Didn't know if the Hard Science or Speculation or Meme flares fit better, but since it's about future space human laws or something, here you go.

Basically, I don't think that breaking apart an entire planet is NECESSARILY a great idea. Part of it? Probably safe. Especially when said planet has no life. But I would think it'd be more like a surgical operation; removing mercury from the solar system, to me, is kinda like if you were to amputate a couple of someone's toes. Probably won't cause a lot of damage, but the planet is linked to others, probably in ways we aren't aware of yet.

Levels of restriction, rationally thinking, should follow a trend like this:

Systems where one of the worlds has life, just don't mess with any of the significant celestial objects. You wouldn't disassemble the moon, that's a horrible idea, so why would you disassemble Mercury? Likewise, if there were life on Europa, don't disassemble Callisto. Normal mining would obviously not be an issue, but if we're going to still be mining this world for thousands of years, how about we call it quits after 1% of the world's original mass is extracted. Seems fair, yeah?

Of course, systems without any life aren't as urgent to watch out for, but at the same time, we don't know all the ways in which abiogenesis gets kicked off. You go to another star and see an airless, waterless planet 0.7 Earth masses and think, yeah, this should be fine. Little do you know, microbial life has started on another frozen planet in the system, whose orbit is kept stable by this dry inner planet, and you haven't checked that ice world for life yet. Removing this planet causes the outer planet to lock into a new resonance with the outer gas giant you've been completely ignoring since it has no moons, and now the ice planet is making repeated dives towards the star, whose flares irritate the life there repeatedly in a severe mass extinction. But hey, at least you get to build 50 octillion new billboards!

What are your thoughts on celestial disassembly?

Some people are saying if you can stay alive for the next 5 years, you might very well live to be 800 years old! What would that mean? Lets suppose its 2032 and the breakthrough happens. Will we live to see Mars Terraformed, is 800 years long enough for that to happen?

I know people hate it, but Avatar has to be one of my favorite film series. I love the hard sci-fi aesthetic of the technology, and the concept of humans transferring their mind to a lab-grown body to explore a lush world.

It led me to thinking about the concept of us designing new species of human adapted to alien worlds (or paraterraformed colonies with different gravity), and then using ”mind transfer” technology à la Avatar to control those bodies.

So, I ask, how might a new species of human adapted to an alien world’s conditions look? What interesting traits might we give them? I’m talking adaptations to new temperatures, surface gravity, atmospheric composition, local biochemistry, etc.

With some Type II engineering we could construct a planetary system consisting of 10,000 Earthlike planets orbiting at a distance of 163 AU. Each planet would take a year to orbit Sagittarius A and would have Earthlike axis tilts to produce seasons. Travel times between planets with fusion torch rockets would be a matter of days. Communication at light speed between planets would be about 426,000 seconds for planets on opposite sides of the black hole. An artificial photosphere would be constructed around the black hole to block radiation and retaliate visible light, this photosphere would be 163 solar radii in radius to produce a natural sunlike disk in each planet's sky.

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I keep thinking about where cryonics and AI are heading. If a person can be preserved and brought back, or their consciousness re-created, then a leader would never have to step down. They could hold power through death and come back, with an AI version of them filling in until they're revived.

Once the technology exists, it feels almost inevitable that someone tries this. There's a term for it: contocracy, a system of government by one person whose supreme power follows their consciousness across substrates, through death and re-creation, and never passes to a successor. The ruler is called the contocrat.

The part that gets me is "never passes to a successor." There's no next election and no next ruler to wait for. Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about that. Would you ever live under one?

I’ve often explored, on here, a ring of O’Neill cylinder-sized habitats at GSO. You can get some pretty impressive numbers, depending on how you stack them. Actually, it doesn’t matter how you stack them, you get pretty impressive numbers. You can also tether them to Earth reasonably nicely, with just a few lower-altitude orbital rings to keep your tether system nice and secure.

Its fantastic… but I always get hung up on how best to position the solar panels to power the thing. I keep coming up with new ideas on how to orient them, whether to include tracking actuators, how to make sure that the system doesn’t block too much light reaching Earth. Yadda yadda.

I think I have my best idea yet: polar rings of solar panels. We’re going to get some big numbers here, so hold on tight.

