We’ve all done it – in an idle moment we’ve all imagined how – be it from zombies, nuclear war or an army of Justin Bieber clones – we would survive the apocalypse.
Well, the speculation ends here. Scientists from Columbia University have published an essay titled How To Survive Doomsday, reports the Daily Mail.
Authors of the essay, Michael Hahn and Daniel Wolf Savin have suggested a number of pretty far out methods for surviving the apocalypse.
Their ideas are based on predictions that humans have less than 500 million years left on the planet – well before Earth is swallowed by the sun in six billion years time.
The sun grows brighter by roughly ten percent every billion years and the Earth responds by decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
With less carbon dioxide, plants will die out, oxygen will not be replenished and animals – including humans – will die off.
But even then, there may be some hope for us Earthlings, as the pair have come up with a couple of outrageous ways we could save ourselves.
One idea is to physically move the orbit of Earth:
If we fired a 100 km wide asteroid on an elliptical orbit that passed close to the Earth every 5,000 years, we could slowly nudge the planet’s orbit farther away from the sun.
This would keep the Earth in the ‘habitable zone’ until the sun expands into a red giant, the astrophysicists explain.
Another option is for humans to upload ourselves into machines.
Although this is currently way beyond our capabilities, they say the idea of building our own robotic replacements is definitely feasible:
Doing this would be no easy feat, but we could probably figure it out in the next few hundred million years.
So there you go, we’ll either just move the planet or upload our consciousness into machines, no big deal.
