Surviving the Suns death The sun is around 4.

5 billion years old and its getting older just like you and I. In just over a billion years, the sun is going to expand so much that heat will begin to melt the earths surface. Can we save ourselves? None of us will be here, but at the billion year mark, the sun will have used up the hydrogen fuel in its core, forcing it to burn at its surface. The increased radiation will boil away all of the water on earth creating an international desert. Flash forward about 5 billion years and the swelling sun will literally begin melting mountains and if not all life on earth now extinct. Around 7.5 billion years, the expanding; now a red giant will engulf the earth entirely. We can avoid this by using Gravity Assist. Its a technique weve been using for years but only for launching space crafts throughout our solar system. Anytime a spacecraft or a satellite comes into close proximity with a planet, gravity grabs hold. And if the space craft arrives at the perfect angle, its able to use some of the planets velocity to catapult it further into space. This extra energy comes from the planets own energy of motion around the sun. As Newton famously said, To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So as the spacecraft uses the earths gravity to speed up and move towards earth, the planet will ever so slightly slow down and move towards the space craft. Of course, the space crafts mass is so small comparatively, that it gets launched incredibly while the planet experiences little change. But if we were to increase the space crafts size or use a large asteroid, we could potentially move the earths orbit away from the sun. This would take a million years and involve large objects coming just close enough and not collide with earth but we do have a billion head start. This idea seems farfetched but its already happening, on October 9 2013, earth will be using gravity assist to assist and space craft called Juno which is on its way to Jupiter. As Juno flies within 559 kilometres of us, it will use earths gravity as a slingshot to boost its velocity by 7.3 km/s. Meanwhile earth will only have moved a fraction, and it will arrive at Jupiter in 2016. In order to move the earth within our billion year time line. We would need approximately one encounter every 6000 years using an object with a mass of around 10^19kg, somewhere around the size of 100km wide

asteroid. In between passes, the asteroid would slingshot around the sun fly out to Jupiter and be gravity assisted back to earth. Its like one long version of catch between the two. Over millions of years, this move the earth to a comfortable 225 million kilometre orbit out from the sun. It is feasible with todays technology, there are consequences. We may lose the moon, which will cause crazy weather patterns. Not to mention the earths spin may increase, which will shorten our days. The surrounding planets like Mars may have their own orbits destabilized, and also the asteroid could just hit earth by accident. But in conclusion, these are the risks we need to take to give our descendants, the planet and all life on it a few extra billion years.