There are several ways we could alter Earth's orbit so it is in a spot further away from the Sun.
In the Chinese science fiction film The Wandering Earth, recently released on Netflix, humanity attempts to change the Earth’s orbit using enormous thrusters in order to escape the expanding sun—and prevent a collision with Jupiter.
We have been devising techniques to move small bodies—asteroids—from their orbit for many years, mainly to protect our planet from impacts. Some are based on an impulsive, and often destructive, action: A nuclear blast near or on the surface of the asteroid, or a “kinetic impactor," for example a spacecraft colliding with the asteroid at high velocity. These are clearly not applicable to Earth due to their destructive nature.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is the most capable launch vehicle today. We would need 300 billion billion launches at full capacity in order to achieve the orbit change to Mars. The material making up all these rockets would be equivalent to 85 percent of the Earth, leaving only 15 percent of Earth in Mars orbit.
Sailing on lightAs light carries momentum, but no mass, we may also be able to continuously power a focused light beam, such as a laser. The required power would be collected from the sun, and no Earth mass would be consumed. Even using the enormous 100GW laser plant envisaged by the Breakthrough Starshot project, which aims to propel spacecraft out of the solar system to explore neighboring stars, it would still take three billion billion years of continuous use to achieve the orbital change.
But what if we could perform a slingshot, using something much more massive than a spacecraft? Asteroids can certainly be redirected by the Earth, and while the mutual effect on Earth’s orbit will be tiny, this action can be repeated numerous times to ultimately achieve a considerable Earth orbit change.
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