What if we were to build an artificial planet?

Let’s say that humanity has decided that they have no interest in undoing the damage caused by carbon emissions and has rendered the earth uninhabitable and rather than finding a new planet to live on we decide that we would like to manufacture a new planet.

Now when you read artificial planet your mind most likely went to the Death Star from Star Wars or Cybertron from Transformers but I assure you this planet will be produced with all-natural locally sourced (if you consider the solar system local) planet

What we will be covering 

Let’s start with the specific topics I will be covering, as an entire artificial planet is quite complex and an enormous topic it would take me hours to explain all of the aspects and moving parts, so for today I am going to be focusing on the general creation of the planet and how we would create the atmosphere, as well I will briefly explain how we would manufacture an artificial core for this hypothetical planet. keep in mind the construction of this hypothetical planet would most likely take about 100 years

Logistics

So first let’s discuss the logistics of building a planet habitable by humans, the fundamental ingredients of a planet are (1: a large ball made of rock 2: a breathable atmosphere and 3:water 4:plants to sustain life 5: a molten core or core substitute)

Construction

Let’s say we want a planet about 7% the size of the earth, that would give us a planet about 1 and a half times larger than our moon. our first concern would be locating the materials to form our planet shaped ball. you may think that a nearby asteroid belt would be enough but the trans neptunian asteroid belt would not suffice our material needs. fortunately for us we have a ripe source of materials that can be taken with no real consequence to ourselves. and that source is the moons of Jupiter. If we were able to pull Jupiter’s moons out orbit we could use them to craft our artificial planet. once the mass of moon rock had settled into its orbit around the sun.

Preparation

Once the big chunk of rock has been created we can move onto phase 2 which would be the preparation for human life. the first step would be to create an atmosphere. to do this we would dump a large amount of water onto our newly formed space rock and let the water evaporate thus creating an atmosphere. once the atmosphere is created we would inject carbon dioxide from earth into this new planet. add some new water and then start planting plants to create oxygen on our planet. and then finally after our extremely long venture to create this planet we would be able to start moving to that planet when we deemed it safe, and then start colonizing our new home. we could also once we are done take one of Jupiter’s smaller moons and send it into an orbit around our new planet so we can have a similar tide and day-night cycle to earth

This video explains the construction process really well 2:26- 3:22

Recreating the earths core

In the video below Scientist Dan Lathrop has created a scale replica of the earths core. I believe that if we make a much bigger model of this core and somehow place it in the center of our planet while we are in the construction phase we could get the magnetic shielding from solar storms and the magnetic poles present on earth.

Bibliography 

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a10946/could-we-ever-build-an-artificial-world-17025054/

Image credits:

https://www.starwars.com/databank/death-star

https://science.nasa.gov/jupiter/moons/

https://www.earth.com/news/mysteries-in-the-sky-how-trees-impact-cloud-formation/

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/take-earth-add-a-billion-years-of-evolution-and-you-get-kepler452b-yikes-10414393.html