I 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

I 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.