Re: Surviving your star's red giant phase


James Burns wrote:

The momentum-adding asteroids are being looked into.

[...]

: 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.

I would have been amazed if nobody had thought of this before.
However, AFAICT I'm the first to suggest encounters with a swarm of
little objects rather than one big one.

Let me play this out a little. ISTM my scheme has some advantages.

1) Safety. If an object of 10^19 kg hits the Earth by accident, you
can kiss Earth goodbye -- it will vaporize most of the biosphere and
kill anything bigger than a bacterium. Other hand, if a swarm of 1 kg
rocks hits the atmosphere, you get nothing worse than a rather
spectacular meteor shower.

2) Tunability. Instead of one big orbit-altering momentum transfer
every 6,000 years, we have continuous flow. It can be sped up, slowed
down, or even thrown into reverse for a while (say, to put off an
inconvenient ice age).

3) Autonomy. The 6,000-year asteroid flybys must be set up
individually. I suppose you could put a long-lived AI in charge, but
can you trust it over millions of years? So, this requires a
civilization that maintains high technology and continuity of purpose
over millions of years.

The swarm-rocks, on the other hand, are run by simple chips executing a
handful of basic commands. Civilizations can rise and fall -- hell,
humanity can evolve into something else, or leave Earth for Somewhere
Else, or go extinct. Left to their own devices, the trillions of
little rocks will continue faithfully carrying out their mission.

Thoughts?


Doug M.

.

Relevant Pages

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