Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Perhaps Earth can survive it...

Maybe not
Adam — (archived)

Hi Raoul

Whether humans will survive is debatable. After all that time our DNA will have diverged by pure chance, if not by design. Life on Earth is less than 4 billion years old and look at its diversity. Survival would only be by deliberate and persistent archiving and/or ultra-relativistic flight to the extremes of space-time.

But life of some sort may guide the Earth away from the Sun by careful pumping of the orbit by fly-bys of some suitable mass. Life may also seek to stir up the guts of the Sun so it can burn the 90% of unburnt hydrogen that remains at the end of the natural Main Sequence. A tiny fraction gets burnt in the Main Sequence proper - the rest is either lost during the Red Giant and Asymptotic Giant stages, or burnt in the hydrogen-burning shell that develops and powers those stages.

At its current rate of energy production the hydrogen, when fused, can supply 74 billion years of energy. Burning the remnant helium supplies about 30% of that, or about 22 billion years extra. Quite a bit of energy in the Giant Stages will come from the core collapsing to white dwarf size, so we could do that too and add 2 billion years.

Adam

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