CONCERNED scientists have revealed how we can prevent the human race from being wiped out — and it involves either changing our planet’s orbit or uploading ourselves into machines.

In around 500 million years, scientists believe that the Sun’s expansion will leave our planet completely uninhabitable, with conditions so unforgiving that the Earth will return to being the scorched, lifeless lump of rock it once was.

However, there is still hope for Earth’s future inhabitants, as researchers claim there are extreme measures we may be able to go to in humanity’s hour of need.

Columbia University astrophysicists Michael Hahn and Daniel Wolf Savin explain how life on Earth will slowly begin to decline in an essay entitled ‘How to Survive Doomsday’.

Assuming that humanity can avoid a self-inflicted nuclear apocalypse or a deadly asteroid strike, our species has less than 500 million years left on the planet.

However, before we’re wiped out for good, our distant descendants may be able to save the species by physically moving Earth’s orbit.

“If we fired a 100km wide asteroid on an elliptical orbit that passed close to the Earth every 5,000 years, we could slowly gravitationally nudge the planet’s orbit farther away from the sun, provided that we don’t accidentally hit the Earth,” the scientists responsible for the prediction wrote.

An alternative way to keep the earth within the Sun’s habitable zone is to attach a giant solar sail to the planet, which would need to be at least 20 times the diameter of Earth.

This would theoretically drag our planet away from the expanding Sun in the same way a regular sail uses the wind to move a boat.

“Strategies like these could, in principle, keep the Earth in the habitable zone until the sun expands into a red giant,” the astrophysicists explain.

Perhaps the strangest survival option involves humans uploading themselves into machines.

While this is far beyond our current abilities, researchers claim that the idea may be feasible in the future.

The reason for this distant doomsday scenario is all due to the expansion of the Sun, which will probably completely melt the Earth in 6 billion years’ time.

However, the Earth will be rendered uninhabitable long before that, with our planet decreasing its natural levels carbon dioxide as the Sun grows brighter.

With our star becoming brighter at a rate of roughly 10 per cent every billion years, there’s still a long way to go before the Earth runs out of carbon dioxide — something which will result in the death of all plant life on the planet.

With most other species relying on plants to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, this would spell trouble for the rest of us, unless we can employ the drastic measures recommended by scientists.