Dear Evil Engineer,
As a yeti, I often wish that millions of years of evolution had better prepared me for life on a planet with average temperatures well above freezing. I tend not to stray far from the Arctic – which severely limits my career opportunities – but global heating is rendering even that habitat smaller and sweatier by the year.
Would it be possible to nudge the Earth into a higher orbit around the Sun and bring down surface temperatures to something more comfortable?
Yours,
A yeti
Dear villain,
You will be pleased to hear that the question of moving the Earth into a different, higher orbit has been given more serious thought than questions of this magnitude usually are. Even given humans’ limited lifespans, they have difficulty accepting that the Sun will eventually balloon into a red giant and engulf the Earth (this is expected to occur in seven billion years, though there are just 1.1 billion years until the Sun grows bright enough to...