Kardashev II and the missing steps in Inter-Stellar Colonization Part One

Something I've noticed in Starbound is a distinct lack of solar-dominace anywhere. Too illustrate why this is strange, I'll explain logical progressions of technological advancement based on the Kardashev scale, Dyson Swarms, and off-world colonies.
This is a long post, refer to part two to skip to the point.

Assuming the invention of better automation than we currently have, and higher efficiency energy sources like Fusion reactors(such as with duetirium and tritium which we currently can do, or helium-3 which happens to be a byproduct of duetirium and tritium fusion), we can expect our current technology to permit mindbogglingly large numbers of people to live on Earth comfortably. Easily hundreds of billions, and even trillions without sacrificing living space. The tech is there, it's only a matter of building and powering it all. The only limit we hit is the heat output of humans. If we wanted quadrillions of people on one planet, we can do that. We can build massive layers of living space. The issue would be that the heat produced by so many people would bake us alive.

So the expectation of inter-planetary colonization isn't absolutely necessary for a good long while. That said, there is a limit, and humans do have a propensity for exploration and curiosity. In space it is far easier and cheaper to build large structures. Getting into space with the materials is the hard part. The most efficient solution to that problem is to bring the necessary materials to build tools and refineries in space itself... To mine everything we need from there.

Asteroid mining is of most value due not to the sheer value of those metals out there, but due to them already being off Earth. I'm sure you've all seen the immense size of the fuel tanks used to get rockets off Earth. The vast majority of fuel being used only to escape the atmosphere. Hardly any is needed once you've actually made it to space. The result of this is that building something in space is absurdly expensive. Using only a few shipments of supplies to set up mining bases would allow building in space far far cheaper later on. The fuel needed to tow a hundred tonnes of refined metals to the site of a planned satellite is barely a tenth in near-zero gravity than what it takes to lift it off Earth. This is without even addressing how much easier it'd be to mine in zero gravity compared to mining on Earth, thus expediting the extraction itself.

The first off-world colony is likely going to be scientific or industrial. Funding is the most major barrier, with Mars colonization being conceivable only due to drumming up enough public interest to pay for it. Mars is, however, not incredibly useful towards construction in space. The gravity makes lifting off from Mars to be similarly difficult. It is highly probably that an asteroid colony will be the first industrial one, providing a base of operations to mine and refine materials that would later be used to construct satellites and statites. Obviously the asteroids we can locate near-Earth would be heavily screened for idea compositions. A decently-sized asteroid with silicon and precious metals is not too terribly difficult to find, that being a very prime candidate for colonization. The reason this would be colonized as opposed to stripped of resources and left is because it's a very long way from Earth. You can't be sending people and supplies constantly, you need to establish a long-term colony for this. In addition to having it for the mining operation, it would be a good staging area in the future for more space-exploration and missions.

How an asteroid colony could be done is going to rely on

• Power
  Without any atmosphere or night time to block sunlight, solar power is extremely effective. Alternatively, if we do continue to advance fusion research, we would likely rely on helium-3 fusion supplemented by solar power.
• Artificial Gravity
  It is unlikely we will discover some incredible new way to make gravity. It relies on incredible mass of the planetary scale. Assuming that doesn't change, we would use spin-gravity. If you've ever been on theme-park rides, you might notice that acceleration and spin produces an effect similar to gravity. Indeed you could stand perfectly perpendicular to the ground within some spin rides. In absence of real gravity, this is the most likely candidate for making colonies that aren't on planets.
• Self-reliance and Food
  Yeah, we're not shipping a colony's supply of food constantly. As stated, getting anything off Earth is very very expensive. Fortunately with solar panels, we can absorb a lot of power form the sun which can be used for hydroponics. Automation is the biggest barrier there, as hydroponics can be extremely efficient in power to calorie output. Open-air farming is what we currently use largely because it's very easy.
  Plants also only use a narrow range of frequencies. Much like how visible light is such a narrow sliver for humans to see, plants are the same. We save a massive amount of power by making lights - LEDs - that emit solely visible light to humans. A tenth the power for greater visibility than older lightbulbs. This applies to plants too, hydroponics doesn't need to use the entire spectrum of the sun, as well as being able to control conditions more precisely than open-air farming. High humidity and higher heat than human's prefer. Plants also grow more efficiently with specific other kinds of plants buried beside them. This would all be extremely labour-intensive to plant and harvest, hence the need for automation before we do it on a larger scale.
  As for water, there's an awful lot of ice in space, especially in certain kinds of asteroids.

It will take a couple decades of setting up a colony while mining the most precious metals first to sell back to Earth in chunks for more funding. Space organizations would want it the most, and pay a premium as they'd be able to skip the step of shipping it to space. It's rather cheap to tow materials within space itself. That said, much of the premium space-to-space trade will have to wait until facilities to refine and construct things are in place. Until then, the materials have to be sold to ground-based organizations at a rapidly decreasing price. Supply and demand: The larger the quantity of supply, the less demand you'll have for it. Eventually the market value of those precious metals will go down and you better have the colony in good operation before that happens. Much of what is mined will likely be stockpiled and sold very slowly to keep scarcity higher. Can't let supply go too high back down on Earth.

When all is said and done and you finally have a fully-established colony with all the industrial facilities necessary, space-construction will BOOM.

