What is on Your Mind?

Earths orbit will most likely shift (due to the mass loss probably associated with the transition to a red giant), but probably not enough. And even if it does shift to a wider orbit, it's still going to be pretty close to the giants surface. Close enough that the surface will become a giant, oxygen fueled barbecue (assuming a 200 times expansion of the sun, with a surface temperature of 5000K, and an outermost orbit of Earth at 1.7 AU, it's still going to be about 1200° C, if I didn't mess up the math)

actually when the sun becomes a red giant it will already be cooled down because it doesnt have enough fule to produce the warmt, and when the sun becomes a red giant it will lose a lot of mass, so its likely that the earth will shift its orbit and we can survive it for just long enough to see the ice age coming...
sorry for bad english its my second language...

Yep, it will cool down to "just" about 5000K (maybe lower), and have lost about 30% of its mass, allowing earths orbit to widen to about 1.7 AU (all numbers taken from Wikipedia entries on the Sun, and it's evolution). Using these numbers, and assuming a quadratic loss of intensity of radiation (and thus temperature), Earth will still be too hot to allow for liquid water. Or life, since by then the solar wind will most probably have it stripped of the atmosphere.

Let's make sure we burn the forum database to disk and blast it off to another solar system before that happens! We don't want to lose the knowledge base forever

Where the same would happen again a few million years later. And while we are at it I doubt our galaxy is a safe place - galaxies are bound to die somewhen too. Maybe the Lagrange-points of our galaxy and the Andromedagalaxy would do.

Nope, as the two are moving at each other, with the merger starting in about 4.5 billion years (~ 500 million years before the sun becomes a red giant). And our local group of galaxies (including the Milky Way & Andromeda) is moving towards the great attractor, just like other local groups and (super)clusters. So the only really safe place would probably be in a parallel universe, but that would screw up access times big time

Nothing that a new function to Perderabo's datecalc script wouldn't fix