Glimpses Of The Universe

What Will We Do When Our Sun Dies?
So what are our options?

First, we must assume that we are still around 200 million years from now.
Second, we must agree that we will have to do something when the time comes.
If we assume these two things we can look at some options. This created an interesting train of thought for me. I have no idea what our technology will be like that far into the future. But it was still fun to think about. When I was considering our options for this page my final and best guess was (in perspective) a good and simple solution. I hope you agree.

Option #1
Moving of course, was the first option I came up with. By that time we will have the technology to move a whole planet. But, as I thought about this I realized by that time, we would not only be concerned with the Earth, but most likely our solar system. Mars will surely be inhabited by billions of people.The moons of Jupiter and the planet Venus will be populated too. We would most likely have extensive mining factories on Jupiter and Saturn and the outlaying gas planets as well. So, what are we looking at here? We would have to find a star much like our sun and move a majority of our solar system to that sun. The placement of the planets would have to be fairly close to what they are now to take into account gravitation and gravitational pull. When I pondered this I thought we might have that kind of technology by then, but I think the cost would be unimaginable. So it is a solution, but I kept thinking there must be a better idea.

Option #2

Moving, but without the planets. This has a few advantages, such as less cost. It also is not as mind boggling compared to moving a whole solar system at the speed of light or faster. This option has several disadvantages. We may have to ask someone permission to resettle on another solar system. Someone else could own the place we pick out to make our new home. Another problem again is in the realm of economics. If we leave our solar system behind we will also leave it's resources. So, I think this would totally change our economic structure. We could probably take a lot of things with us so we wouldn't have to start from nothing. But remember, the more we take with us the higher the cost shall be. It also creates another can of worms. Meaning, what will we decide to take with us and what will we leave behind? Who will be making those decisions?

Option #3

As you can tell I wasn't happy with the other two options. Finally it hit me. The reason why we have to move is that our sun will burn up it's hydrogen. It has about 72% burnable hydrogen left. When it burns to about 55% hydrogen left that's when we will feel the effects of the sun's increased brightness. Hydrogen is the lightest element and most abundant in the universe. Our best solution is to harvest hydrogen in vast enough quantities and place that hydrogen within the sun so it will never run out of the stuff. This will keep the sun in it's main sequence and all of our problems are solved. Of course we would have to set up the hydrogen collectors and be able to transport these to the sun and transfer the product. But this option seems to have a cleaner feel about it. The technological end of it is not that outlandish. And even within twentieth century thought this seems possible. Transporting a trillion tons of hydrogen is a lot easier than transporting a whole solar system. Economically, this seems to be the most cost-effective solution as well. It should be much cheaper to build these collectors and transport them to the sun than moving a population that fills a solar system. Remembering too, the hydrogen is free. Maybe in 100 million years we should start to consider building these hydrogen collectors and have some kind of transport mechanism large enough to release the gas into our sun.

Your comments and suggestions are always welcome...

1997,1998crown2@zdnetmail.com

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