The star that gave our planet life will one day take it away. Scientists have long agreed that the expansion and eventual death of the Sun will destroy Earth’s habitability, but one researcher believes he’s figured out a way for humanity to avoid this fate. In a study set to appear in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, independent researcher Gabriel Harry outlines a plan that he claims could help us outlive the Sun. In fact, he presents megaengineering concepts designed to safeguard against a whole suite of long-term threats to Earth’s habitability: solar luminosity, solar engulfment, the end of tectonics, water loss, changes in the planet’s tilt and spin, object collision, and dangers from beyond our solar system. The findings are currently available on the preprint server arXiv. “Left unchecked, the Earth’s current habitability will end in one billion years,” Harry writes in the paper. “Implementing and maintaining the set of safeguards would allow the Earth to remain habitable for 9.1 million billion years.”
Step 1: Blot out the Sun As Harry describes in an accompanying article for Phys.org, the Sun will begin to run out of fuel and expand about 1 billion years from now, rendering Earth uninhabitable. As the star engulfs our planet, global temperatures will skyrocket, oceans will boil off, and the atmosphere will burn away.
