Orion's Cold Fire

Let us speculate that humanity survives its intellectual infancy.  Let’s imagine that it’s now 10,000 A.D. (that’s right, the Year of the Lord) and our smartest Earth scientists have calculated that by 100,000 A.D. the Earth’s magnetic field is going to shut down for good.  I have no reason to believe this is an accurate number.  By all accounts we should have many millions of years on the warranty for the magnetic field but just let’s say for the sake of discussion it will.

Well, there we are ultra-modern humans with a world government, a genetically engineered genome that includes a third set of teeth and a three-hundred-year lifespan.  We hear that our distant descendants are going to lose their atmosphere, oceans and have to wear SPF 50,000 rated sunscreen for days at the {dry) beach.  So, what will they do?  Well, with a ninety-thousand-year window of opportunity, if they’re my descendants they’ll probably waste the first twenty thousand years dithering.  After that they’ll start engineering the crap out of their options.  But what will that be?  Let me try to guess.

So, the Earth’s liquid iron core produces a magnetic field because it is a moving electric field.  So, all we have to do is produce a moving electric field between Earth’s atmosphere and the sun (and to a lesser extent all of the universe around us.  Well then shouldn’t we install solar panels in orbit around the Earth and run a current through a really long piece of copper wire that is moving and thereby set up an electromagnet?  Now someone with any kind of electrical engineering knowledge or a physicist who specializes in E-M would slap me across the face and say, “What the hell are you rambling about?”  And he would be right.  But just for the sake of getting through this exercise let’s say that it is theoretically possible to have a framework around the Earth that converts solar energy into enough of a moving electric field to induce a magnetic field as strong as the current field we enjoy today.

Postulating that, is it technically feasible?  Or would the amount of mass needed to create this device be completely ridiculous from the point of view of the energy needed to boost it into space ?  Would the weight of the conductive material and the photoelectric cells be just so enormous that it would be beyond all of the resources of even a distant future civilization to put in orbit from Earth?

Now this is a cheat.  I don’t know the answer.  I haven’t tried to estimate the amount of material needed to produce such an enormous electrical field.  Something with a diameter of more than 24,000 miles and with the structural integrity that that requires seems absurd.  I, of course am aware of the science fiction convention of a ring or (Dyson) sphere around a star used to harness some significant portion of the energy output of the fusion reaction going on inside every star but I don’t know that anyone with enough of a technical background has tried to do a back of the envelope calculation to see if the numbers are just too scary to make any sense.

So, I’ll throw this one out to the readership.  What have you heard?

Human beings of one sort or another have existed on this planet for a few million years.  But only in the last ten thousand years have we existed above the level of stone age hunter-gatherers.  And only for the last five hundred years have we begun to understand the rudiments of science at a level high enough to give us a glimpse of what surrounds us in the universe. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton began opening up the window to what the Earth is and how it interacts with the Sun and the Moon and how we are related to the other planets and just how far away the stars really are.

And because this knowledge is only a few hundred years old I guess I should forgive us for not having thought deeply enough about what our future looks like and what things should be on our list of stuff to think about.  For instance, only recently have planetary scientists started asking why are all the other planets completely unfit to sustain life?  And this may seem like a silly question but look at it by asking the inverse question, “How did Earth win the jackpot and have basically everything we need to make this place a paradise stuck in the middle of a series of hells.  We’ve got the right distance from the Sun.  We’ve got a molten iron core to produce a strong magnetic field to protect us from solar and cosmic radiation.  We’ve got a deep atmosphere.  We’ve got liquid water in abundance.  We’ve got all of the chemical elements available due to vulcanism.  And most importantly we’ve got life in absolute abundance.

Now look at the rest of the planets.  Mercury is ridiculously close to a titanic fusion reactor.  Venus and Mars are close to the habitable zone in terms of solar orbit.  But Venus is a greenhouse oven and Mars is a frozen lifeless ball with no atmosphere to speak of and no water.  As for the outer planets they’re not even close to being places where life could even start.  Jupiter is more like a failed star and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are frozen hells where liquid nitrogen takes the place of water.  A case could be made that some of the moons of Jupiter and the other gas giants may have subsurface oceans of liquid water underneath thick layers of ice.  And due to magnetic interaction with their primary world, they could be at temperatures and pressures where life is theoretically possible to exist.  Sure.  Why not?

But once we get a little smarter and a little more organized it’s going to be time to start thinking about what challenges will planet Earth be faced with in the distant future.  Now, I’m not specifically talking about the distant future, billions of years from now when the Sun runs out of hydrogen and starts becoming a red giant.  That’s too far in the future for even me to worry about.  But as a for instance, what happens if the magnetic poles switch off and then reverse direction?  That sounds kind of crazy but it does happen fairly regularly.  And sometimes the field just weakens significantly like the last one about 42,000 years ago.  If the field disappears soon, it would probably wreak havoc with all of our satellites that currently benefit from the Earth’s field protecting them from charged particles to a greater or lesser extent.

Now things like this have been postulated in science fiction stories but when we get around to growing up, we will have to spend a good amount of time figuring out how much time we have before the Earth starts reaching its middle age and stuff starts working less optimally.  I’ll think about some “for instances” in the next installment.