Is the earth drifting away from the sun or being pulled in to the sun?
First of all, the Sun consumes its own supply of hydrogen and helium for nuclear fusion, a process that will take at least 10 billion years before the fuel supply is exhausted. The Sun is about 5 billion years old, so we’ve got another 5 billion years to go, give or take a billion year. Second, whether the Earth’s orbit is decaying toward or away from the Sun, it really doesn’t matter because the orbit is changing at such a slow rate that it’ll take billions of years for the change to be even noticeable. For example, the Moon used to be much closer to the Earth when it was first formed (it appeared 4 times bigger in the sky about 4.5 billion years ago). Its orbit is decaying away from Earth, but it’ll be billions of years in the future before it’ll drift out of Earth’s gravitational influence.
