Are Scientists Smarter Than Me?

I ran across this headline while cruising the internet last night:

Hope Dims That Earth Will Survive Sun's Death

Well, Duh?

The article goes on to say this:

"The future looks bright for the earth - but not in the way we'd hoped. The slim chance our planet will survive when the Sun begins it's death throes has been ruled out.

In a few billion years, the Sun will fuse the last of it's hydrogen into helium, turn into a red giant and expand to 250 times it's current size. At first, the Sun's loss of mass will loosen it's gravitational pull on Earth, which will allow the planet to migrate to a wider orbit about 7.6 bilion years from now.

This process had led some to specualte that the Earth might escape destruction - but survival now seems impossible, says Peter Schroder of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico and Robert Smith of the University of Sussex in the UK."

Now I may not be the brightest crayon in the box, but I do think I've got the whole "Earth-Sun- thing" figured out. I think I learned it in about the third grade. Apparently they've just now concluded that, if the sun burns out we're all toast.

Why do I suspect that a lot of serious time and energy (not to mention money) went in to making this brilliant "scientific" determination?

They should have called me last Saturday. With my wife out of town I had some time to kill. I could have helped them figure this out.