The search for a strategy for mankind to survive the solar Red Giant catastrophe

In around 5 gigayears our Sun will grow to a Red Giant and will swallow Earth. In this article we present a rescue-plan for the whole mankind, including its inherited habitat Earth. The plan is subdivided into two parts: If we content ourselves to survive only the next 5 Gy (until the shellburning phase of our Sun) we propose to construct some kind of parasol to shadow Earth rather than to move Earth to an outer orbit using asteroids for the swing-by technique. The position of the parasol will be the (inner) Lagrange Point L1 or depending on the radiation pressure onto the parasol, in a levitated orbit a bit nearer to the Sun. The sidereal period of these orbits is one year guaranteeing a permanent eclipse of Earth. If we want to survive also the time beyond the next 5 Gy, where Sun’s luminosity and radius increase hundred fold and oscillate until our Sun develops finally into a White Dwarf, we have to shift Earth into the Kuiper Belt (50 AU) by means of the swing-by technique whereby the overwhelming part of the gravitational energy needed will be transferred from the orbit of Jupiter and Saturn. During this journey of about 10 megayears or more Earth must be illuminated by an artificial light source because of the intensity by our sunlight becomes the smaller the distance increases. A ring of DD-fusion power stations outstretched on Moon’s orbit should produce the necessary 175 PW of visible light with which Earth has to be illuminated. In the Kuiper Belt Earth will be brought into an orbit of an artificial Sun, an ArtSun formed in the meantime by the fusion of gaseous Jupiter-like planets imported from other planetary systems in the neighborhood. Depending on the total hydrogen mass we will bring together a G5-class star (very similar to our Sun) or a M-class star (Red Dwarf similar to the Gliese 581) with a mass of one third of that of our Sun can be formed the latter one with the advantage that its life-time is about an order of magnitude higher than that of our Sun. ----------------------------------------------------* Bollackerweg 10, CH-8956 Killwangen, Switzerland, [email protected] ** Mülacherstr 44, CH-5212 Hausen, Switzerland