Is THIS the solution to global warming? Scientist claims we should MOVE the Earth away from the sun

Astronomers know very well that the sun is getting brighter very slowly, and in a billion years or so it will make the Earth too hot to live on.

A scientist is now proposing a radical solution that would allow people to live longer on this planet by physically moving the Earth away from the sun.

Albert Zijlstra, professor of astrophysics at the University of Manchester, proposes to move the Earth about three million miles further away from the sun.

Right now, Earth orbits the sun at a distance of 93 million miles (150 million km), but this needs to be extended to at least 96 million miles (155 million km), he says.

This move would extend a year to 380 days, meaning we would have to insert an extra 15 days into a calendar year somewhere.

“The earth will get warmer, and warmer – best estimates are that in one or two billion years the oceans will start to boil away,” Professor Zijlstra told MailOnline.

“Soon after that, we’ll be like Venus, with temperatures of several hundred degrees Celsius, so we’ll have to move before that happens.

“For the living world to last longer than a billion years, we need to move away from the sun a few million kilometers.”

To explain how the ambitious project would all work, a little basic astrophysics is essential first.

When a planet (such as Earth) slows down in its orbit, it gets closer to the sun, because of the enormous gravitational pull our star has on its planets.

Similarly, when a planet accelerates in its orbit, it moves away from the sun, in part because this speed makes it more resistant to the sun’s gravity.

Like all the planets of the solar system, the Earth gradually rotates away from the sun – but not enough to substantially cool the planet.

Professor Zijlstra’s concept of moving away from the sun would involve a gravitational assist or ‘catapult’ maneuver, which is often already used to accelerate spacecraft after they have launched from Earth.

By approaching a planet, such a spacecraft can take advantage of the planet’s gravity to increase its speed, causing the planet itself to slow down slightly in its orbit.

And as we know, due to the laws of physics, when a planet slows down, it gets closer to the sun.

It is a little known fact that gravity slingshots can also be used to reduce the speed of the spacecraft, which has the opposite effect on the planet, accelerating it in its orbit.

And when the planet accelerates in its orbit, it drifts further away from the sun.

This is the basic concept on which the project would work, but instead of a spacecraft (which would be much too small), Professor Zijlstra suggests using a huge asteroid – about 50 kilometers in diameter, the size of a large city.

He suggests altering the asteroid’s orbit in some way while it is still in space, perhaps by nudging it at a certain angle and speed with a robotic probe.

If the asteroid is successfully pushed, it will loop around the sun and head back toward Earth, before blasting itself into Earth’s orbit.

This would slow down the asteroid and, more importantly, speed up Earth — though doing the whole process just once wouldn’t be enough.

‘Since the Earth has to accelerate to move away from the sun, we have to let the asteroid lose speed as it moves towards the inner solar system,’ says Professor Zijlstra.

Do this a million times and the Earth will increase its speed by the amount we need.

“After a million fly-bys, Earth is in its new, upper-urban orbit.

“And since we have a billion years to move, that means we only need a flight of the asteroid once every thousand years.

“Do this once every thousand years, and over a billion years we can move the Earth enough to keep the temperature constant as the sun rises.”

In the end, it sounds like a big enough task only for NASA, or even for a consortium of international space agencies working together.

Meanwhile, the cost would surely be many times higher than last year’s DART project by NASA to nudge an asteroid, which cost $324.5 million (£258 million).

The public may also be concerned about such a huge asteroid coming close to Earth, especially when you consider that it was an asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Professor Zijlstra emphasizes that there are two forms of global warming.

The first, much publicized, is caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, such as burning fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, the second, lesser-known form of global warming has to do with the sun’s natural brightening, which will make Earth in its current form too hot to support life in about a billion years.

“That’s a long way off, but scientists are paid to find solutions to problems of the future before anyone else thinks about it,” he told MailOnline.

“This concept is not a solution to the current man-made global warming.

“It’s taking way too long to help us now – we need to solve man-made global warming in other ways.

“But it will resolve the long-term changes in the sun.”