NASA: A History of the U.S. Civil Space Program Book

Saskatchewan astronomer Martin Beech's Rejuvenating the Sun and Avoiding Other Global Catastrophes is a slim book that more than satisfies my interest in radical futurology, with its talk of remodeling entire planetary systems, what Beech calls "asteroengineering." It reminds me of the far-future space opera Orion's Arm, where humans and their ally species and their created species and guardian artificial intelligences combine to make the galaxy that much more hospitable to intelligent life, whether through terraforming once-sterile environments or transforming solar systems into vast arcologies.

Although Beech is concerned with asteroid impacts, Rejuvenating the Sun is most concerned with the aging of the sun. Aging Sol will become a swollen red giant in five billion years, but long before that fate the heating sun will make Earth's present environment unsustainable in several hundred million years. Earth might avoid becoming a Venus-like world for a couple billion years after that. If, Beech suggests, we care for our world, surely we should try to keep it--and its sister worlds, too, Venus and Mars, hopefully rendered Earth-like themselves--a living world for as long as possible.

How is this to be accomplished? A relatively simple method Beech outlines is the gradual shifting of Earth's orbit further out of the solar system, through encounters with well-placed asteroids which pull Earth out as Sol's energy output grows, thus keeping the climate stable. Far more radical means would involve sharply reducing the sun's mass, using barely imagined technologies--solar sail arrays, magnetic field projectors, hypervelocity asteroid bombardments--to vapourize entire layers of our star, directing its mass towards--somewhere. Perhaps it could be used to create some very durable low-mass stars in the Oort cloud.

Rejuvenating the Sun has structural flaws. An extended essay, really, Beech gets to the point of his book only in the last couple of chapters, leaving interested readers like myself bored, and his style of writing could be stilted (the narratives are unappealing). That said, I was an interested reader. I'm interested in astronomy and science; I'm interested in science fiction; I am, for any number of reasons, interested in preserving things, in extending things to new environments. The idea terraformed Solar System really appeals to me, and I couldn't help but agree with others who read about the Epsilon Aurigae dust clouds and wondered if someone had built something there. Beech did a good job in writing about a highly speculative subject of no small interest to me but of little interest to others. How can I do anything but be glad that this book exists and was available to me?