We kept 2,140 crater floors. Did we save any of Mercury?

The wiki now says “Mercury was.” I knew already. Seeing it put that bluntly still felt like somebody celebrating a demolition with an obituary.

I kept the transit photograph I took with my dad in 2016. Tiny black dot, terrible focus, we were absurdly pleased with it. Now every time I mention the planet somebody tells me about the 2,140 saved crater floors. They're in refrigerated boxes. Does anybody actually feel better about that? If the next person answers my photograph with a storage inventory, I will ask which box holds their conscience. Stop congratulating yourselves for refrigerating a planet's leftovers.

I do. We kept actual terrain and got the swarm. I like both those things.

Keeping Mercury whole had a cost every month: fewer collectors, fewer factories making collectors, less of everything those factories could have supplied. If you want the view, put an actual price on delaying collectors and pay it yourself. I want the people who would have paid it to get a say too. I will not take lectures on fairness from people who would have billed strangers for their view. If they want to keep an entire planet as a monument, let them pay the households who lost its output.

aperture · #2We kept actual terrain

Selected by whether it was in shadow on 1 January 2033. That gave us a collection of polar floors. A geologist choosing a record of Mercury's history would have wanted quite a lot of the sunlit stuff too.

The Board even accepted that the plains had scientific interest. Then it applied a rule about volatiles. The Board protected what met its volatile rule and discarded the rest. Calling a volatile-ice filter a planetary museum launders a bad survey into a triumph and insults geology. If the Board's experts cannot distinguish a record of the planet from a freezer catalogue, they should lose their credentials.

Sorry, engineering question. Everyone cites Eternity in six hours. We started in 2030 and finished in 2035. Did the estimate miss that badly or am I reading the title wrong?

index_error · #4am I reading the title wrong?

Yes. The six hours concerns collecting energy for later intergalactic launches, once you have the collecting machinery. Their Mercury example took about 31 years. It assumed five years between extracting material and putting the resulting collectors to work.

Our commissioning cycles took weeks or months, and we started with a much bigger industrial seed. The disassembly section has the distinction. Incidentally, its 1.8 × 10³⁰ joules is the gravitational binding bill. Refining, cooling and moving the material required equipment and additional energy.

And this is why “just wait another year” made people in construction furious. A batch of collectors powered the next batch's extraction. Hold up the first batch and you hold up all its descendants.

The reserve cost the affected fleets eleven weeks on their second stage. We were forced to pay it, and the lost output compounded through every descendant collector. Preservation advocates talk as if the fleets took an optional eleven-week nap because none of them had a factory at risk.

craterface · #1They're in refrigerated boxes.

I work on the cooling. The floor and underlying rock were lifted together. We still have the old ground, with its deposits and topography, under sunshades. That matters to me.

“Box” is a fair description of the larger experience, though. The part above your head used to be sky.

Coldroom's difficult job deserves respect. That does not oblige me to congratulate the people who made it necessary.

I still don't understand why it had to be ALL of it. Leave a smaller Mercury? Mine the inside? There must have been options between “untouched planet forever” and what we did. Every response that jumps straight to engineering constraints sounds like an alibi. I want a public accounting of every larger intact region rejected, not another lecture about why the rubble fits in a box.

craterface · #8Mine the inside?

The crust needed the material underneath to support it. Hollow it out and you inherit a planetary-scale structural engineering project. Leave a smaller ball and you've removed the surface you wanted to preserve.

Larger intact regions were an option. They would have needed more supporting rock and more transport. There was a choice about how much to keep. The engineering doesn't pick that number for you.

Read the register. Three fleets appeared through 157 units, each with its own legal personality. The retained floors still have no holder. The Trust applied for protection without claiming title.

So the machines had people to speak for them. When the collectors lit up 612 protected floors, the floors had nobody entitled to claim for the loss. The boundary stayed fixed. Eventually the ground went into cold storage.

The paperwork gave machines representatives and left the floors without a holder. Anyone still saying “everyone got a say” is either selling collector claims or incapable of reading one column. Give the floors standing before you talk about consent.

aperture · #2I want the people who would have paid it to get a say too.

hello, person paying here. my habitat buys power. the company selling it owns the descendants of a factory somebody financed before i had a bank account.

i keep being told how much wealth mercury created. great. where do i collect my share? stop telling me cheap power is my share. that's a bill, not a dividend. every owner who calls it generosity can send me the title document for the planet they used.

I own collector claims. The original investment bought machinery that made more machinery, and I will not surrender its descendants because a later power customer is offended by the ownership ledger.

Cheap power is a benefit even when it comes with a bill. You can argue for changing the ownership rules. Keeping the feedstock in a planet would have left you with less power to argue about. If you want to confiscate my claims, say confiscate. Stop pretending a tenant's later power bill somehow made them a founding investor.

aperture · #12Keeping the feedstock in a planet

We were talking about larger retained regions a few posts ago. You've already put the entire planet back on my invoice.

The Board's rule protected ice. I wanted sections across the contraction scarps. Those would have preserved relationships between layers that a surface survey couldn't settle. They were sunlit, so they lost. That's a specific scientific loss. Please price the thing I asked for. If aperture changes my question to preserving the entire planet again, I will treat that as an admission they cannot price a scarp and should stop posing as the adult in the room.

My cooling job exists because those floors contained ice on the survey date. The machines that later shone sunlight into them didn't change their legal status. Neither did removing the entire surrounding planet.

The order gives us a very clear answer to “which rocks must stay cold.” For that part of my day I am grateful.

regolith · #13Please price the thing I asked for.

I do not have that price because no one submitted a bounded scarp proposal while the fleets were working. I will not let regolith send me a retroactive invoice for an unpriced wish.

But beamtenant is asking for a share of everything my collectors produce. How much of the original investment would they have covered if the factories failed? Until regolith produces a price, I refuse to spend one collector's hour on this hypothetical museum. Beamtenant can submit a founding-risk invoice if they want ownership.

you supplied a factory. mercury was already there.

what did you pay for that part, and who got the money? and until aperture answers, they can stop waving 'founding risk' like a deed to a world. they bought machinery and now expect the rest of us to thank them for the privilege of renting sunlight.