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Comment by toofnbad | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. The Earth will end, but not in the timelines they provide. In a million years it is unlikely we won't have the technology to hold the sun back from expansion. All we need are orbiting superconducting supermagnets to hold back the sun, tame volcanos, hold back cosmic radiation, etc. Asteroids would be nothing but mining prospects to humans in 1 000 000 AD.

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One would think in a million years if we have that sort of technology, we would no longer be dependent on Earth for humans survival. Whether we would colonize other planets and make them habitable through terraform or build our own planets at that point.

One could imagine an "Earth 2.0" that we can move around the solar system, positioning it perfectly for the right weather.

When you can tune the fusion of the sun using advanced particle physics and as of yet undiscovered branches of science, you don't need to move planets.

That would probably destroy the solar system. Without the moon, the earth would just exit the solar system. Increasing the mass of earth by mining too much asteroids would cause the earth to fall into the sun. It’s a quite delicate balance.

Excuse me, what? Maybe if you somehow added enough energy to immediately jettison the moon from Earth’s orbit or steered every asteroid in the solar system into the surface of the Earth. This is just nonsense otherwise. Any future mega projects can easily account for orbital mechanics, it’s just physics not magic.

The mass of the moon is “not that much” on a solar scale. The comment was about adding another planet and moving it around the solar system to “adjust the thermostat.” We can’t even get a rocket off the ground without blowing it up sometimes… I have little faith that we can move a whole freakin planet around without killing everyone.

I disagree. Forget about sun, the strongest weapons we have are microscopic even at the geological scale:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSjratvNGmo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUREX8aFbMs

You're not telling me anything I don't already know. The strongest weapons we have /right now/ have no implications for what we will have in the future. A million years is a lot of time. Long live the Earth! We cannot conceive of how we will contain the suns expansion, just like cavemen could not conceive any of our technological advancements mundane to us.

The key challenge is getting to 1000000AD intact as a civilization. For that to happen we need to get our collective asses to Mars in the next 50 years and then continue to develop space habitats and colonies on other bodies at a steady clip from there on out. If we stay put something will get us whether it’s nuclear war or just plain apathy.

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