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How would a society go about either preventing our sun in its primary sequence from going into a Red Giant a billion years from now? Or perhaps, accelerating the process of going from main sequence of our start to a red giant prematurely.

What catalysts would have to happen, implemented by humans, so no natural phenomenon could play a part in it, that would have an impact, even slight, on the future processes of the sun's lifecycle.

Any thoughts or help would be great!!!!

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  • $\begingroup$ Find another star, and bang them together. Easy. Other than that I don't think its possible. Dunno. $\endgroup$
    – Manishearth
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 3:22
  • $\begingroup$ From wikipedia on red giants "Red giants are stars that have exhausted the supply of hydrogen in their cores and switched to thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen in a shell surrounding the core. " further down "When the star exhausts the hydrogen fuel in its core, nuclear reactions in the core stop, so the core begins to contract due to its gravity. This heats a shell just outside the core, where hydrogen remains, initiating fusion of hydrogen to helium in the shell. The higher temperatures lead to increasing reaction rates, $\endgroup$
    – anna v
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 4:17
  • $\begingroup$ There is nothing we can do to influence the sun appreciably. The scale of material and energy resources that we can have on Earth is neglibile compared to Sun's scale. $\endgroup$
    – Slaviks
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 4:18
  • $\begingroup$ producing enough energy to increase the star's luminosity by a factor of 1,000–10,000. The outer layers of the star then expand greatly, beginning the red giant phase ". To change the red giant path one would have to infuse hydrogen to the core. Cannot be done, I think even naturally. If a giant hydrogen filled asteroid fell into the sun now, to reach the core the impact necessary to reach the core would blow up the sun, imo. $\endgroup$
    – anna v
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 4:20
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    $\begingroup$ You could try to introduce new material from interstellar space into the sun. This would be an engineering task on the scale of building a Dyson sphere... You could try to extract material from the sun - somehow intercept a solar prominence and appropriate the plasma, rather than allowing it to fall back? And perhaps you could introduce some sort of exotic matter into the sun that interfered with the fusion process. There was an sf novel in which there were "photino birds", made of supersymmetric particles, which got into stars and did this... $\endgroup$
    – Mitchell Porter
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 4:42

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Sci-fi method: It might still be a competitive in terms of energy expenses options to put all the people into a spacecraft, attain ultrarelativistic velocities, wait a second (or some other necessary time), and then come back to what is left from the Earth. Due to special relativistic time dilation effects during the flight billions of years may pass for the Sun to end its main-sequence phase.

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  • $\begingroup$ Waiting a second will do almost nothing. It's the acceleration that does things. $\endgroup$
    – wizzwizz4
    Commented Oct 27, 2017 at 19:37

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