Dear Evil Engineer,
I have been unable to get climate change off my mind. Watching our leaders utterly fail to decarbonise with the urgency scientists warn us is necessary makes me more certain by the day that Earth’s ecosystems face collapse in my lifetime and billions of people will die. It got me thinking – what a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity this presents!
My fellow high-net-worth villains are building private bunkers and mouthing off about the need to terraform Mars as a back-up planet, but I have an alternative proposal. I’d like to build a habitable megastructure in space that people – that is, those willing to pay a very reasonable resettlement fee – can live inside indefinitely while Earth succumbs to climate change. Could you advise me approximately how large a structure I might be able to build? Would I be limited to around the size of the ISS, or could I go much larger: as large as the Moon? The Earth?
Yours,
An opportunistic v...