/sci/ - Science & Math

Well, a type II culture would be obscenely powerful. It's a stretch to say we could become that powerful without leaving our solar system.

>3 million Earths
EGAD

>>3523715

That part actually made sense to me. If you're trying to maximize habitable surface area, a standard planet ( a ball shape) is HORRIBLY inefficient.

>>3523683

This right here is the problem. In order to become a Type II civilization (by definition, a civilization capable of harvesting almost all of the energy from its central star), you basically need to build a Dyson sphere. A Ringworld isn't as good, but it's far more practical (I believe a Dyson sphere at 1AU from our sun would require more matter than is available in the solar system). Once you have one such structure, you have a huge amount of power to work with, and building others becomes much easier. The problem is finding the energy required to build the first one. To advance to a Type II civilization, you would probably build a Ringworld in segments: as each segment is complete, you can use its energy output to build the next segment more quickly.

Is there even enough material/matter to construct something 1/10th that big?

Since the frame would have to be made of strong materials like steel in order to survive cosmic micrometeorites, how on this solar system are we going to get the materials for it?

We'd have to strip mine the meteor belt and maybe another damn planet.Probably Mars, it's the closest, and since it doesnt seem to be geologically active, it wont be very useful to us in a colonization sense- Mars will never be more than a barren wasteland, even if were to live 10 lifespans.

Then we would need something with a big gravity to shield our poor ringworld from most micro meteorites.

This isnt even Mega Scale Construction, it's something else.

>>3523806

The chapter claims that we'd have to cannibalize the entire planetary mass of the solar system to pull it off, and that we'd use small-scale space habitats (Namely Cole Planetoids forged from the asteroid belt) to form a Dyson Swarm for the energy.

>>3523806
>We'd have to strip mine the meteor belt and maybe another damn planet.Probably Mars, it's the closest, and since it doesnt seem to be geologically active, it wont be very useful to us in a colonization sense- Mars will never be more than a barren wasteland, even if were to live 10 lifespans.

Fuck off, you're not laying a finger on Mars.

>>3523866

We should launch it on a trajectory into the sun. Just for kicks.

>>3523874

>>3523885
>that image

>>3523866
You know I used to dig Mars, but it's not gonna be useful to us as a species, and we gotta look out for number one.

The whole place is geologically stable- too stable, the planet's geological activity means that there's no benefit for an additional temperature rise, or the blessing of volcanic activities and processes on the environment.

It's just outside of the "habitable zone", which means in our sons's sons's sons's lifetime, the place will never be hospitable. he Martian atmosphere contains about 95.3% carbon dioxide (CO2) and 2.7% nitrogen, with the remainder a mixture of other gases. However, it is a very thin atmosphere, roughly 100 times less dense than Earth's atmosphere.

So, really, no usefull resources here for human habitation.

It's a big mining colony prospect, nothing more.

In theory the center of gravity of the ringworld, which will be the point of origin of the circle that is it's shape, can orbit the sun, so it won't eventually fall into the sun. Not sure if any material can withstand the stresses of the structure though, haven't done the math.

If it is feasible it's pointless. If civilization has reached that point chances are it's not human anymore. You'll probably have quantum computers and nanomachines or something and they might prefer to build a dyson swarm of solar panels.

>>3523903
Haven't heard of terraforming, have you? It is on the outskirts of the habitable zone. What we define as the Goldilocks Zone is actually quite hazy. Even with Mars' incredibly thin atmosphere we have witnessed that water exists on Mars in at least two forms, ice and water. And yesterday in a Mars-related thread, someone suggested that Mars' core is TOO HOT to have a magnetic field due to the sulfur drastically lowering the freezing point of the FeNi core.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars#Climate
>. Martian surface temperatures vary from lows of about −87 °C (−125 °F) during the polar winters to highs of up to −5 °C (23 °F) in summers.[44] The wide range in temperatures is due to the thin atmosphere which cannot store much solar heat, the low atmospheric pressure, and the low thermal inertia of Martian soil.

As I've said before, we will become gods. The creators of worlds.