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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

They propose steering a very large rock around the solar system to transfer momentum from Jupiter to Earth. The point is to increase the orbit of Earth to accommodate the brightening of the Sun over the next 10^9 years. So it's a long term global warming mitigation project.

If the rock is big enough to do the job, the tides, earthquakes and volcanism around perigee could be inconvenient. Also, the power to set the gimbals on the rock is the power to extinguish the planet, and what organization could stay incorruptible for 10^9 years?

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That was my first reaction as well: let's start mucking with earth's orbit, what could possibly go wrong? But the problem statement is trying to avoid being incinerated when the sun goes red-giant in a few billion years, so doing nothing is clearly not a viable alternative here.

On the other hand, given our current blase response to climate change, I'll give you long odds against human civilization being around in a billion years, or even a million -- or, for that matter, a thousand. And unless something changes radically in the next few years, I'll give you even odds against it lasting to the end of this century.

I can't see how we'd call any descendants of ours 'human' in a billion (or even a million) years, but I would be surprised if modern humans were wiped out in the next thousand years - we've lasted tens of thousands up to now. We certainly need to make some changes, but I'm at least semi-optimistic we can do that.

Oh sure, humans will be around. But whether human civilization will be around is far less clear.

What makes you so sure about that? Humans require VERY specific environmental conditions to survive.

Humans have thrived in a wider range of ecosystems and environments than any other mammal I know of. Humans have did this without a global industrial base using only local technology and economic output.

Actually, I would be amazed if "humans" exist at that point. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't exist in even a thousand years.

Assuming we don't do ourselves in there will be sentients, but species are defined by the ability to interbreed and I expect genetic modification will reach the point that interbreeding with a stock human is no longer possible. At that point we will be a new species, not "human".

> what organization could stay incorruptible for 10^9 years?

Create a religion around the project, like the technicians priesthood in Asimov's Foundation or like in some proposals for long term protection of radioactive waste sites https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warn...

Right, because if there ever was a subset of humans that has never been corrupted, it’s the clergy…

Irrelevant in context. Priesthoods in the examples above are just structures to preserve and transmit the knowledge of their respective missions to future generations. However corrupted are real religions it can't be denied that they've been running under the same traditions and knowledge corpus for millennia, and that's the point.

> and what organization could stay incorruptible for 10^9 years?

I'd imagine after the first 10^8 years you'd probably have it sorted. Getting your organisation to last 10^2 to 10^3 years is the hard part.

It is not global warming mitigation. This method has no hope of counteracting any kind of change in climate even on geological timescales. The only thing it can do is to slowly move Earth away from Sun over billions of years in imperceptible increments roughly every 6 thousand years.

I hope humanity can even survive 6 thousand years.

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