Re: Surviving your star's red giant phase

sigidunum@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Let's assume an alien race living on a mostly earthlike planet
around a mostly sunlike star. There's one big difference:
the star is about to leave the main sequence and become a
red giant.
[...]
Moving an inhabited planet is tricky, but over millions of
years it ought to be doable. Tens of thousands of
momentum-adding asteroid flybys?

The momentum-adding asteroids are being looked into.
See the associated thread and the references in
Message-ID: <1122234046.449574.255100@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

For example (from the abstract of
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0102126 )

: The Sun's gradual brightening will seriously compromise the
: Earth's biosphere within ~ 1E9 years. If Earth's orbit
: migrates outward, however, the biosphere could remain
: intact over the entire main-sequence lifetime of the Sun.
: [...]
: To maintain its present flux of solar energy, the Earth must
: experience roughly one encounter every 6000 years (for an
: object mass of 1E22 g). We develop the details of this
: scheme and discuss its ramifications.

Jim Burns

[Sorry if you saw my note-to-self before I deleted it.
I hit send instead of save.]
.