Assume a ring whose inner radius is 42,100 km (just under GSO) and whose outer radius is 42,200 km (just over GSO). The area of that ring is ~26.5 million sqkm. If you assume a modest 300 MW/sqkm, that the entire ring is covered in solar panels (front and back), and that the ring rotates once per day (so it only produces ~64% of what it would if it tracked the sun), one such ring produces over 100 petawatt hours, daily. Or 43.5 exawatt hours, yearly.

You have one of those on a polar orbital path, bolted onto the equatorial-GSO habitat ring (picture this looking like an armillary sphere), and you don’t have to worry about power. It produces almost 2,000 times humanity's current annual power consumption.

Now, this polar ring of solar panels doesn’t track the sun. That basically loses you 1/3 of its potential output. You know what else it does? It positions these panels, almost 40,000 km away from Earth’s surface, in such a way that they block almost no sun light from hitting the Earth’s surface, because they’re always perfectly edge-on relative to the Earth and Sun for the brief amount of time they’re in between.

This means you can put way more than just 1, or 2, or 4 up. Your limit is basically how close they can get to each other before they block each other too much (so you can’t just put them every 100 km along the ring, for example). You’re always going to get them blocking each other at least a little, but you want to limit that. I like the idea of 24 of these polar rings. So not almost 2,000 times global energy consumption. More like almost 48,000.

There is also another way they can be increased. I picked a 100 km width for the ring. That was pretty arbitrary, and the gravitational forces at these altitudes are pretty weak, so you could make the ring even wider. Since it is a ring, it isn’t perfectly “x times as wide gets you x times the surface area,” but its close enough. And, of course, the wider they get, the more they would block each other.

Been thinking about something for awhile now. Initially it was a 9 emitter convergence array (microwave, THZ would be difficult) in a spherical boundary chamber (such as a 3D geodesic array mounted inside a dielectric sphere) vacuum back filled with penning gas. 3 emitters on the equatorial plane spinning (mechanical or electronic phase rotation) around the center 120° apart, 3 stationary on top and bottom tight triad formation and a picosecond (maybe femto) aimed at the focal point. (That's the high level quick and dirty.)

If the sphere's internal radius is sized to a multiple of your drive wavelength, the spherical boundary should create a standing electromagnetic wave. The EF vectors from all 9 emitters should constructively interfere at the geometric origin, forming an ultra-intense central E-field node. That should create a stable (sustainable?) ball/toroid of dense plasma correct? In other iterations I thought about using 6 spinning emmiters. 3 on the polar axis and 3 equatorial or adding an x axis cut quartz (MgO coating?) at the focal point but I think I'm doing to much here. I feel like more is possible with less. I'm not a scientist but it's been a persistent thought for a few years. Has anyone tried something like this?

Apologies if this is not the place for this if there's a better one please let me know.

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In 1993, the Mars Observer probe vanished through a wormhole and discovered Vise, a world of intelligent reptilian civilizations whose technology resembles that of Earth's ancient empires.

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Both are made out of a Jupiter Brain or a Matryoshka Brain. The Subverse Time Machine simulates time travel with multiple branching, but only a limited number of multiple branches can be simulated at a time, so if you simulate an alternate outcome, you can continue simulating that alternate history from that outcome so long as you choose to devote resources to it. Simulating an entire galaxy means simulating all the star systems in that galaxy that you want, there is just one simulated reality here, the Galaxy is based on real world physics with some FTL loopholes added for convenience. If you don't know how to make a wormhole in the real universe, you just simulate one in the subverse that allows it to be transverse able.

I’ve been thinking about whether a civilization becoming more technologically advanced would necessarily make it easier for outsiders to detect.

We usually imagine civilizations far ahead of us using enormous amounts of energy, building massive structures or expanding across star systems. And I understand why those possibilities are taken seriously.

But is there any reason technological advancement has to follow that direction?

A civilization could become much more efficient, develop completely different ways of communicating, or eventually become something that doesn’t resemble our current understanding of a civilization at all.

I’m not suggesting every advanced civilization would become invisible or stop expanding. I’m wondering whether technological capability and detectability could develop in completely different directions.
If a civilization had a million-year technological head start on humanity, what would we actually expect to detect from thousands of light-years away?

And how much of that expectation comes from known physics versus assumptions about how technology develops?