Having fun at NASA
gabby, on host 206.231.74.18
Wednesday, June 13, 2001, at 20:29:30
This was too cool. It was taken from cato.org, but it will be gone tomorrow, so I'll post the whole article here.
gab"Could I get paid to figure these things out?"by
Under the headline, "NASA Aims to Move Earth," The Observer of London reports that scientists have found an unusual way to prevent our planet from overheating by moving the planet to a cooler spot.
This startling idea of improving our interplanetary neighborhood is the brainchild of a group of NASA engineers and astronomers who say their plan could add another six billion years to the useful lifetime of our planet.
"The technology is not at all far-fetched," said Dr. Greg Laughlin, of the NASA Ames Research Center in California. "It involves the same techniques that people now suggest could be used to deflect asteroids or comets heading towards Earth. We don't need raw power to move Earth, we just require delicacy of planning and maneuvering."
The plan put forward by Laughlin and his colleagues Don Korycansky and Fred Adams, involves carefully directing a comet or asteroid so that it sweeps closely past our planet and transfers some of its gravitational energy to Earth.
"Earth's orbital speed would increase as a result and we would move to a higher orbit away from the Sun," Laughlin said.
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