In case people are still watching this thread: I started a new thread about whether religions can help motivate big, long-term projects, and would love it if you could provide your perspectives.

John Edds, you’re right of course–turning cubic miles of rock into empty space in years rather than millennia is not a job for microbes. But you brought up one of the most important next steps in the process: making soil. Say we’ve hollowed out the interior and it’s just a bare rock face. We could keep using machines a while longer, as suggested…[Read more]

C M Weller, you make some good points. Unfortunately, my plot ideas (which have been under development for way too long, since well before Project Hieroglyph started) don’t work well with the idea of building a shell from chunks of the asteroid surface, fascinating as that would be (though I could mention it as a common technique used elsewhere in…[Read more]

Dr. Landis, I’m honored by your contribution to my first Hieroglyph discussion thread. I have a partial solution to the strength problem because my asteroid will only spin fast enough to produce a quarter-G, but I want it to be 5 or 6 km in interior diameter, to give room for a cloud layer. I was also thinking of having large support columns, also…[Read more]