A global apocalypse could be closer than you think.
According to astronomers, in five billion years or so, the sun will run out of hydrogen in its core completely and expand, possibly engulfing the earth. Now that's a bright future you don't want. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently tweeted that the expansion of the Sun would result in the extinction of all life on the planet, making interplanetary living a necessity. Musk said this in response to a paper warning about mass extinction caused by human activity, arguing for the necessity of working on ways to move off-world. However, while we lack the technology to live on other worlds just yet, we may have a more immediate catastrophe at hand — climate change and global warming.
The emission of greenhouse gases has significantly altered the temperature and climate pattern of our planet. According to six leading international datasets consolidated by the World Meteorological Organisation, 2021 was one of the seven warmest years on record. And these warmest seven years have all occurred since 2015, with 2016, 2019, and 2020 constituting the top three. A strong El Nino event that occurred in 2016 also contributed to recording global average warming. Scientists predict that increased rises in the concentration of greenhouse gases will continue to cause a significant temperature rise, possibly even melting much of the polar ice. And there is also another concern - the amount of energy that reaches the Earth is very slowly increasing over time. This increase will eventually cause severe problems for Earth, causing the planet to one day to become so hot that the Earth's oceans will boil.
Currently, policies in place to prevent global warming revolve around decreasing fossil fuel consumption and investing in greener and cleaner sources of energy. Despite various such pledges to slow down climate change, experts feel that the Paris Agreement will not suffice to prevent the global average temperature from rising to or above 2.7°Fahrenheit (1.5°Celcius).
Now, Sohrab Rahvar, an astronomer and professor of Physics at Sharif University of Technology, Iran, decided to take up the challenges of a heating planet and a more luminous sun. In a preprint paper that hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, Rahvar has made a proposal for a way to decrease the global temperature of our planet. Using gravity assist by asteroids, Rahvar's paper suggests we can increase the orbital distance of the Earth from the Sun, moving the planet to a cooler position.
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