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Ultimate Solar System contains 60 Earths in a Binary System
#11
That's right; some sort of space fountain might do the trick at a slightly lower-tech level, as well.
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#12
Don't more massive stars have wider habitable zones? Sol might have thousands of bodies in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud (implying that Sol could have thousands of planets). So a giant star's radiation, pushing material out, might have its planets much further away...giant stars are too young to have habitable planets, but there might still be many of them orbiting one star. Then somebody with advanced technology could cool them off and terraform them. Does that make any sense?
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#13
(06-12-2016, 07:32 AM)sandcastles Wrote: Don't more massive stars have wider habitable zones? Sol might have thousands of bodies in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud (implying that Sol could have thousands of planets). So a giant star's radiation, pushing material out, might have its planets much further away...giant stars are too young to have habitable planets, but there might still be many of them orbiting one star. Then somebody with advanced technology could cool them off and terraform them. Does that make any sense?

This page HERE contains some interesting information on this topic.

The brightest O-Type stars might have habitable zones that are literally light-days out from the star. That said, their habitable zone would not be wider than Sols, just farther out. It should also be noted that a much larger star will suck up more material from the stellar nursery as it is forming, leaving less for any potential planets to accrete from. Still, a particularly rich stellar nursery might make up for that, and we keep finding more planet size bodies the more we look, so this might be possible in at least some cases.

A technology capable of interstellar travel (and certainly the kind of tech we describe in OA), could likely set up shop on almost any reasonably solid chunk of mass and make a go of it if it wanted to.

Todd
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#14
(06-16-2016, 12:31 PM)Drashner1 Wrote:
(06-12-2016, 07:32 AM)sandcastles Wrote: Don't more massive stars have wider habitable zones? Sol might have thousands of bodies in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud (implying that Sol could have thousands of planets). So a giant star's radiation, pushing material out, might have its planets much further away...giant stars are too young to have habitable planets, but there might still be many of them orbiting one star. Then somebody with advanced technology could cool them off and terraform them. Does that make any sense?
The brightest O-Type stars might have habitable zones that are literally light-days out from the star. That said, their habitable zone would not be wider than Sols, just farther out.
A technology capable of interstellar travel (and certainly the kind of tech we describe in OA), could likely set up shop on almost any reasonably solid chunk of mass and make a go of it if it wanted to.

It is true that the brighter a star the broader its habitable zone, and the brightest stars could have room for a dozen or more terrestrial-type stars with orbits that give neither too much not too little insolation. Whether such bodies would actually form in those numbers I don't know, and the last time I checked the whole theory of planetary formation was too much in an uproar from all the new discoveries to give any good prediction of that. Agreed, if you did have enough terraformable bodies civilizations with OA-style tech could have a field day with it and have dozens of worlds going at once, even if natural evolution could not have allowed life on those bodies in the relatively short time the brightest stars are stable. Years ago Jack Vance had fun with this idea, and placed a large number of worlds in the same system (the rationale was that an older civilization had done the terraforming, and humans later discovered and colonized these worlds).
Stephen
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