Can We Build a Planet From SCRATCH?

Whether it is human activity were a giant meteor crashing into us planet Earth is not gonna last forever eventually the lump of space rock that we call home will one day no longer exist so what will we do as a species if this were to happen the obvious plan is to reach out into the universe and build colonies elsewhere but space travel is incredibly complex and we're still not sure if it's even possible to reach another solar system within a reasonable amount of time but what if we built an entirely new planet ourselves.

We see artificial planet-sized objects quite often in science fiction from the Death Star of Star Wars the planets building facility and Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy and even far larger objects like a Dyson Sphere the species shown being capable of building such creations are of course incredibly advanced but what exactly would it take to actually build one it first depends on what you mean by the question are you talking about a replica of a planet like Earth war a space station that's the size of a small moon or planet the former would require a careful combination of elements and mass Wow the latter would still require enormous engineering feeds but maybe not quite as difficult the most famous planet sized Space Station from sci-fi is of course the Death Star according to estimates at the construction of such a structure which is 74 miles in diameter compared to the Earth's 8,000 miles would require materials that weigh approximately one quadrillion tons which is about a millionth of the weight of Earth supplying all the material would be a mammoth task and impossible with current technologies for example on earth we produce about 1.5 billion tons of steel a year which means it will take more than 800,000 years to produce enough for a moon sized space station furthermore it would cost about 852 quadrillion dollars and that's not even taking into account how will transport them into space but let's say we could do all that once it's there the construction would actually be relatively easy we can use robots to complete most of the work in the Lac gravity is faise means it wouldn't be too difficult to move all the materials into place it would take a long time but eventually that would be possible now the alternative will be to mine all the materials from asteroids that are in space already a number of companies are actually looking at the feasibility of doing this with some tests already being underway if successful it could vastly reduce the cost of building things in outer space this may also be a better plan because it's not even certain that steel would be strong enough we may need to create artificial gravity which can be done by spinning the station and the force this would exert could crumple steel so some researchers think a carbon-based material Arvest it from asteroids would be much better suited to the job.

Now despite the difficulties with building a mu sized structure creating an actual planet is a much much bigger problem after all the earth is already 4.5 billion years in the making so how could we possibly replicate that well we wouldn't actually have to perfectly replicate the earth to get similar conditions for example gravity is related to mass so we could put the equivalent of one tenth of the Earth's mass of rock into a shape the size of our moon to get the same result there's so much rock and debris in space and our planet itself is formed by enough of it collecting together so if we could develop technology that did this for us we'd be off to a really good start following this some have suggested we could build a fusion facility near the Sun which could produce some of the heavier elements that are needed these dense metals could be layered on top of each other allowed to cool and then they would form a stable structure the problem with this is that it would take tens of thousands of years to complete while building a planet completely from scratch is far beyond our capabilities.

In conclusion, the idea of building a brand new planet sounds pretty exciting but it is way beyond our current technologies if we perfected the mining of asteroids and critter robots that won't eventually turn on us then it could be possible to build a large space station although this would be a monumental project to undertake so basically is far more realistic to look to our neighboring planets and to work out a way to adapt their environment to make them less hostile and this is going to be the most likely way that we'll be able to find somewhere other than earth to live.