Red Giant Risk

The Announced Expansion

When its core hydrogen is exhausted, in about five billion years by scientific estimate and 4.8 billion by the Foundation’s planning figure, the Sun will leave the main sequence and enter its red giant phase. Its radius is projected to grow by a factor of well over one hundred, past the orbit of Mercury, past the orbit of Venus, and in several published models to the neighborhood of Earth’s own. Astronomers regard this as one of the best understood events in the Sun’s future, forecast with a confidence most industries reserve for things that have already happened. A facilities professional would recognize it at once as a footprint expansion announced billions of years in advance with no easements filed, no impact study commissioned, and no community meeting held.

The Tenants in the Path

Mercury and Venus sit inside the projected expansion zone, and the peer reviewed literature is unanimous that both will be engulfed. The literature then moves on to other subjects at a pace the Foundation has noted for the record. Neither planet maintains a relocation plan, a forwarding address, or representation of any kind. Earth’s own orbit survives in some models and not in others, a spread of outcomes that would close an amusement park. Well before any expansion, rising luminosity is expected to complicate surface conditions here, a process already underway at roughly 10 percent every 1.1 billion years. The change is gradual, measurable, and unsupervised, which is the combination the Foundation was founded to end.

A Question of Ownership

No government agency, multilateral body, or standards institute has accepted responsibility for red giant planning. Executive Vice President Theodore Ainsworth’s office wrote to the relevant authorities requesting the name of the official who holds the expansion portfolio, and each reply received referred the question to another authority, several of which do not exist. Chief Scientific Relationship Officer Everett Marsh therefore retains the file on an interim basis, an arrangement that has now outlasted three of the agencies consulted. The matter has been raised at 14 stakeholder meetings this cycle, minuted at all of them, and resolved at none, which the Foundation reports plainly because accountability begins with attendance figures.

Planning at the Speed of Prudence

The Foundation does not conduct planetary relocations. It conducts readiness, which is the phase before the phase in which relocations are scoped. Three of our 27 strategic initiatives now address expansion contingencies, including a preliminary framework for identifying which frameworks will be required. This is sober work, done early, on behalf of tenants who have not asked for it and descendants who cannot yet. An inheritance of 4.6 billion years deserves better than a shrug and a range, and with your commitment it will at minimum receive a file.