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Asked by anon-175412 to Alex, Ella, hayleypincott, Thomas on 21 Jun 2018.
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Thomas Perriment answered on 21 Jun 2018:
I don’t think it’s likely that we will ever have the technology to help with that! The issue with the sun burning out isn’t temperature or radiation, but fuel. As the nuclear reactions occur, that fuel is used up and will eventually deplete. It would be next to impossible for humans to ever collect and deliver enough fuel (hydrogen!) to sustain the sun!
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Hayley Pincott answered on 21 Jun 2018:
I wouldn’t think that was possible just because of the size and energy of the Sun I don’t think we could get close enough to study the Sun in the detail we would need to to figure it out. The Sun is such a huge force it will do it’s own thing, including one day dying, we can’t stop stars dying it’s just their natural lifecycle. However as I’ve said a few times before when I’ve answered questions it’s a good thing to always question what we know because that’s how we find new things out, so maybe it would be possible however at the moment with the information we have I don’t think it’s likely.
Comments
anon-175412 commented on :
Thank you. It is nothing to worry about for us as is lt will happen in billions of years but just thinking about it one day humans on earth won’t exist!!
David commented on :
I actually did the calculation on this once. Depends on what you allow to happen.
A lot of this is based on technology we don;t have, so it may as well be magic.
If you pull off about 2/3rd of the mass of the sun and reform it into gas-giant planets, then drop a small blackhole into the sun, you will effectively kill the sun. Not a good start.
But now you have a black hole, which you can orbit the earth around. You also have a lot of mass stored up on the planets you made from the sun. Blackholes are massively more efficient at turning mass into energy than stars are.
So you slowly drop into the blackhole bits of planet. This generates energy and keeps Earth warm and lit.
You should be able to get at least 10 billion years from this. That’s before you have to chuck in the out planets (neptune, uranus, saturn, jupiter) – they will give another billion years or so.
By then the black-hole sun will probably have come close to some other stars, so we can steal mass from them to keep feeding the black-hole. In theory you can keep going as long as there is mass.
This does rely on rather a lot of magic technology, and humans being able to plan engineering on the time-scale of billions of years. I’m not hopeful.
Thomas commented on :
Great point! A huge part of science is protecting the world from people and people from the world, moving into the future (millions of years!) we need to look at protecting people from risks outside of our planet!