Talk:Bootstrapping Industry
The potential for bootstrapping extraterrestrial industry
When industry is fully developed on Luna, space based solar power plants could be built for Earth, but there is no need to stop there. SBSP satellites could be built and shipped whole to Mars along with colonists to fill the colonists' electrical power needs. Not only that but a shield could be built at the Mars-Sun L1 point using lunar material. This would shade Mars so that by dropping its temperature it could be lunaformed, making its atmospheric pressure practically zero. This would allow mass drivers to operate effectively on Mars and allow the export of Mars' products economically to Luna and Earth. The shade that would cool Mars would incorporate a microwave power generating facility so that former SBSP satellites in synchronous orbit about Mars could be converted to microwave relay stations insuring that Mars received plenty of power for the strip mining operations. Mars would be strip mined from pole to pole and from the surface to the core allowing its mass to be spread out in orbit about the sun as space habitats. Based on a G.K. O'Neill estimate that the asteroid belt contains enough mass to make space habitats with 3,000 times the living space of Earth, Mars could be converted into habitats with living space equal to 680,000 Earths. That would house 4*1015 people (four million billion people). To have energy for all of them the habitats would fill the entire orbital path of the former planet Mars in a belt 0.044 degrees wide. That allows as much sunlight per person as falls on Earth plus 27 percent more because it made calculations easier. It seems that most Mars colony enthusiasts think too small. The six billion or so Martians that could live on a terraformed Mars are insignificant compared to those who could be provided homes from the material of a lunaformed Mars. Farred 22:15, 18 October 2011 (UTC)
