Can Earth survive the death of Sun? Researcher proposes wild plan to live for 9 quadrillion years

Scientists have long projected that billions of years from now, our Sun will start expanding as it reaches the end stages of its life. It will become a Red Giant, swallow Mercury and Venus, and likely Earth and Mars as well, while affecting the environments and orbits of Jupiter and the later gas giants. But one researcher thinks that we can save ourselves from this fate. A soon-to-be-published study argues that it is possible to dodge the bullet when the Sun is no longer alive.

Independent researcher Gabriel Harry provides a solution to living for up to 9 quadrillion years even when the Sun runs out of fuel in about a billion years, and finally shrivels into a glowing ring of gas in 5 billion years. The study, set to appear in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, states megaengineering can protect Earth from not only the Sun, but also tectonics and water loss, changes in the planet’s tilt and spin, collision, and any other dangers from beyond our solar system.

A sunshield in Moon's orbit

In its current state, Earth will become uninhabitable in about one billion years, Harry states. "Implementing and maintaining the set of safeguards would allow the Earth to remain habitable for 9.1 million billion years," he adds. As the Sun starts expanding, Earth will need some kind of shield to protect itself from solar radiation. He proposes that a 700,000-kilometre-wide sunshade placed just outside the Moon’s orbit can save Earth.

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To keep it in position, a carbon cable can be used, which is attached to a weight placed at Lagrange Point 1 (L1). It will be made of aluminium that can be mined from the Moon, and will cover a 70-degree area of the sky. The 2-million-km carbon tether could be made by mining 40 per cent of the dwarf planet Ceres. The shield will be 0.1 millimetres thick, putting its total mass at around 100 quadrillion kilograms.

How to heat up Earth if the Sun is blocked out

However, blocking out the Sun would cool Earth considerably. To solve this problem, he suggests making an artificial sun. The fuel could be sourced from Jupiter for fusion reactors that could orbit the gas giant 6,500 km deep in its atmosphere. The energy produced can be beamed up to Jupiter’s L1, then shone onto Earth’s surface, heating up the atmosphere.

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How to avoid being swallowed by the Sun?

The problem of being engulfed by the Sun would still remain. For this, we would need to move away from it. Harry suggests extending Earth’s orbit from 1 astronomical unit to 1.2 astronomical units. For this shift, oxygen mined from Jupiter could be used to fire a particle beam past Earth. With a mass roughly equal to half of the Amazon River’s outflow, it will slowly move our planet away from the Sun.

All of these methods sound like straight from a sci-fi thriller, and it is hard to believe that they could ever become real. Mining Jupiter for energy and a 2-million-km carbon tether sound purely absurd. However, since the Sun is still many, many years away from dying, an advanced civilisation might be able to pull it off. Let's save his recommendations in a black box that future humans can dig up.