How to move up to one million Earth-mass planets?

Question

Inspired by The One Million Earth Solar System.

A civilization wants to create a solar system with a lot of earth-sized planets. How would they go about building it? Specifically, how would they move planets to the new solar system?

There are no planets in the system
The civilization has plenty of planets but they are all in different systems
The civilization has FTL travel, and can build very large starships if needed
The price of FTL is based on the mass of the object being transported

What would be the best way to transport the planets, as small payloads, pre-assembled or whole planets?

How to move many planets, possibly up to one million of them, to the new solar system?

If they have FTL, why would they move material to this system instead of terraforming planets in place? You would need an incredibly good reason for such a massive (almost unfathomable) economic price. — GrandmasterB, Jul 26 '18 at 18:16
@GrandmasterB the context isn't important, I just want to know how this could be done. — Starpilot, Jul 26 '18 at 18:17
@JThomas it is possible, actually. They could act as a ring, if they have a massive enough primary. See The Million Earth Solar System — Rafael, Jul 26 '18 at 18:56
All of your questions are impossible to answer. You are actually asking people to tell you how they would do things some of which we actually think are impossible and way beyond our engineering and physics to the point it is pure fantasy. — StephenG - Help Ukraine, Jul 26 '18 at 19:07
So I took the risk of editing the question. Roll back the edits if you disapprove. — Vincent, Jul 27 '18 at 02:08
Reopening this question is irrelevant. It's a duplicate of "How can I move a planet?" — JBH, Jul 27 '18 at 02:22

Ash · Answer 1 · 2018-07-26T18:52:43.157

I think you'd well served by pulling all that matter together with a big artificial gravity generator. It would take time to get into one place and would weigh three or so times more than the sun but if you want to build earthlike worlds there won't be enough free hydrogen to start or support fusion so while it will get awfully hot it won't go stellar. It probably doesn't quite weigh enough to cause matter degeneration either.

So having put it all in the system you want to use you now cut it up into planet sized chunks using localised artificial gravity fields to pull masses off the huge matter reserve. Volatiles like water and atmospheric gases are going to be a major issue to balance and getting the planets to differentiate the way Earth has so that they're geologically functional is going to be even worse but this is an exercise is supertech so you'll manage.

The amount of energy you'd need for such an undertaking will require the direct and complete matter-energy conversion of a number of stars but by the time you're ready to try this kind of thing you'll have to be able to do that easily.

Do note I have assumed that you have millions of years to finish this project, I can see no feasible way to do this in a hurry.

How to move up to one million Earth-mass planets?

1 Answers1