alt Hacker NewsAs you said, luminosity increases. It isn't a matter of survival, it's a physics problem. If a planet absorbs more energy from its star than it's capable of radiating away, it will rise in temperature forever until and unless energy output increases above energy input.
And when you consider that by this point energy input is on a permanent increase, there's really not much you can do apart from moving the whole damn planet out of the way.
It's kind of pointless to speculate what kind of technology we'll have in 500m years (or indeed if there is a 'we' left in the system). The time scale is so enormous that there's simply no way to predict anything at all involving humans or human-derivatives.
The planet (without literally unimaginable intervention) will heat up and become uninhabitable sometime around 500m years from now.
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> there's really not much you can do apart from moving the whole damn planet out of the way.
You can put something in between, a giant sun shade
The interest in speculating, to me at least, is the impact of intelligent life still existing. It puts an upper bound on the life span on single planet species.
I suspect with the right mix of aerosol injection and additional megaengineering of radiators pointing to deep space we could make that work
> If a planet absorbs more energy from its star than it's capable of radiating away, it will rise in temperature forever until and unless energy output increases above energy input.
That’s a really misleading way to describe what going on. The amount of energy radiated into space is a function of temperature, so increasing incoming radiation also increases outgoing radiation. 5% increase in luminosity is roughly 3.5C increase in earths average surface temperatures ignoring other effects.
However, you get a feedback loop as water vapor is a greenhouse gas which makes things hard to model. Here’s a study suggesting the tipping point is on 1 billion years https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216142310.h... but it’s not suggesting the oceans literally boil but rather a transition point where there’s a lot more water in the atmosphere.