com/tech/nanostasis.html

if you do the maths, you find that you could send a thousand or ships full of neatly stacked humans in stasis with the fuel required to send one single generation ship at a much slower speed.

[skrap1r0n]

what we need to do is build a bunch of "Death Star" type colonies. and send them out in different directions.

Each should be capable of carrying say 50,000 people and a full compliment of livestock. I think we could probably make these things self sustaining. Sort of like a Dyson Sphere, only instead of a sun at the core, we could have a reactor at the core surrounded by various types of filters so it wouldn't be too toxic.

[iFire]

Still that is enough to transfer an entire civilisation byte by byte to another star.

God help us if someone decides to use a dial-up modem...

[Kaptain K]

My personal feeling is that this question is so moot as to define the term moot. H. sapiens is less than 0.001 billion years old. Mammals have been around for less than 0.1 billion years. Multi-cellular life is on the order of one billion years old. One billion years is so far in the future that speculation is useless. One thousand years ago horse drawn wagons were the height of technology. One hundred years ago telephones and automobiles were new-fangled gadgets and airplanes were so new that it was actually airplane. Fifty years ago, the number of computers in the world could be counted on one hand.

[Swift]

Very true Kaptain, but its also fun to wildly speculate.

Your point about time reminds me of something. We've probably all seen the logarithmic/factor-of-ten distance books/videos/etc. where they go from sub-atomic to the intergalatic distance by factors of ten. I think a similar neat demo would be to do it for time:

- 1 year ago - do I need to remind you?
- 10 years ago (1994) - middle of Clinton's first term, new baseball stadium in Cleveland, etc.
- 100 years ago (1904) - Wright brother's flight, early autos, etc.
- 1000 years ago (1004) - pre-Renaisance
- 10,000 years ago - agriculture, first towns, last ice-age ending, domesticating animals
- 100,000 years ago - Homo sapiens spreading around world
- 1,000,000 years ago - Homo erectus?
- 10,000,000 years ago - early primates, age of mammals
- 100,000,000 years ago - dinosaurs rule the Earth
- 1,000,000,000 years ago - single-celled life
- 10,000,000,000 years ago - solar system not formed yet, formation of Milky Way galaxy (?)
- 100,000,000,000 - pre-Universe

I'm sure I got some things wrong, but you get the idea.

[HoffaXVIII]

My personal feeling is that this question is so moot as to define the term moot. H. sapiens is less than 0.001 billion years old. Mammals have been around for less than 0.1 billion years. Multi-cellular life is on the order of one billion years old. One billion years is so far in the future that speculation is useless. One thousand years ago horse drawn wagons were the height of technology. One hundred years ago telephones and automobiles were new-fangled gadgets and airplanes were so new that it was actually airplane. Fifty years ago, the number of computers in the world could be counted on one hand.

I agree with you. Of course in less time than that, we will evolve into a species that is quite different from the way we are now (barring any catastrophies that would wipe out the human race), so in fact, by that time our species wouldn't exist anyway, per se. But the question is still interesting: what options presently would be open to us if for some reason we needed to leave our solar system, and theoretically, what options would our evolved descendants have open to them for changing "solar zip codes" (barring if we already had left the solar system)?

[Charlie in Dayton]

ROAD TRIP!!!

James Blish's "Cities In Flight"