Planet good for another 1.75 billion years - they just discovered this?

I've been very remiss not to post for so long, and so much has been happening it's hard to know where to start, so you might think my choice is a bit strange. It's this article from Foxnews [2] on the end of life of our good planet. The take-home point is that our planet might not be liveable all the way until the end of life of the Sun. This is because the Sun's heat slowly increases. From being maybe 30% cooler when the Sun first formed, it will end up maybe 30% hotter than it is now. This will mean the Earth will pass from the 'habitable zone' into the torrid zone, the oceans slowly evaporate, the Earth's natural thermostat fails, and the planet suffers runaway heating until all life is gone.

To give you the flavour of it, here is a short clip from the article:

Earth could continue to host life for at least another 1.75 billion years, as long as nuclear holocaust, an errant asteroid or some other disaster doesn't intervene, a new study calculates.

But even without such dramatic doomsday scenarios [3], astronomical forces will eventually render the planet uninhabitable. Somewhere between 1.75 billion and 3.25 billion years from now, Earth will travel out of the solar system's habitable zone and into the "hot zone," new research indicates.

Very interesting. The only problem is this is old, very old, news. In the "Tree of Life" book Gitie and I wrote in 2003 [4] we discussed this very problem.

The only difference between then and now is that the figure for how long we have left has been altered. I nearly said "refined", as I might have done in my naive youth, but since my confidence in the practice of science has been so shaken by the global warming shysters, I no longer trust anything I read unless I check it myself. And life is too short for that, of course, so I simply say, the new timing is a lot longer than the old one. If true, that is good news for our planet.

So why am I writing about this today? A few reasons.

Firstly it is an example of how the past gets lost. Far from being a new discovery, this is at best a refinement of an earlier estimate. And the subject has a literature, of which our book referenced above is one example, and of which the journalist seems entirely ignorant. This is a symptom, of course, of the anti-scientific secular ideology that dominates western society. From the French revolution onwards, just about every would-be remaker of the world has started out with a "Year Zero" (or a "Year One" for those challenged by the notion of counting from zero). The result is always poverty, death, and misery. The past, in every case, is not understood, but only berated from the present viewpoint or ignored altogether. But the past matters. Our ancestors had their own wisdom. For sure we can improve upon the past, but we ignore it at terrible peril.

A second oddity about this article also propelled me to comment. It is an oddity that manifests very commonly in modern discourse. It is present in the short quote from the article above (twice, once per paragraph). But before I say what it is, let me show you a bit more of the article. See what you make of it:

"If we ever needed to move to another planet, Mars is probably our best bet," Rushby said in a statement. "It's very close and will remain in the habitable zone until the end of the sun's lifetime 6 billion years from now."

While other models have been developed for Earth, they are not suitable for other planets, he added.

Okay, before I say what puzzles me, let me try my best to summarise: They calculated how long it will be before the Earth passes out of the habitable zone into the hot zone, then they speculate on where we could move to when that happens. Do you see the problem? Read on when it seems as odd to you as it does to me. Here's a picture that comes to mind...

Here's that picture again:

So here's what I found very odd in this article - and indeed, in a few others I've read about this idea over the years:

Isn't that odd? Maybe you're not interested in the far, far future millions or billions of years away. But lots of us are, and that group most likely includes the scientists who did this research, the earlier scientists whose work I discuss in the book referenced previously, and the science writers who have reported this to us, including the Foxnews writer whose article I am perhaps unfairly making so much of now.

And think what sort of thing we "far futurists" do talk about:

• Dyson spheres, in which we cut up the entire planet and make a shell of it completely surrounding the Sun;
• Can life 'punch through' the "big crunch" that has sometimes been considered as a possible end for the entire universe;
• The Omega Point Theory of Frank J. Tipler, in which an infinite amount of processing power becomes available to make all of us immortal.

Those are just three possibilities. The last two are 'speculative', which is a polite way of saying they are so way out there that we might almost spend our time as profitably discussing Daleks and Klingons (i.e. science fiction). The first one, the Dyson sphere, is possible but would require humanity having technology of unimaginable power. So in practice all these ideas and others are not realistic. But we far futurists do talk about these ideas.

So let's return to the article under discussion: there is not a single word in it about how humanity might be able to avoid the End of Everything. And this whilst everyone, far futurists or even unimaginative politicians, artists, teachers, stock traders, miners, and everyone in between, all of us are not only discussing changing things to avoid disasters, we are actually implementing crippling schemes to wreck our standards of living to fight the nonexistent bogey hoax of carbon-dioxide-induced "global warming" aka "climate change"!

And that brings us back to that picture above of the five Lagrangian points. They were discovered by a very good mathematician/scientist called, of course, Joseph-Louis Lagrange. They are special points where the forces of attraction of the Sun and the Earth balance each other. A spacecraft or any other object, placed at one of the Lagrangian points, will be attracted to neither the Sun nor the Earth and can sit there 'forever'. Two of them are stable, meaning that it is like a marble in a curved fruitbowl - push it a bit up the sides of the bowl and it rolls back down to the bottom. Likewise, something at a stable Lagrangian point, if shifted a small distance from the point, will be pulled back again; it can stay there without any assistance indefinitely. Points L4 and L5, lying 60 degrees ahead of and behind the Earth in its orbit, are the stable points. But the one we are interested in is L1.

Lagrangian point L1 lies in between the Earth and Sun, roughly 1/100th of the way from the Earth to the Sun. Something at that point is equally attracted to the Earth and the Sun, and can stay at that spot without trouble. Bu L1 is one of the unstable points: if something at L1 shifts a little bit away from L1, it is pulled further away and rapidly flies off, ending up in the gravitational field of either the Earth or the Sun, depending on which way it fell off from the balance point.

And the very first time I heard about the idea that our planet might be doomed long before the Sun turns into a red giant, simply by its gradually increasing heat, I immediately thought of the L1 Lagrangian point. I thought about it and I wrote about it in In our "Tree of Life" book [4].

Because if an object placed there is in balance, it needs very little effort to be kept there, despite the fact that L1 is unstable. So why not simply but a big umbrella there?

Putting an umbrella at the L1 point some time before heat disaster strikes in 1.75 billion years isn't fiction of any kind, it is doable right now, let alone with a billion years or so extra scientific and technological development. In fact we have already put things at L1: The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory [5] is at L1, busy continuously doing scientific measurements of our star. A really big umbrella would be a huge project, but it is one that is perfectly within our means today. It isn't science fiction, it is science. (And I don't mean climate bogus "science" either!) One might object that L1 ia an unstable point. That means that any shield placed there has to have correcting mechanisms, thrusters, etc., to make corrections whenever it starts to drift off the balance point. That is a complication, but by no means a show stoper.

With all this in mind, the thing that stood out so much in the Fox article (and others like it) is why the heat death of the planet is treated as an unavoidable fact (with talk of migrating to Mars and so on) when the solution is not merely speculation, it is technology we already have and could deploy right now. Doesn't that seem really odd? Not when you realise that if we deployed it now, there would be no "global warming" problem. And the goal of the ringleaders of modern "progressive" ideology is not to fix this or any other problem, it is to deny people (usually the poorest, but never the ideologists themselves) the elements of a good life such as electricity, good food, transportation, and so on; the goal most definitely is not to solve the problem. That is merely the excuse. If you don't agree, explain to me why they maintain such religious commitment to the ridiculous global warming theory that is one of the most refuted theories ever to pretend to be science.

The tragedy is that so very many well-meaning lovers of wildlife and the environment don't see how their good intentions are being so badly misused.