In discussions about colonizing outer space, people usually begin with, “Well, first we terraform the moon…”, or, “After we’ve terraformed Mars…” Well, we may be able to tinker around and make an artificial almost-Earth in places where nature wants barren freezing wastelands. But no matter how much we try to pretty-up Mars, or the 93E-2 solar system or whatever, it won’t be exactly right. We evolved on a planet with a twenty-four hour rotation, just this close to the sun, with a moon that has just a certain amount of gravitational pull- why settle for second-best?
Would it be possible for our Very Advanced Civilization to build Earth 2.0 themselves? Maybe find a dead planet the right size, drag it over to a suitable sun, fill the core with molten core stuff, add a moon, and lessee, a Jupiter-sized planet to catch all those pesky asteroids… do you think we might ever be able to do it? What sort of technology will it take? Will we have professional planet designers, making an obscene amount of money and winning awards for their baroque Norwegian fjords? Can we put a spare planet in the same orbit, or would they crash into each other? Would Project Planned Planethood be sponsored by huge corporations, in return for shaping the oceans into the company logo?
Relevant thread on the topic: [post=8766400]How to move a planet?[/post]
In short, the technology required would be virtually indistinguishable from magic. By the time you had the capability to do this, it would be much easier to merely built permanent orbiting colonies, and indeed, modify the human form to be more amenable to survival in interplanetary space.
Not quite. With patience it doesn’t take supertechnology to move a planet; you can do it with repeated close asteroid flybys as it turns out. It’s been suggested as a method of moving Earth away from the Sun as it grows hotter. And with self replicating machines ( aka Von Neumann machines ) everything on a smaller scale could be handled as well; such machines mean that in most situations sheer size isn’t really an insuperable obstacle anymore; you just have the machines replicate until there are enough to accomplish the task.
The real problems are time, and “why bother?” Depending on what you are doing we’d be talking about thousands or even millions* of years to finish. Why take so long when with such technology you could build far, far, far more non-planetary artificial habitats in years instead of millennia or longer?
Example of something that would take millions of years: Using the planet moving technique mentioned above, you move two or more planets that are too small until they impact and merge to form a larger one of the right size. Not only would you need to take a very long time to move the planets; you’d then have to wait more millions of years for it to cool off.
I agree. A planet is a horrible waste of matter. They don’t hold many people and even the best of them don’t work very well, turning into giant snowballs and such every billion years or so. Use your matter to build hollow, spinning habitats. Your only big technological challenge is getting them lit on the inside.
<snip> Will we have professional planet designers, making an obscene amount of money and winning awards for their baroque Norwegian fjords? <snip>
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