How Can We Move the Earth?

Sooner or later we're going to want to move the Earth further away from the Sun. It turns out, there are a few techniques that might actually make this possible. Not easy, but possible.

[nyarvideo]

I think you're dismissing the 'Gravity Tug' idea too quickly. According to an article in New Scientist (October, 2008) Colin McInnes, a mechanical engineer at the University of Strathclyde has calculated that moving the Earth outwards to keep pace with the Sun's warming would require a disc-shaped sail 19.2 times the Earth's diameter. It would have to be tilted at an angle of 35° to the line towards the Sun, and stationed at about five times the Moon's distance from the Earth. Balanced between solar pressure and earth's gravity it hover there providing a gentle fuel free gravity pull on the Earth away from the sun year after year, century after century, extending the Earth's habitable lifespan by billions of years. The mass required to make such a sail would require a 9-km-wide metal-rich asteroid. Nickel and iron from the asteroid would be made into an 8-micron-thick film for the sail. That's 10, 000 times less mass than the 100 km Oort cloud object you suggest. Also safer. The solar sail would have two failure modes. 1-It could fly away from Earth or 2-It could fall toward the Earth where the 8 micron thick film would burn up in the atmosphere. Far better than a sterilizing 100 km asteroid collision.

[davidshafer]

Couldn't we also find a way load the sun up with more hydrogen to keep its fuel supply stocked up?

[joeldenring]

Instead of moving the earth, would it be possible to build gigantic mirrors? We could use them to deflect light away from the Earth (depending on global average temperatures, we could adjust for whatever temperature we wanted.)

[URC]

My suggestion is to build a gigantic cage with enough strong material from Earth- itself, this will have a big impact on some of the Earth's mass, then get hundreds of rockets on a gravity chain and pull it with gigantic amounts of power. I know this will be very costly such as in the billions, or even a Trillion dollars!! But if our world is going to survive, this may be our last hope for a chance of survival by helping each other out, or this may be our last stand. Directions to move Earth: Step 1. Get the world to cooperate together, Step 2. Get NASA, and some other companies build a giant strong cage and finish the rest of it in space, Step 3. Initiate the launch as soon as possible, then builds tons of hundreds of spacecraft with maximum power to pull the chains and (hopefully in god's name) not break in the opposite direction opposing our (dying future supergiant) Sun. Is my idea crazy? Leave a comment if you think so; Is my idea helpful to future situations? Press the "like button" if you think this one. (FACT: This real scenario won't happen anytime soon, but the sun won't be involved in this until eventually in like a couple of billion years. [If we're still even alive by those generations.]) Thank you for your video relating to my first thought question in moving Earth to a different space time location! I appreciate this video, comments, and spending time in writing my article with these facts and this knowledge, Thank you very much!

[NeWx]

They do move planets in Olaf Stapledon's sci-fi novels, they even try to move entire solar systems to another galaxy to meet up with another galactic civilization/s. But it's discovered that the stars themselves are actually alive and are rebelling to this infection of solar germs (people), and starts to nova themselves to get rid of us.

[calciferfelix]

I have been watching your videos for a while and I have never checked how many subscribers you have. Today I looked, and 24K??? Really? You should have waaay much more than that!

[rgraph]

500 million years? What with North Korea's posturing, climate change, pollution of the atmosphere and seas and a lot of other things that I can't think of, do you think that humanity will make it past the next 50 years?

[DannyCruzCreations]

Hah. Good one Fraser. We can't agree on cleaning up the air and we're going to move the Earth using objects with more mass than the Earth itself! Fun watch though. :)

[ThePeterDislikeShow]

What is the cumulative effect of all the spacecraft we have launched and flown by earth in changing the earth?

[MitchCrane]

What if we just smashed a bunch of these Oort cloud objects into Mars until it was about as massive as the earth and had also acquired a lot water? Then we wait for it to cool and seed it with plant life and wait until it's habitable. Easy, right?

[tonybenny]

I have an idea. We launch space ships with unbelievably strong magnet which will attract the earth and moves it, a bit though, as the sun gets hotter we move the earth proportionally.

[iamcleaver]

To avoid the problem with Mars, we could put Mars into the geostationary orbit around  Earth, turning Earth and Mars into a double planet. If putting mars that close to earth is unstable, we could put Mars further away from Earth, to make one rotation last, say 32 hours. It would cause massive Earthquakes and tides at first, but after a couple million years, we would eventually get tidally locked to each other,   making Terrestrial and Martian day last a relatively comfortable 32 hours. The tidal forces would also help to restart Martian dynamo.

[danmiguel]

Hi Fraser,
IMO, the best way to move a planet(in theory) is to use the Sun's gravitational field to gradually push both Venus and Earth away from it. The example lays on the planet's polar axis that the Sun's gravitational field could use to gradually push the planet while it rotates around it, which gives it its movement. I believe that the Sun could push the Earth & Moon towards the midpoint between it's current orbit and Mars. This might also be another way to reverse global warming by 35%. At the same time as the Sun is pushing the Earth, it could allow Venus to occupy Earth's current orbit as the Sun is pushing both planets away from it. This would allow Venus to break its tidal lock with the Sun, allowing it to begin rotating on its axis to 24hrs, causing the planet's CO2 clouds to cool down. In addition, if Mercury becomes the moon of Venus, its magnetic field would increase to prevent it from escaping, as well as block the solar winds. It would allow the planet to circulate its CO2 that would be reduce significantly to allow humans to walk on its surface.

[thestranger]

We will be at some point able to collect far more energy from the sun. And so we could build bassicly a gigant booster in earth that directly uses that energy of the sun to create thrust and so be able to move the earth how we want

[fmn]

May be a dumb idea, could we just constantly supply the sun with more fission material by crashing meteors on it?

[MattMachine]

I'm sure if humanity exists another billion years, we'll figure out a way.

[georgenelson]

A Wee Bit Crazy! Fraser you are awesome and hilarious!! Keep up the good work good sir!

[Ro_Ball]

500.000.000 years? In about 1000 years we will most certainly have the technology to travel fast enough through space in order to just dump the Earth and just move to another planet.

[Winchester]

500 million years just isn't enough, took like 3 billion years for anything interesting to happen here, a project worth doing.

[jurrien]

build two giant solar powered ion thrusters in space and attach cables to the poles. Pull the earth in a greater orbit