Submitted by AdamZeeper t3_zw32hl in space
I’ve been consuming scifi and Isaac Arthur’s videos (the guy makes hard sci-fi style predictions of the future, plus quite a bit of world-building) for a while now, and it led me to think about how our home solar system would look when fully utilized to its full potential and propelling us to a Kardashev 2 civilization in the process.
So far, assuming we have 1000 years to work with (and no FTL and other out-there ideas):
- Mercury would have been completely disassembled to create a swarm of habitats/servers and stellar lifting infrastructures, making our sun the de facto capital of the solar system and containing the most significant concentration of populations and industry. Jupiter would be a close second due to it being the second largest object with ample resources around it (the moons are free for the taking).
- Earth becomes a historical archive/mausoleum/botanical garden, with small pockets of purely biological and unmodified pockets of the human population that refuses to undergo the necessary modification to survive space travel. There may or may not be thousand years old people making nostalgic trips on the surface, just wandering through their old places.
- Assuming most of humanity has gone the route of a digital existence in servers, most planetary surfaces would have been converted into computational substrates and, due to most planets in the outer solar system being rather cold, would make for a very nice heatsink for digitized sentience to occupy. In the very, very far future, mass-efficient space habitats would be preferable to planets as resource/mass constraints tighten, therefore most planets would probably diffuse into a mess of orbital structures, before vanishing entirely.
These are just my ideas on how Sol will look like, neglecting the near-future events entirely. How do you guys think we'll go about colonizing the solar system, and its end result?