Technologies for creating a fully-fledged habitat in microgravity conditions and on other planets: mycelium, 3D, carbon fiber
The Mycotecture project team at NASA’s Ames Research Center is developing technologies that will enable the “growing” of habitats on the Moon, Mars, and beyond using fungi and the subterranean filaments that make up their main component, known as mycelium. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, have successfully tested the next-generation SpaceCAL microgravity 3D printer. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have unveiled ecovoxels—modular, reconfigurable building blocks that can be used for both construction on Earth and for creating living and working spaces in space. As part of the European Space Agency’s First! initiative, CompPair, in collaboration with Com&Sens and CSEM, has developed a new self-controlling and self-healing carbon fiber composite material.
First proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, the idea of alien spheres remains relevant in the 21st century
In the 1960s, physicist and polymath Freeman Dyson proposed the idea of creating these eponymous spheres. He proposed that a sufficiently advanced society would have an insatiable need for space and energy. If they were industrious enough, they could solve both problems by dismantling a planet and turning it into a massive spherical shell. This sphere would encircle the star, providing a surface area equal to billions of planets and absorbing vast amounts of solar energy. Dyson calculated that a shell made from a Jupiter-mass planet could completely envelop the Sun at approximately the same orbit as Earth. However, gravity within the hollow shell is neutralized, meaning there is nothing binding the shell to the star. They are free to move in independent directions, meaning the star containing the Dyson sphere would soon simply smash into the shell, destroying it.