Advance to help Humanity

[Excited Penguin]

That would take hundreds of years. No government is going to want to put that much money into it, even if it were to mean saving the species. Not saying I'm against it, I'm just being pessimistic about it I guess.

I don't know much about the subject yet ( no one really does I suspect) but yes while it would take a long time most of that time would simply be waiting. Once your done shaping the planetiod and inducing a magnetic field it would be akin to making wine. We would be using natural processes for our own ends. With a whole lot of simply waiting.

I am reading the Spin series now. Very similar plot right there. The earth is encircled by a sort of plasma that makes time be experienced at a different rate than the rest of the universe. Inside this area, for instance, 1 minute equals thousands of years from the outside - I'm not sure about those numbers, but it's something crazy like that. And they just terraformed Mars in order to find out what happened to them. It's really cool.