While they have similar life cycles, ending up as white dwarfs, red dwarfs are much less massive than our sun. Thus, our sun can’t turn into a red dwarf without somehow loosing a significant amount of mass.
Alos, in the case of our sun, before it becomes a white dwarf, it will balloon up into a red giant and consume everything out to about the orbit of Earth. Any life on Earth at that time will be wiped out even if the planet itself doesn’t get dragged down into the sun.
If you were to do that, the Goldilocks zone would move inward as the Sun’s energy output dropped. So all the life on Earth would still die because the Earth would freeze.
Still, since you have the tech to remove mass from a star, you would also surely have the ability to move the earth inward to keep it in the Goldilocks zone. But that still might not work. Being so much closer to the Sun, the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere might not be sufficient to block flares and CMEs.
Check out some of Larry Niven’s Known Space stuff. The Pak Protectors built Ringworlds and the Puppetteer homeworlds were moved into a Klemperer rosette formation so they could take them all with them as they fled the galaxy.
While they have similar life cycles, ending up as white dwarfs, red dwarfs are much less massive than our sun. Thus, our sun can’t turn into a red dwarf without somehow loosing a significant amount of mass.
Alos, in the case of our sun, before it becomes a white dwarf, it will balloon up into a red giant and consume everything out to about the orbit of Earth. Any life on Earth at that time will be wiped out even if the planet itself doesn’t get dragged down into the sun.
I fail to mention it, but I had Astro engineering in mind. IE, artificially remove mass from the sun
If you were to do that, the Goldilocks zone would move inward as the Sun’s energy output dropped. So all the life on Earth would still die because the Earth would freeze.
Still, since you have the tech to remove mass from a star, you would also surely have the ability to move the earth inward to keep it in the Goldilocks zone. But that still might not work. Being so much closer to the Sun, the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere might not be sufficient to block flares and CMEs.
but we could remove mass slowly to avoid it from expanding and consuming the earth.
Stellar engineering isn’t talked enough in science fiction
Check out some of Larry Niven’s Known Space stuff. The Pak Protectors built Ringworlds and the Puppetteer homeworlds were moved into a Klemperer rosette formation so they could take them all with them as they fled the galaxy.