The Omniscient Eye
Can We Make More Room For Our Stuff?
In many a sci-fi story, one finds artificial planets and such having been constructed. So my simple question is: in a reasonably realistic SF RPG, what would be required to make an artificial planet, a Dyson Sphere, a Ringworld or even a Death Star?
--H.B. SebaIn short: lots of mass in the right place.
The first stage of any large-scale construction project will probably use asteroids. They're abundant, and small enough to be plausibly moved with only moderate technological advances from the present day.
Just a single asteroid or comet may well be enough artificial world for a small population; habitats can be built on the surface or tunnelled in for protection against radiation and debris. In more extreme cases, a metallic asteroid may be converted into a larger useful area by explosive centrifugal forming: the asteroid is cored and the hollow filled with water, then the whole body is spun and heated with reflected sunlight until the metallic composition softens enough to let the water flash to steam, leaving a hollow metallic shell ten times the size of the original asteroid. (If everything goes well. If not, well, there are always more asteroids.) This is known as a Cole habitat, from Cole and Cox's 1963 proposal.
Raising the temperature of iron from space-background to its melting point takes 800kJ/kg even ignoring radiation losses during the heating process; an asteroid two miles long by one . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: December 1, 2006
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