In 500 million years, scientists project that the Sun’s expansion will leave the Earth a scorched, uninhabitable rock. Fortunately, researchers at Columbia University are being paid taxpayer dollars and student tuitions to salvage the fate of the planet’s future inhabitants.
Michael Hahn and Daniel Wolf Savin, astrophysics professors at the venerable institution extrapolate on the Earth’s decline and the evasive lifesaving action that the space alien overlords who will inevitably take over the plan should take, in an essay titled "How to Survive Doomsday."
The team of academics have created a survival plan for the distant descendants of humanity, who history suggests will not be able to comprehend contemporary English to enjoy the essay.
Student tuition dollars are funding projects while comfortable tenured professors criticize them for complaining about soaring tuition rates, saying that if they can’t pay it off it is because they are lazy. Columbia University’s tuition is the highest in the US, at about $53,000 per year.
The professor's’ first humanity-saving scheme is to launch a massive asteroid toward the Earth. "If we fired a 100km wide asteroid on an elliptical orbit that passed close to the earth every 5,000 years," the scientists declaimed, "we could slowly gravitationally nudge the planet’s orbit farther away from the sun, provided that we don’t accidentally hit the Earth."
The scientists then broke for lunch, to prepare for the thought processes required to come up with additional ground-breaking ideas.
But seriously, the professors then suggested that an alternative way to maintain the habitability on the Earth would be to attach a giant solar sail to the planet, something at least 20 times the diameter of the planet. Using this method, it is postulated that our Earth could then sail through the galaxy, as Thor Heyerdahl did the Pacific Ocean, on his basket of reeds.
If all else fails, the scientists suggest that humans can simply upload themselves into storage.
Student debt in America now exceeds $1.41 trillion, with over 2/3 of that debt accumulated within the past seven years. Certainly, these wild-eyed research projects are more likely to send students to debtor's prison than they are to save lives, whether in 500 million years or just tomorrow.
