Moving the Earth

WHILE most environmentalists worry about the near-term future, one scientist has examined a crisis that threatens genocide in the far distant future. Its solution will involve, literally, moving the Earth. The crisis will come in about 1,000 million years from now as the Sun begins to change–if there is still intelligence on the planet at that remote time. Our parent star is growing imperceptibly hotter. Eventually it will grow so hot that agriculture will be impossible, and starvation inevitable. ``Our descendants will have to take some action at this point," says Lorne Whitehead, professor of physics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who has worked out a rescue scheme which he believes is devoid of technical flaws. ``The most practical idea will be to move the Earth."

Earth and Moon would head off

It might appear an impossible task to move the Earth away from the Sun, even with the most unimaginably powerful matter/antimatter rockets. Whitehead's solution instead, outlined in a perfectly serious article in the American science journal Discover, is that the people of that age will move the Moon, to which the Earth is gravitationally bound. ``Our descendants would fix matter/anti-matter rockets to the far side of the Moon, converting matter into anti-matter with 100 percent efficiency." The Moon would thus be accelerated forwards into an ever-widening circular orbit round the Sun, acting as a tugboat, pulling the Earth along with it. Thus, after a few thousand years, the Earth would find itself getting ever further from the newly hostile Sun before breaking free from its influence altogether. The bound pair of bodies, Earth and Moon, would head off into interstellar space. There might seem to be a flaw in this argument. Having left the Sun because it was getting too hot, might not our descendants not freeze and starve in the eternal night between the stars? Whitehead has an equally ingenious solution to this problem. It takes advantage of the fact that the Moon and the Sun are at present roughly the same apparent size in the sky. Why not, therefore, make the Moon shine as brilliantly as the Sun as it accompanies the Earth through boundless space? This would involve electric lighting, of a kind now being developed by some companies that specialise in producing high pressure argon arc lamps that simulate sunlight. The Moon could be made to shine with all the warmth and light of the present-day Sun if its nearside could be covered with a trillion such lamps–one lamp for about 100 square feet of lunar surface. With this number, Whitehead calculates, each person on Earth would receive the radiation of 200 lamps. How would the wandering people of Earth fare with their artificial star? ``Everything on the planet would look the same, golden sunshine, blue sky, fleecy clouds and rainbows." The tides would still be there–from the Moon. The only thing lacking would be reflected moonlight.