Assume it is the year one billion

[james_davis_nicoll]

How can one maintain the Earth's ability to support complex life?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

To start: "Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death."

[dsrtao]

Going to assume that's "one billion years from now".

The Sun should be about 10% brighter than it is now. It might be a good idea to put a nice big station out at the L1 Lagrangian point with adjustable sunshading. On those timescales, moving a nice big asteroid there is feasible. It's about 3-4x the distance to Luna.

A billion years is a substantial time for evolution. Multicellular life is only about half that old. There will probably be several die-offs and superspeciation events in that time period.

[kithrup]

Charlie covered this, in Palimpsest.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

How actively do you want to maintain your remediation? Putting a bunch of junk into Earth-equatorial orbit would help a lot, I would think. But the lighter the junk, the quicker it de-orbits, while stuff heavy enough to stay there for 1,000+ years might be too large to completely burn up on reentry.

[graydon]

If you're supposing planning on this time scale, you gravity tractor the earth into a more distant orbit rather than messing about with sunshades.

[mikeda]

A society wth really advanced tech might be able to somehow drop the sun’s brightness back down enough to keep the earth from overheating. Although any society capable of doing that eould probably also have the alternative (suggested above) of moving the Esrth to a more distant orbit.

[(Anonymous)]

Move it farther away from the sun. It'll take a while, but we have a while.

Riderius

[ba_munronoe]

Roof over the planet with nice shiny new tin roofs.

[(Anonymous)]

Would going underground be in any way feasible?

Drain the ocean to make a colossal refrigerant system, and put giant heat radiator fins to dump excess heat from the refrigerant. Could you have a colossal system of underground tunnels that are kept at a comfy 24C/75F (with cooler and warmer areas for those who like or need that sort of thing)?

[zxhrue]

a billion years?

that's a rilly rilly rilly long time

sol III is forgotten? purposely obscured as a luxury resort ala tetiaroa? obliterated in a long forgotten war? racoons?

or you know, planet in flight perhaps