A Star Is a Terrible Thing to Waste
What we fail to notice about the sun
Earth is but a speck of dust in the limitless dark space that barely registers compared to the size of the sun. Our star is 1.3 million times the size of our planet and generates in just one second the equivalent to nearly 500,000 times humanity’s global energy consumption for a whole year.
We all know the Sun has an atmosphere that produces solar storms, that the corona is hot and often ejects massive amounts of plasma, and that it generates a dangerous level of radiation. But we never hear it’s a high metallicity star, with a gigantic concentration of elements heavier than helium. Or that it contains thousands of times the entire mass of our planet (5,842 quintillion tons) in metals, carbon, nitrogen, silicon, oxygen, and many others we can use as raw materials.
Although it’s hard to wrap our minds around such numbers, these resources can untether the human species from its place of birth, leading to a spacefaring civilization housing quintillions of souls and even propel giant colony ships to the stars.
“We plan to use Static Satellites, Statites, if I may. Hovering above the sun in a balance between gravity and solar wind, each Statite is an ultralight hexagonal sail over a kilometer across that reflects light back to the sun. Millions of…
