{"id":242165,"date":"2026-08-04T01:30:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T06:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/how-to-keep-the-earth-habitable-when-the-sun-dies"},"modified":"2026-08-04T01:30:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T06:30:58","slug":"how-to-keep-the-earth-habitable-when-the-sun-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/how-to-keep-the-earth-habitable-when-the-sun-dies","title":{"rendered":"How to keep the Earth habitable when the sun dies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-to-keep-the-earth-habitable-when-the-sun-dies.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In a billion years, the sun will start to run out of fuel and expand to become a red giant. Earth\u2019s oceans and atmosphere will be burned away, and Earth will likely be engulfed by the sun altogether. The sun will then shrink to a dim white dwarf, and all light and warmth in the solar system will diminish. In a hundred trillion years, the galaxy\u2019s ability to produce stars will be exhausted, and everything will turn dark. However, there\u2019s a way for life to escape this fate\u2014and what\u2019s more, we wouldn\u2019t need to leave the planet to do it. We just need to build some safeguards.<\/p>\n<p>First problem\u2014the sun. To block it out, we can place a large sunshade at the Lagrange point 1 (a gravitational balancing spot between the sun and Earth). We\u2019d need to cover a huge 70-degree area of the sky to ensure the red giant would be eclipsed.<\/p>\n<p>To reduce the required area of our sunshade, we can place a weight at Lagrange point 1, attach a long cable and place the shade close to Earth, just outside the moon\u2019s orbit. We could mine 40% of the dwarf planet Ceres to produce a carbon tether 2 million km (1.2 million miles) long, and 0.01% of the moon to produce an aluminum sunshade 350,000 km (217,000 miles) in radius.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a billion years, the sun will start to run out of fuel and expand to become a red giant. Earth\u2019s oceans and atmosphere will be burned away, and Earth will likely be engulfed by the sun altogether. The sun will then shrink to a dim white dwarf, and all light and warmth in the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}