Moving earth's orbit a little = no life?

Question

I heard once that if earth was 50 miles closer to the sun in it's orbit, we'd all burn up, and if it was 50 miles farther, we'd all freeze to death. Is this true, and can you provide any sources for/against it?

Answer 1

No this is not true. our orbit is in a constant state of change. with varences of over 100 miles. this is the cause of the seasons, along with the earth's rotation. another thing to think about is drifting, every this in space is drifting. the earth is getting further and further from the sun, only by about 3-4" every 100 years, that does not seem like much untill you think about it in terms of thousands of years. I dont have any webpages to give, but i took astronamy this last semester.

Answer 2

Outer space begins at 62 miles up. To suggest that there would be a difference at 50 miles is ludicrous. And 50 miles is small even compared to the diameter of the Earth. Now, 5-10 million miles and you'll start to see some differences. The Earth's distance from the sun varies annually some 3 million miles.

Answer 3

No, this is not true. 50 miles is peanuts in space. The earth orbits the sun in an ellipse, so that our closest approach to the sun is 147,000,000 km and furthest is 152,000,000 km, making a difference of 5 million kilometers (~3,000,000 miles), and that happens every year!

Now, if you changed the average distance of the earth to the distance of mars, We would get only ~40% of the light and heat we get where the earth is, and if it were where venus is, we would get ~190%. These differences are many more millions of miles, and even then we can't be certain that the change would destroy all life--though in the case of Venus' orbit it would be likely.

Here's where I pulled my numbers from:

Answer 4

No it's not true. There is a place in space called the life zone. That is, In every solar system, there is a place so far from the sun that life is able to live and sustain there. In our case, that's where we are right now. I don't know how big our life zone is, but I know that it's more than 50 miles on each side of Earth. Hope this helps.

Answer 5

Untrue, just do some simple math.

Diameter of Earth orbit - 186,000,000 miles, divide that by your variance of 50 miles and you have a difference of only .00000026881% of the norm.
Do you think that such a small change would affect Earths temperature by hundreds of degrees?

Answer 6

jake it has nothing to do with God or religion... it's just physics... Earth orbits Sun at distance of roughly 150 millions km, on winter that distance is around 145 mil km, and on summer around 155 because of eliptical orbit...
50 miles is very little distance to know the difference, I'll say the distance should be much greater, like 100 mil km, then the temperature would probably be higher...
please don't mess religion with science...

Answer 7

I find that very hard to believe. I don't have the hard numbers but our orbit is elliptical and I believe at certain times of the year we vary our distance to the sun by more than 50 miles.

Sorry I don't have any sources!

Answer 8

Life is more versatile than that. If the Earth were colder or warmer (within limits, of course), life would have evolved to survive in those conditions. That's why some creatures survive in the tropics but would freeze in cold climates, while other creatures survive quite well in the Arctic but would die out in a hot climate.

Answer 9

Not 50 miles but a larger amount would cause that to happen

Answer 10

according to http://www.worldjumpday.org/, we all get a better life if orbit changes. This website asking every body jump in that day to move the orbit.