Boundless Expansion
The solar system provides an impressive venue for expansion. Astrophysicist David Criswell (Finney & Jones, 1985) notes that we could use space to sustain a 20% per year growth in our use of bulk materials for many centuries to come. At this rate asteroids would be upgraded by 2140, and Jupiter taken apart and converted to space colonies between 2200-
2400. This is only a tentative first step. If Sol's outer layers could be taken off, we could turn it into 15 white dwarf stars, each with an expected life of over 20 trillion years. Alter-natively, some of the mass could go into build…