The other one is that if we were to disasemble all our planets (we can leave earth alone for sentimental reasons) and rebuild them in shells around our sun we could create as much habitable living area as the surface of every natural planet (habitable or not) in our entire galaxy. Plus the whole thing would fit inside the orbit of mercury which means very low light lag. Why build a galaxy spanning empire when you can just build a galaxy at home and have much better ping?
So I’m doing this calculation as I write this comment so I’m commited regardless of the outcome.
The sun is (roughly) 2 x 10^30 kg
The sun makes up 99.86% of the solar systems mass
That leaves about 2.8 x 10^27kg of mass in the planets and asteroids.
Earth weighs about 3000kg/m^3 at the surface
I’m going to assume the shells are about 1km thick, or maybe 500m but with an extra 500m worth of stuff in a more condensed form as structural support.
So 1km of surface requires 1km^3 of material or 3 x 10^12 kg of material.
Assuming we can get all of the solar systems material and use nuclear fusion to turn all of the gas into heavier elements (I assume anyone dismantling solar systems has workd out fusion) that results in about 9.3 x 10^14 square km of living space. about 1.83 million earths.
The total surface area of the solar system (with rough guesses for the size of the rocky cores of the gas giants is about 9.8 x 10^9 square km.
Since we can’t really detect small planets in other solar systems I’m going to assume they all have roughly the same amount of planet as our own one. So all in all we get just under 100,000 solar systems worth of living surface.
Ok so its actually about 0.1% of the milky way in terms of living space at best. But thats still pretty damn good and its all withing fairly managable lightspeed communication range of just a few minutes delay at worst. And we could get to 100x that if we could do starlifting and removed just 14% of the suns mass.
The other one is that if we were to disasemble all our planets (we can leave earth alone for sentimental reasons) and rebuild them in shells around our sun we could create as much habitable living area as the surface of every natural planet (habitable or not) in our entire galaxy. Plus the whole thing would fit inside the orbit of mercury which means very low light lag. Why build a galaxy spanning empire when you can just build a galaxy at home and have much better ping?
Oh, a theory pushed by people that have no idea about the size of a galaxy? I like it.
So I’m doing this calculation as I write this comment so I’m commited regardless of the outcome.
Assuming we can get all of the solar systems material and use nuclear fusion to turn all of the gas into heavier elements (I assume anyone dismantling solar systems has workd out fusion) that results in about 9.3 x 10^14 square km of living space. about 1.83 million earths.
The total surface area of the solar system (with rough guesses for the size of the rocky cores of the gas giants is about 9.8 x 10^9 square km.
Since we can’t really detect small planets in other solar systems I’m going to assume they all have roughly the same amount of planet as our own one. So all in all we get just under 100,000 solar systems worth of living surface.
Ok so its actually about 0.1% of the milky way in terms of living space at best. But thats still pretty damn good and its all withing fairly managable lightspeed communication range of just a few minutes delay at worst. And we could get to 100x that if we could do starlifting and removed just 14% of the suns mass.
Hum… Well, just try to calculate how much mass/m^2 of area your arrangement uses. You’ll see the problem.
Dyson Sphere
Induced demand. Once you build a galaxy at home with good ping, its going to fill up and then you’re going to need another.