i had a book on mathematics as a child, actually my parents had it but they haven’t missed it yet (ooops, hi dad!), which had an explanation of levers and how given a long enough lever a man (or woman, or even small girl just getting interested in maths and science) could move the earth. the idea of being able to move large objects with minimal force blew my mind at the time.

now i find people are proposing ways of moving the earth for real:

we don’t need raw power to move earth, we just require delicacy of planning and manoeuvring. the idea is to counteract global warming (and in the really long term also counteract the warming up of the sun) by throwing a large object at the earth and changing its orbit just a little. effectively we’d be playing snooker with planets and an asteroid cue ball.

one consequence of this would be that:

any alien astronomers observing our solar system would know that something odd had occurred, and would realise an intelligent lifeform was responsible.

‘and the same goes for us. when we look at other solar systems, and detect planets around other suns - which we are now beginning to do - we may see that planet-moving has occurred. it will give us our first evidence of the handiwork of extraterrestrial beings.’

my mind is blown once again by that!

[found via powazek]