And if we were to move to another planet it would probably be Mars.
I browsed through a book about space biology once and read about a project, Biosphere 2, that was made to test the possibility of a closed ecosystem to sustain a small crew. It finally failed but surely put a milestone in this branch of research, and also in our understanding of actual ecosystems. And I imagine it is something similar that will be used to build experimental colonies on Mars in a distant future.
i heard about that. I'm pretty sure scientists were talking about that years ago, just made it official recently, though.
Dudes, Gliese 581g is a different planet from Gliese 581c which had been in the news a few years back. g is the 6th planet (the other four being b, d, e, and f) discovered in that solar system.
That is if Mars becomes habitable again, and who knows, by teh time we make the tech to move to new planets, maybe we could move to a whole new System.
Again? There will be a point in time where another galaxy is going to crash into our galaxy, but that won't happen in another billion years.
Um, I believe it is a multiple times harder to leave the galaxy to another than to leave a solar system to another. But anyway I think the end of earth will occur sooner, because when our sun dies it will roast all life and engulf earth. We'll have to be on another planet by then, preferably on another star system. We have roughly 5 billions years to do that.
we could always physically move earth away from the sun
Yeah sure, let's pull earth out of it's attraction to the sun, that totaly makes sense and is absolutely not a waste of time and ressources, because it's totally possible!
*facepalm*
I liked it better when you said you wanted to go to other planets.
Oh geez, how can I put it? Earth will have to "die" once, be it melted by the dying sun or frozen because some uber-phenomenal godly strength pushed it into space. You must know that life on earth depends on the actual temperatures to live. That's why even foreign planets with the right atmosphere are not viable as long as they are too far away/too close to their sun. Pulling earth away would condemn it to die. It doesn't make sense.
And no I don't think it could be possible, the sun is just too big, it's attraction is too strong for us to push a whole planet out of it's orbit. And what about the other galaxy crashing in our? Would you want to push earth all the way out of the galaxy?
Even if we did move the Earth besides from the usual temperature increase/decrease asteroids, meteoroids would crash into Earth. Moving the Earth is far too dangerous to move.
To bring earth out of it's orbit we would need such a force that it would be flying through space at a massive speed (imagine "flinging" the planet out of orbit). We would have to be sure there's nothing in the way, and calculate all the masses of the nearby planets, starsystems and other spatial objects that would influence the trajectory. Would you risk crashing earth into something? I wouldn't; travelling to and settling on a new planet seems like the better alternative. But we won't grow old enough to witness it ourselves.
