stop the earth from getting closer to the sun?

Question

how do you think we got out of the ice age? by orbiting closer to the sun. Thats to simple a solution isn't it?

Answer 1

That is a simple idea that has some basis in fact. We know that the Earth's orbit is not totally stable at the fine level over long time scales, and there are cycles (Milankovitch cycles ) that may cause the Earth to sometimes experience more or less heating from the Sun. But those cycles take millions of years. And they don't really correlate with the geological record of ice ages anyway.

Note that the Sun is gradually getting hotter; it is 30% hotter now than it was when life first appeared on Earth. So why wasn't the Earth frozen back then? Because it had WAY more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then and global warming kept the planet warm. In the billions of years since then, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has gone down at JUST the right rate to keep the Earth at a nice temperature as the Sun got hotter. The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological theory that proposes that the living matter of planet Earth functions like a single organism, and it is actively keeping conditions on Earth just right for itself. But today, almost ALL the carbon dioxide has been removed from the atmosphere and trapped in limestone and other geological formations. So in a mere few hundred million years, the Sun will boil away the oceans and all life on Earth will end. Unless we can move the Earth's orbit farther from the Sun. It is possible our technologically advanced decedents will be able to do that, but that is SO far in the future that, who really cares anyway! Meanwhile, Al Gore is saying we are messing with Gaia and causing the active control to fail by burning so much coal and oil. It's not nice to fool mother nature!

Answer 2

The Earth would eventually reach about 3 degrees above absolute zero, but only after the radioactivity in the core ceased and this would take many thousands of years to happen. The planets would immediately travel in straight lines,(except for their effects on each other). Sunlight would disappear from Earth after about 8 minutes. Gravitational effects would be instantaneous. Consider black holes, if light can't escape, how can gravity get out? Nobody knows how fast gravity is.

Answer 3

We had an ice age due to the shifting of the continents, and the oceans reaction to the shifting. During shifting of the plates, ocean channels were blocked by new land being formed, and no warm water was carried to the North pole. Then both poles formed glaciers. Eventually, things shifted again, as they will, and we warmed up again.

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Answer 4

which ice age?

A comet/astroid impact? A shift in continental plates? A cycle change? A magnetic pole shift? A major upheval in planetary orbit?

Answer 5

That was more to do with the Earth's ability to regulate the conditions.