Taffer

Mercury being 'merged' with Mars (and probably Phobos and Deimos too) is possible.....IF the blackhole drive/generator envisioned by Lois Crane and Shawn Westmoreland is as 'doable' as their math and our technology so far suggests. With a Black Hole drive/generator, we would potentially have a lot of energy and mass to throw around. Many, many, many high mass close flybys (if we could make a ship that could survive prolonged time that close to the sun) could nudge Mercury into a higher orbit. We could then eventually guide it into the gentlest possible collision with Mars. That added mass (and the energy of the collision) might even get the core going again. It would be a shame though we lost the near 24 hour rotation period of Mars Maybe we could NEAR (or barely) impact Mercury with Venus for (A) a slingshot effect and (B) skim off some CO2 from Venus to bring to Mars..... Hmmm, it might be easier to do the same thing with one of Jupiter's moons instead of Mercury..... That said, we could also likely do a lot of interesting things with Venus, Titan, Rhea and Europa. Not sure what to do about Venus's CO2 though....maybe a Black Hole (without attached ship) being skimmed through Venus's atmosphere could deal with the issue? It just seems so wasteful when Mars could really use some of that gas..... Between all those planets, we might be able to squeeze out an extra 1-3 terrestrial worlds. Also, as our star's luminosity increases, we would also be able to continually keep our planet at an ideal distance.... and if we can't do this, our world will start to become inhospitable for us in about 500 million years. I wouldn't want to be the one responsible for the math in compensating for moving both Earth AND the Moon though....oh wait, I guess there is about 0% chance of that happening. lol IF we can make these drives/generators, then we can make the trips to other star systems. Hey, what would happen if you had a Red Dwarf with a few large gas giants, and you guided those gas giants into collisions with the star? Maybe we could make Class G-K stars without permanently frying potentially useful inner planets....of course, we would need to make a gazillion flybys to move planets like that because of their huge mass and thick atmosphere. Hmmm, their atmospheres are probably the biggest problem there, since the distance of the fly by would need to be increased so far = there would be close to zero gravitational effect on the gas giant. Anyway, lots of possibilities IF the drive/generator is possible. I just don't like the idea that the Black Hole will eventually explode......