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Yeah, thanks. And I agree; it turns out that planets are really heavy and have an incredible amount of inertia; moving some asteroids around isn't going to cau
by elihu 9y ago
Yeah, thanks.
And I agree; it turns out that planets are really heavy and have an incredible amount of inertia; moving some asteroids around isn't going to cause the Earth to slip on a banana peel and fall into the sun.
The original article about placing 416 Earth-sized planets in a stable orbit does involve a quantity of mass greater than Jupiter (at 317.8 Earth masses), but building habitats out of what we have available in and inside the asteroid belt is a much more modest scope.
- bmcusick 9y agoI love how turning the entirety of the asteroid belt, and maybe Mercury, into livable space stations "is a much more modest scope". :-D Not that I disagree! We also have the Hilda, Trojan, and Greek asteroids (in Jupiter's Lagrange points) to work with. The Jovian and Saturnian moons too. It'll be a long, long time before we need to worry about dismantling the gas giants themselves. On our path towards maximizing the livable land area in the Solar System, I wonder what we will run out of first. It looks like water, iron, carbon, etc. are all pretty abundant. We'll run out of* some rarer element (like Phosphorous or something) before we ever approach maximum constructed land area. *And by "run out of", I mean even with perfect recycling, the spot market demand for the material maintains a price level where it's uneconomical to develop further, barring discovery of new supplies or more efficient usage.
- jeremysmyth 9y agoThis assumes that we don't create such elements as a by-product of fusion or other processes that we develop in parallel with the technology advances required to bring significant industry outside earth's gravity well.