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But you do still need the stuff they are made of... There is much more useful mass of material in a planet than even a pile of asteroids... In fact, until you
by techdragon 4y ago
But you do still need the stuff they are made of...
There is much more useful mass of material in a planet than even a pile of asteroids... In fact, until you start gathering up the entire Oort Cloud (current best estimates put the entire Oort Cloud as x5 earth masses). From the inner solar system you don't even have as much mass in asteroids and comets to equal the mass of smaller "planets". It's not a stretch to imagine that you want concentrated mass to facilitate efficient industrial scale operations. It takes time and energy to drag lots of small mass together to build a big interstellar ship. So your hypothetical interstellar civilisation might want to break up large rocky planets into smaller "low gravity" chunks for processing, which if your an interstellar civilisation, is probably best done by slamming nice dense metal mass into the planet at high speed to throw big molten chunks of it into orbit, you want larger than dinosaur killer size glancing hits, not planet cracking "the moon hits earth" sized ones. This whole process gets much easier once you strip away the atmosphere as well.
- D-Coder 4y agoIt doesn't take a planet-full of stuff to build a space city. And dragging it up a gravity well is an extra step.
- techdragon 4y agoI’m assuming an interstellar civilisation wants to build a lot of space cities and starships and anything else… like a lot on the sort of scale that justifies being an interstellar civilisation, enough space cities for trillions is going to take a lot of material. And as for the extra step… That’s why I said they might want to reduce that gravity well by breaking up the planet.
- mozey 4y agoOn earth advancements in technology, education, and especially woman's rights quickly lead to reduced or even negative population growth. So maybe interstellar civilisation won't need that many space cities
- techdragon 4y agoWho knows! Perhaps one of the necessary steps to conquering the distance between the stars is to develop robust robotics and the ability to somehow convert their consciousness into computer forms and cast off all the needs of their former fleshy bodies… vastly transforming the needs of such a society to primarily needing computers and energy for “sustenance”.
- m4rtink 4y agoThe most stuff is always locked up in stars, which are not very efficient as they just radiate most of their energy to the void of space, which is hard to all collect even with a Dyson Swarm. Better feed it into an artificial black hole and the fish out all the nice heavy elements from the accreation disk! https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464790d2497de https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464790d2497de