[belovelife]

say, as humanity progresses into the future, and we choose to make another planet by gathering the material in the asteroid belt, and put it into orbit at 1.1au

what would be the process

this is my thought, (considering we would have to make it completely out of materials off our planet)


considerations: non-active core (thermal worries)

gravity affecting earths orbit

gathering materials in space

energy needed to add deltaV to gathered materials:

A-in one bundle

B-individually to gather at a meeting point (these packages of material do not neccisarily have to move super fast as long as their orbits generally match to a rondevou point)

material rights for nations involved in the project, and correlating property rights

stabalizing atmoshere gasses to emulate planet earth

robotic vs human workers

power for thrust:

lunar material with potential chemical energy for rocket propultion

lunar material used to grow algae that creates fuel for rocket propultion

availibility of oxygen

NTR

solar ion drive (efficient and just needs to recharge gas)

etc

please give thoughts on the subject

(note: this is a completely relistic concept, please only ideas for, if you want to argue against, please use another thread, thank you)

[CraigD]

belovelife, on 26 January 2012 - 03:07 PM, said:

Say, as humanity progresses into the future, and we choose to make another planet by gathering the material in the asteroid belt ...

It’d be a very little planet, because all of the material in the asteroid belt totals only about 3 x 10²¹ kg, about 3 times that of the largest single asteroid, Ceres, and about 4% of the mass of our Moon, 0.05% of Earth.

That mass would put your proposed manufactured planet in the dwarf planet class, massive enough to form itself into a spheroid, but not enough to clear most of the smaller bodies from its orbit. Of course, at 4% of the Moon’s mass, it would be hard to put a noticeable atmosphere on it, and surface gravity would be tiny, about 0.37 m/s/s (3% Earth’s, 18% the Moon’s, and 139% Ceres’s)

It’s theorized that early in the formation of the solar system, the asteroid belt had about as much material as the belt that eventually fell together to form the Earth, but because it wasn’t in the right planet-forming “sweet spot” (having mostly to do with being in nice, small whole number orbital resonance with the Jupiter and smaller inner planet neighbors), rather than forming a planet, it’s been gradually losing material for the past 5-ish billion years, ‘til now all that’s left of it are Ceres, 3 large asteroids, and smaller stuff about equal in mass to its 4 big bodies.

[belovelife]

how about pulling objects from the keiper belt also, in the future we should be able to do this

do you have a guestimation of the mass there?

[Eclogite]

belovelife, on 26 January 2012 - 09:30 PM, said:

do you have a guestimation of the mass there?

From wikipedia:
Despite its vast extent, the collective mass of the Kuiper belt is relatively low. The total mass is estimated at range between a 25th and 10th the mass of the Earth with some estimates placing it at a thirtieth an Earth mass. Conversely, models of the Solar System's formation predict a collective mass for the Kuiper belt of 30 Earth masses.