Brute force Terraforming of Mars, moons and thousands of asteroids in this century

Currently humanity can control about 20 terawatts and this is increasing at 3% per year. As an unintended by-product there is slow climate change over the course of many decades to centuries. There have been many proposed plans to terraform Mars, but those are to bombard with objects from the asteroid belt or add bioengineered organisms to generate warmth and a thicker atmosphere with oxygen.

Consider the sunlight received every second by planet Earth, from the Sun. About 1.4 kilowatts of energy for every square metre directly facing the Sun – all 125 trillion of them. A total power supply of 175,000 trillion watts (175 petawatts), which is about 8,750 times more than the mere 20 terawatts human beings presently use. Earth receives a tiny fraction of the total – the Sun radiates about 2.2 billion times more, a colossal 385 trillion trillion watts (385 yottawatts).

Controlling 17.5 petawatts is one tenth of Kardashev level one. Ten billion times more than 175 petawatts is Kardashev level two where civilization controls all the power of the Sun.

A giant interstellar laser sail, massing 2,500 metric tons and using laser power of 5 petawatts, which accelerates the laser-sail starship 1 gee for 190 days to achieve a cruise speed of half light-speed or 150,000 km/s. 17.5 petawatt means you could launch 6 of them each year.

Large lensing structures may not be something of the far future. There was a 2007 NASA NIAC study for making large bubbles in space. Devon Crowe of PSI corporation made a study for making large space structures from bubbles that are made rigid using metals or UV curing.

A single bubble can be 1 meter in earth gravity, 100 kilometer in low earth orbit or 1000 kilometers in deep space. Foams made of many bubbles could be far larger in size.

The size of a 1000 kilometer bubble is nearly the size of Charon, the moon of Pluto. Charon is 1200 kilometers in diameter. Saturn’s moon Tethys is 1050-1080 kilometers in diameter Ceres the largest object in the asteroid belt is 970 kilometers in diameter. A single tesselation foam (like in the picture) of 1000 kilometer bubbles would be about the size of Earth’s moon. A Penrose tesselation like the one in the picture of 1000 kilometer bubbles would be in between the size of Neptune or Saturn. A Tesselation foam of 100 kilometer bubbles in earth orbit could form an object the size our existing moon or larger.

Metal can be evaporated to coat the inside of the bubble for reflective sails and telescopes.

At the end of this article I will also discuss spiderfab lens construction.

Read more »