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

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.

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 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.