Tom Kalbfus
Mongoose
Probably not, its not the best way to mine the Sun in any event. The best way to mine the sun is to use its energy to create magnetic fields and cause coronal ejections which then can be mined for its resources. You can move most of its mass that way and deposit it in another place, thereby creating another star, and thus extending the life of the Sun in the process. The Sun does not convect the material in its core, so when its core runs out of hydrogen to fuse into helium, the Sun heats up due to contraction of the core and then begins to fuse helium into carbon at a much higher temperature, this causes the Sun's outer layer to expand and go into its red giant phase. But if you turn the Sun inside out by peeling away its outer layers and exposing the core. You create another Sun with a hydrogen core, and you can deposit the remainder of the old Sun into the new Sun that you created and you get another 10 billion years of main sequence for the new Sun by turning it inside out. The Sun can probably last 100 billion years if you do this repeatedly about every 5 billion years or so.Reynard said:
But we have gone far afield. I'm talking about creating a pseudo-fantasy world out of Venus, using Jupiter's Moon Io as a standin for Earth's Moon around Venus, put it into a wider orbit around the Sun so it doesn't eventually collide with the Earth, and leaving a thicker atmosphere and enhanced greenhouse effect on Venus to compensate for its further distance from the Sun. The Sun then appears slightly dimmer and smaller as seen from Venus as from Earth, but not very noticible unless one does careful measurements of the Sun's angular diameter. This Venus has a longer year than Earth's, About 15 months long instead of 12 and a year that lasts 450 days, a red volcanic moon that cycles through its phases once every 30 days. Since all of this is artificially arranged with Earthlike days we get a standard fantasy world with 12 intelligent humanoid races with two main continents Ishtar and Aphrodite. Aphrodite is the one where most of the large dinosaurs inhabit, Ishtar has a climate resembling Europe and similar flora and fauna to Europe as well. These Venusians have a technological level similar to Earth's Rennassance. The magic here is psionic, the currency is based on precious metals with an exchange rate of 1 platinum piece = 10 gold pieces, - 100 silver pieces = Cr100 = 1000 coper pieces, and 1 standard gold piece weight is 10 grams which make 100 such coins weigh 1 kilogram. So basically I am creating an environment that looks at first glance like a typical D&D world, but with technological relics substituting for magic items, and a gateway to the past, hence an entry into the classic Traveller campaign. The history of this Venus follows that of Traveller up to the New Era setting, only there is no 4th Imperium, the Virus becomes the dominant life form in the galaxy, most of mankind based in nongarden worlds has perished as the Virus has hijacked the technology required to keep biological lifeforms alive in those environments. The Virus has over the last 5000 years evolved into something else, most of it has passed on to another universe leaving mankind and other sentient races behind with left over technology, some of which still works. One item is a stargate which connects to Prometheus in the Alpha Centauri system 5000 years ago.
