This is a truncated version of a book I wrote a few years ago. I think you will get a kick from it.

Global warming is a known fact. It has been a fact for over fifty years, yet no one is worried about it because it will take billions of years for global warming to kill the Earth.
This is also a known fact. What most people including the scientist have not figured out is that with global warming we will be among the first to die as a species.

Some small attention is being raised by the kook fringe but their claims are so off the wall that they are being ignored. Let’s start on the outside and work our way in.

The sun will die in roughly five billion years. When the sun dies nothing in the solar system will survive. All living organisms on this planet survive within a narrow temperature range once that range is altered the organisms will die. Humans can live within a range of minus one hundred degrees to a maximum of plus one hundred forty degrees Fahrenheit. this narrow temperature range mark the limits of what humans can survive but in order for humans to flourish we need to be safely within this range, between zero and eighty degrees Fahrenheit.

The process of a stars death

As the sun burns fuel its mass is reduced, as the mass is reduced the magnetic field weakens. As the field weakens the star (our sun) expands. The magnetic field that holds in most of the heat and radiation stretches a bit. It has been doing this for millions of years. There is a zone of habitability a few million miles wide. As the sun expands this zone moves with the expansion. At one time the planet Venus was within this zone and earth was a very cold place. The zone moving with the expansion of the sun has turned Venus into a nasty place to live with temperatures around nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The oceans have boiled away, the radiation level is lethal, and the global warming has run amok. The earth is coming to the end of the habitability zone. The earth will get hotter, the first signs that the earth is in its last stages will be an ice age. The earth is a living organism that regulates its temperature. But the earth can only do this one or two more times before the seas begin to heat up, the water trapped in the poles melts to cool the earth then even that won’t work any more and the water will begin to boil. Not to worry we (all humans on earth) will all be dead by then. The best guess the scientists have at this time is a million maybe a million and a half years before this happens. So yes the sun will die in five billion years but the earth will become uninhabitable in less than two million years.

Back to the Sun getting weaker. The sun will expand but as it does so will the radiation striking the earth. Notice that there are more people dieing of cancer. Cigarette smoking was blamed for the increase in cancer deaths, but not all those people smoked, then second hand smoke was blamed but that has been proven false. Then people blamed the environment or more to the point humans destroying the environment. This is where the kook fringe comes in. Don’t misunderstand I am not saying that cleaning up the environment has not helped humans live longer. But if we dumped all our hazardous waste wherever we wanted we would not kill that many more people. We as a species need to grasp the fact that we can not save the earth. We can not stop the end of days. We can not prolong our stay on this planet. The last time there was global warming was millions of years ago. It took all the volcanoes on this planet erupting simultaneously for roughly three thousand years to achieve this global warming. We have not been burning fossil fuels for more than two hundred years yet the earth is supposedly being super heated by man.

There are only two ways to save the sun and in doing so save the earth.
The first way is a little difficult. We have to take all the hydrogen from both Jupiter and Saturn then compress the hydrogen to the size of the planet Mars and insert it into the center of the sun without igniting the fusion process prematurely. This will give the sun more mass and increase its magnetic field and bring the earth closer to the center of the habitability zone adding a few million maybe even a billion years to the life of the earth for us. Chances of success are negligible. Ok it’s a little tricky and we don’t have the technology yet and the ramifications of removing the two largest planets in the solar system need to be studied. We also need to study what the added mass will do to our orbit but little things like that can be worked out.

The other way is a little crazy. All we have to do is create a transparent shield to circle the sun that will block the harmful UV radiation and reduce the heat. Short of doing either of these means we have to find a new place to live outside of the solar system.

Honey call the movers

I know some misguided people think they can transform Mars into a habitable planet but it is not possible. Allow me to explain why.

Mars is a third the size of the earth with negligible water and air. Mars is also a geologically dead planet, it no longer has the ability to retain an atmosphere that can sustain humans. It has no ozone layer to protect us from radiation. The best guess from scientist is that it will take millions of years to teraform the planet once we get the technology. By then the habitability zone will have just reached Mars but without a strong gravitational field to hold an atmosphere it won’t do us any good. Any oxygen we can bring or manufacture would drift off the planet into space. Even if those little problems are overcome the planet will only be habitable for a few million years and we have to find another place to live as the sun is still going to die and as it expands it will kill everyone on the planet Mars.

This brings me to the only option left, find a planet outside of the solar system and move there. With a limited amount of time left to us we either have to figure a way of getting a huge number of people off the earth and onto another planet or resign ourselves to the fact that the only hint that we ever existed left the solar system with our deep space probes like Voyager and all our radio and television broadcasts.

There are no other planets in our solar system that can hold our population, or sustain life. we have to look to another planet and that will be very difficult. As space travelers we are still in the womb. It took millions of man hours and a few hundred billion dollars to get three people quarter of a million miles to the moon with a three day travel time. We need to travel at least a few dozen light-years. We have to first find a planet that can sustain humans and then figure a way to get us there all the while hoping the place is not already occupied by the time we arrive.

No pressure folks we will all be dead by then it is for our progeny, the survival of the species that we need to get to work on this as soon as possible. We are willing to do without aerosol spray to save the children, we are willing to restrict our pleasures to protect our children, and we are willing to put people in jail to protect the spotted lizard owl or what ever it is that some wack job wants us all to save. You think the poor fish in the ocean are in pain from being hooked or netted, think of the pain they will feel when they are boiled to death. Now you know we are all going to lose the battle of saving the earth and no amount of conservation can help let’s try to do something useful and get our butts off this rock before we are a faded memory.