Earlier this year, I wrote a short story called "Old Earth," which involved our planet long after most of the stars in the universe had died. Several people felt that was implausible, because the Earth would have been swallowed by the sun when the sun became a red giant.
Of course I’d been familiar with that idea since childhood, but by the time I wrote the story, the Earth’s demise due to the sun’s expansion was no longer certain. Late last year, I’d read about the possibility that the Earth would survive, because the sun would lose mass before becoming a red giant, and Earth’s orbit would move outward. Therefore, the Earth’s survival in my story was not implausible, according to the most recent research. But my readers didn’t know about that research, so they incorrectly thought my story to be implausible.
Then, after I’d written my story, even newer research came out, showing that the tidal forces between Earth and a red giant sun would cause the Earth to be swallowed up after all. My story, which had been incorrectly deemed implausible when I wrote it, could now be correctly deemed implausible.
But given that scientists are constantly discovering things that would have been considered implausible prior to the discovery, like humans living in Europe 500,000 years earlier than previously thought, isn’t it plausible that some new discovery will make Earth’s survival of the red giant phase plausible again? And if such a discovery is plausible, doesn’t that mean that Earth’s survival is, in fact, already plausible?
