Moving the Earth

[WestAir]

Would it be possible for mankind, with current technologies, to displace the Earth from its orbit?

Could we use constant, continuous Hydrogen Bomb blasts on one point of the Earth, relative to its orbit, to push Earth off its orbit? What about manufacturing giant rocket engines and turning them on at the right moment, once a day, for decades? Could we even create giant ion engines and just let'em rip for a few hundred years and do it?

If the answer is no, then could we at the very least change the Earths rotation speed with today's technology?

[kinnison]

the tidal stresses on the earth from putting enough force on it to move it would make the earth inhabitable.

All we need is a giant planet sized Bergenholm to make the earth inert, then just lighting off some engines wouldn't be an issue.

[Awaras]

If you used bombs, you would make the Earth uninhabitable long before you made a noticable change in it's orbit...

We have already changed the Earth's rotation speed. The building of large dams on rivers since the 1950's and the subsequent redistribution of water has changed the Earths rotation speed, altering the lenght of a day by eight millionths of a second. The Three Gorges dam in China has increased the lenght of the day by 0.06 microseconds.

[WestAir]

If quick, massive energy transfers (like bombs) would destroy life, what about slow, small ones? Like a low-powered ion engine burning at the appropriate time for the next 500 years?

[Tommygun]

Would it be possible for mankind, with current technologies, to displace the Earth from its orbit?

Could we use constant, continuous Hydrogen Bomb blasts on one point of the Earth, relative to its orbit, to push Earth off its orbit? What about manufacturing giant rocket engines and turning them on at the right moment, once a day, for decades? Could we even create giant ion engines and just let'em rip for a few hundred years and do it?

If the answer is no, then could we at the very least change the Earths rotation speed with today's technology?

These methods are too violent and polluting.

Something like a variation of the gravity tractor might work.

If you used something like say a nuclear Orion engine to push a large asteroid to pass close by Earth and give the asteroid an orbit that would repeatably pass by Earth, then over millions of years you could slowly change Earth's orbit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor

[OtherDalfite]

It would take millions of years for the most efficient engine we have to displace Earth even moderately from it's orbit. Earth weighs 6 septillion kilograms, or 13,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds. No way we are moving that much mass with any technology we have today.

[MalletFace]

I would provide a little more detail on the goal in your question, rather than suggesting methods of accomplishing it.

If you mean any change in orbit, just by launching rockets, and detonating nuclear bombs, we have nudged the Earth around quite a bit.

If you mean a major change in orbit, I would suggest pulling large objects by the earth. Burning engines or detonating bombs to do that seems pretty wasteful to me.

If you literally mean putting the earth in a displaced orbit around the sun, I believe that is fairly impossible given any circumstances. We can just barely do it with a satellite around the earth.

[Cesrate]

A gravitational tractor maybe feasible. Question is what to be the tractor.

[stupid_chris]

A gravitational tractor maybe feasible. Question is what to be the tractor.

Ceres would be the best but hardest to get candidate.

Although anyone thought of using gravity slingshots around other planets? Instead of moving straight to a higher orbit, you move down a bit to intersect Venus and let her sling you outwards? That would be hard to do, but her, WHY NOT COCONUT.

[Tommygun]

Ceres would be my choice.

The gravity slingshots would be too disruptive to the Earth as you get too close to the Sun.

At least as I am imagining it. I'm thinking of a scenario that someone might want to buy the Earth more time as the Sun slowly turns into a red giant.

[stupid_chris]

Ceres would be my choice.

The gravity slingshots would be too disruptive to the Earth as you get too close to the Sun.

At least as I am imagining it. I'm thinking of a scenario that someone might want to buy the Earth more time as the Sun slowly turns into a red giant.

Well, if it there wasn't this constraint of the sun becoming a red giant, a slingshot would theoretically work. Venus might not be happy with it's orbit after, but it would definitely give a boost outwards, probably near Mars's orbit or further.

[PakledHostage]

An idea that I read about was to disrupt comets from the Oort cloud so that they fly by the Earth and nudge it outwards via successive gravitational assists. The idea was that it could be done by an advanced civilization to save the Earth from being destroyed when the Sun becomes a red giant.

There is a theory about the evolution of the solar system that suggests that gravitational encounters between small bodies and the planets we know today shaped the solar system. Look up the "Nice model". The Nice model was even mentioned in an article in this month's National Geographic.

[softweir]

If quick, massive energy transfers (like bombs) would destroy life, what about slow, small ones? Like a low-powered ion engine burning at the appropriate time for the next 500 years?

Ion drive wouldn't work. To achieve enough thrust that we cold measure the change of orbit, the drive would have to use many times more electrical energy than we generate. Even then, the Earth's atmosphere would slow the ions down and the magnetosphere would bend the beam round so it was absorbed by the Van Allen belt, and there would be zero net thrust. On their way, the high-energy ions would cause massive atmospheric ionisation and generate huge amounts of ozone, and would be an environmental catastrophe.

Also, the ion engine would only be pointing in the "right" direction for a few minutes each day.

[harharluke]

It's simple

[Nuke]

i wouldn't use ceres as a gravity tractor and i would presume it would be simpler just to terraform other worlds than to move our own. ceres would be very useful as an intermediate colony during the gradual inflation of the sun, to allow us to survive till a jovian colony becomes possible. way i see it we would just planet hop as the sun expands. rising temperatures on mars will simplify terraforming operations there. but eventually mars will become the new mercury and habitation there would cease and move on to ceres. i could however see the moving of the moon and colliding it with ceres to increase its gravity and heat the planetoid, possibly creating a magnetic field like on earth. this would be done thousands of years before the habitable zone moves to the asteroid belt, to allow time for cooling, crust formation and teraforming. though the astroid belt will probibly need to be artificially cleared during this time.

before that happens tunnel boring machines can be used to create habitable areas under the lunar surface, so the moon becomes the life boat for the bulk of terrestrial bound humans. it would be much easier to move the moon with ion propulsion than the earth. useful materials from earth (like water reserves and farming critical nutrients) would also be transfered to the moon to support life there. the earth itself would need to be completely stripmined of usable resources, some for terraforming but most of it going to manufacture launch vehicles to get humans and other resources out of the gravity well (at this point it becomes acceptable to use nuclear propulsion for launch applications, so the evacuation would be done with heavy lift reusable launch vehicles possibly using nswr engines). archives of genetic matrerials created to clone animals and engineer ecosystems on other worlds.

all this will require humans to plan things ahead on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years, but we have how many billion years to figure that out? what kinda tech will we be using by then? also we may have already colonized a sizable portion of the galaxy by that point anyway.

Edited July 4, 2013 by Nuke