3 ms·

It has, however, a tremendous value for building Dyson swarms and other megastructures.

• lmilcin 5y ago
  I disagree. Tell me, how putting actual human on Mercury helps building a megastructure? It is not like they will be able to do shit while on the surface of Mercury. They would be just sitting idle in a single polar crater that happens to be shaded from Sun and have access to water. Then if you want to send anything to an orbit where you would want to build Dyson sphere you would actually have to expend more energy than if you tried to send it from surface of Earth. That makes absolutely no sense. I think these types of megastructures will be built by swarms of autonomous drone ships that can collectively gather, transform and deliver resources, use gathered resources to produce more drones and use the rest of resources to build whatever megastructure has been programmed in.
  • Valgrim 5y ago
    Mercury has a some great advantages for a Dyson swarm: - It is extremely metals and mineral rich, perfect for building the billions of giant mirrors required for a Dyson swarm. -It's already really close to the sun, so you don't need as much energy to get your mirrors in a lower solar orbit, compared to earth. -Because it's close to the sun, it receives a lot more energy too, which can be used to power machine and... -It has no atmosphere and little gravity, so the swarm can be launched with simple electromagnetic mass drivers. -It has plenty of water, so the few human operators required to control the machines remotely in real-time can live very comfortably at the poles (or in deep trenches in lower latitudes). I agree that human colonization of Mercury is going to remain very limited, only because of the trouble of landing there. But you won't find a better planet to mine and launch billions of mirrors.