The amount of silicon and metal in space will permit nation-sized solar panels easily. All the power-needs in space will be completely met. As long as everything you need is already in space, the most expensive task is bringing the people up from Earth. And on the note of nation-sized solar panels...

Over 90% of the energy output of the sun goes wasted in space. When we have a foothold in space, it's likely we'll make moves to start harvesting much more energy from the sun. One of the proposed methods involves a massively wide solar panel statite. A static-satellite to hover nearly still over the sun. The gravitational pull of the sun can be balanced out by the radiation thrust it puts out in the form of photons. This harkens back to the concept of a solar sail - a large sheet of reflective metal that uses the bounce of photos against it to propel it away from the light-source. As long as the statite is wide enough, this will balance out against gravity. If the statite gets closer, the amount of photonic thrust pushing it away will increase. If it gets further, the thrust reduces. It will be stable.
This is the first step towards the Dyson Swarm. This wouldn't even block the sun's light from any of the planets in the solar system as the planets orbit at around the same plane. Solar systems are disc-like in their shape, so just maneuver the statite to be above/below the sun relative to the planets.
The energy gathered by this would be astronomical - literally! The energy could be used on-site for further operations near the sun or converted into a concentrated laser to beam towards a receiver. While this certainly loses some of the energy in transit, it largely passes through empty space where we don't have to worry about air absorbing that energy. As with the solar sail concept, the laser could be used to propel spaceships to very high speeds.

The Dyson Swarm. As the logical conclusion to this, we will eventually build to totally encompass the sun. As little as 5% of the sun's energy could power our entire civilization. What if we could harvest 100%? We would have the Dyson Swarm. A mega-structure consisting of tons of planet-sized solar panels around the sun, as well as many floating colonies most likely. This is also called a Dyson Sphere sometimes, however the name has declined in fashion as some mistake it for implying the structure is a single rigid thing. For those that may argue against harvesting 100%, thus depriving planets in this system from sunlight, the technology to rotate solar panels and let light pass is extremely simple, especially compared to the scale of tech we're discussing here. There is no logical argument against a Dyson Swarm besides that. If we don't gather that energy, it will fly off into deep-space where it will never be used. Eternally wasted. It won't fly off and possibly support life out there, it's too far from anything. While if we do harvest that energy, we could conceivably support new life with it. From economic, ecologic, and ethical standpoints it is all in favour of pursuing this.


So then my question is.
Why has no civilization in Starbound done this? No star has been converted into a massive power station. By all accounts, this seems perfectly reasonable with the level of tech on display. Not only would this be an incredible source of power for them, it would efficient. They don't need to go mining moons for haunted fuel even if that fuel might be more compact for power. A Dyson Swarm could be home to spinning habitats that survive off the power of the sun for billions of years while hardly putting a dent in the power harvested. Once again using the concepts required for a solar sail, mirrors could help direct energy back at the sun in angles that shred the sun's atmosphere(largely flaming hydrogen) all of which is rapidly replaced. This could drain the sun of some mass while giving ourselves a great deal of matter to work with on other projects. The power output of the sun would then decrease, but its own internal efficiency would increase as less massive stars burn their fuel slower. Massive stars often die with over 20% of their potential fuel unspent as the mass becomes too great and they implode.We'd be extending the life-span and efficiency of the sun. Any civilization interested in survival at a cosmological timescale would want to do this in response to much of the energy they harvest but fail to find purpose for.

Even a hylotl bent on preserving the "purity" of such cosmic objects like the sun would have to relent as they see doing this would extend the lifespan of a star by billions, trillions, or even quadrillions of years.

So you see, even if every single civilization in the entire cosmos found FTL travel and hyper-abundant fuel like Erchius long before harvesting stars was necessary, it's still something many would want to do when the technology to accomplish this becomes so commonplace.

 

Aren't asteroids kind of a bad idea to colonize? I mean, they're too fragile for rotation-based artificial gravity and have some other limitations that makes them a relatively bad choice compared to a well-designed space station. Heck, Scott Manley did an entire video that basically boils down to "spin-based asteroid base gravity = bad idea".

I also always figured that Erchius wasn't used for energy, but as a sort of catalyst that provides unique properties that cannot, at the time Starbound takes place, be replicated. I mean, we have infinitely regenerating energy sources on us at all times somehow (since we never run out of energy, even though our energy stores are shown by our weapons to be far beyond what some bioelectricity harvesting setup or similar could produce), so I figure civilizations in Starbound have nigh-unlimited energy sources somehow.

The only thing that doesn't really make sense to me about this whole business is why materials still cost things, given the existence of infinite energy. All you'd really need is a ton of such infinite generator systems, use them to produce enough energy that you can create matter with it via E=mc2, create more generators, infinite increase in power, create unlimited amounts of any material whose structure you know via E=mc2.

Also, the mass of a star doesn't increase, it's density does as it compresses hydrogen into other, denser elements.

 

I don't believe I said that it does increase- Oh woops, my bad. I meant density when I said it'd implode. Removing mass does increase lifespan, however.

As for colonizing a large asteroid, you bring a good point about their fragility. The biggest point, really, is that mining resources in space, and refining and building with them there, is far better than using resources from Earth. Some kind of space colony will be needed for much of this.