As it turns out, we won’t have to wait until the Sun goes nova (or turns into a red giant) for Earth to become completely uninhabitable; it looks like in only one billion years the temperature of the Earth will be the boiling point of water.
So, what are our options?
- Evolve into beings that can survive very high temperatures. Doesn’t seem likely, as water-based organisms generally don’t do well when they’re boiling.
- Change the orbit of the Earth to compensate for the increased temperature of the Sun. It seems to be that this solution would have significant engineering challenges to overcome.
- Abandon the planet and seek out new homes elsewhere in the galaxy. The good news is that the engineering is at least theoretically possible, and its a somewhat easier problem than, say, #2 above. The bad news is that it’s still really hard, and that’s even assuming that we stick with slower-than-light travel. Plus, outer space is a unforgiving environment, so if anything screwed up, we’d all be dead. And, of course, we still haven’t actually found any suitable planets—and there’s no guarantee that those planets wouldn’t already be inhabited.
- Evolve into non-corporeal beings. Difficultly level on this one is off the charts.
- Move our civilization underground. This is something of a temporary fix.
- Terraform Mars, and move there. Doable. Hard, but one of the easier options listed here. Downside is that it’s still only a temporary fix since that’d only buy us time until when the Sun went nova.
- Do nothing.
U fergot kick Bush out of office right now and get someone smater in there that will actully do some about global warming.