Move the Earth

Did you know that our sun is going to die? In the process of dying, it will expand into a red giant type star and engulf most of the planets in our solar system.

Are you worried about the sun engulfing our planet as it becomes a red giant? You shouldn't be, because it won't destroy all life on the planet for about a billion years. But if you are still worried about the traces of your DNA that might still be mixed in some life form somewhere on earth in a billion years, you still shouldn't be. Scientists are already working on a way to move the earth out away from the sun. The gist of the story is that engineers could move a large space rock past the earth every 6,000 years to slowly increase the earth's orbit. The process of moving the earth to a safe orbit will only take a few hundred million years. No big deal, right? There are also the trivial problems of massive tidal forces and losing our moon. But hey, in a billion years our oddly mutated descendants will all have summer cabins in the Horsehead Nebula, so they probably won't mind so much if earth has no moon.

Interestingly, the same process could be used in the (relatively) short term to move Mars closer to the sun. This would aid significantly in the process of terraforming Mars, because Mars is way too cold where it is!