The article claims that Earth will be incinerated, but we could just move Earth further from the Sun. The energy of escape velocity is just GMm/r. r is one AU, 150 gigameters. G is the gravitational constant, 67 piconewton square meters per square kilogram, M is the Sun's mass, 2.0 billion yottagrams. m is the Earth's, 6000 yottagrams. It works out to 5.3 billion yottajoules. The Sun emits 380 yottawatts, thus providing enough energy to move the Earth out of the Solar System entirely every five months. Moving it to a somewhat higher orbit, such as Jupiter's, would require somewhat less energy than that. And we have 500 million years, which most experts consider to be a significantly longer time than five months, so the problem is clearly soluble.
A possible problem is that Jupiter itself could destabilize Earth's new orbit. Possibly putting Earth into orbit around Jupiter as an additional moon would be a solution, but if not, I think we could solve that problem by removing Jupiter. If we drop it into the Sun, we can gain all of its orbital energy in the process.
If we still need to live around Sol when the sun goes red giant, we will have deserved to be selected out of existence.
It would be a shame to abandon her entirely, but don’t count on nostalgia to last for billions of years. We will have empires of people who never lived in Sol who think Good Riddance.
Anywhere there's liquid water, we will find mildew.
A bazillion dollars to explore new worlds, to find this mold that won't come off.
Maybe it will talk to us.
We will have seeded the life there. And earth will be obliterated. And the emergent intelligent beings will wonder if life can exist somewhere else in the universe. They’ll specifically look for moons around large gas giants orbiting a red giant sun.
"When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?"
The answer is yes, of course. Everyone on Europa is going to be fine.
>> the sun will enter the final phase of its life. Its core of hydrogen fusion will expand and, in doing so, inflate the outer atmosphere of the star into gross proportions. It will swell and become a red giant star that will engulf Mercury and Venus and incinerate Earth.
Does anybody know what is the timescale we are talking about here? From start of inflation of Sun's outer atmosphere to engulfing of earth?
One interesting thing to keep in mind here is that life could even survive on Earth itself when the Sun dies.
If the red giant phase of the Sun (before its collapse) were to be just not quite hot enough to do more than scorch the surface of the earth and maybe heat the crust down only partially, microbial life would survive in deep fissures. Studies (link below) have shown that a whole ecosystem of life exists in wet cracks down to a depth of up to maybe 10 kilometers. Assuming the red giant phase of the sun only manages to cook the earth's surface, it's possible that the heat radiates down into the crust by a few hundred meters, or maybe a kilometer.
After all, though rock as a dense object in your hand isn't a good thermal insulator, the porous, cracked substrate of our crust is indeed wonderful at insulating (second link). If it weren't we'd have long since cooked from the enormous heat beneath us. The same process works in the opposite direction.
Thus IF, if the sun expands just enough to only scorch our world, once the sun collapses again and our planet enters its deep freeze, the microbes that survived far beneath its surface could live their strange existence indefinitely, close to magmatic heat sources in the delicately balanced equilibrium zones between these and the frozen world above.
Yes, the core of the earth will also eventually cool too, but the combination of residual heat from formation, compressive friction heat and radioactive decay is enough to keep that from happening for at least tens of billions of years.
It's a fascinating scenario to consider: the extreme limits of how tenacious life could stay alive on our world long after everything we consider sustaining is dead and gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biosphere
https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/physical/oce...
Radiation on Europa would kill people in a day.
Without the sun the only source of energy would be starlight. Planets don't _generate_ energy of their own, they only radiate away energy. So without the sun everything will simply freeze to near absolute zero, once it radiates away all heat energy.
Maybe before then a passing star will allow humanity or it's progeny to transfer over to one of the star's orbiting planets?