With the right amount of seriously pumped up, integrated, and flexible logistics. With the right amount of tremendously pumped up liquid hydrogen production, or other fusion fuel. And with the right amount of imagination; with all of that we could devour our moon in pretty short order; not only building things on it, but also using mass drivers by the hundreds, if not thousands, flinging material out, either as manufactured parts, or just raw moon dirt for radiation protection, or actual replacement dirt to grow things with, to try and build either really big stationary habitats, or really big, moving habitats that become the generational ships it may take to continue expanding our "Isthmus of Migration;" the isthmus that we must have or our numbers will overcome even the, now seemingly limitless, resources of our entire solar system.
And as it wouldn't be in our best interests at all to actually do such a thing (devouring our moon, or devouring the moons of any of our closest neighbors) we will have to eventually look into the big band of stuff available in the asteroid belt.
That this belt is very big indeed. Or that it has a very large amount of stuff in it, shouldn't preterb us too much; in either being too overwhelmed with the obstacles that will be in our way, or overly optimistic (because anything is possible, after all, even if not very likely) about being able to use all of its content; and that for purely practical reasons. As in the time spans involved with such distances; as well as to just how much of it, with the limits of the energy you can bring to bear (because you have to transport it too to power robot tugs), so that you can move significant portions of it back to where you might need it. Which is all to suggest that there would be practical limits to the infrastructure you would want to commit to to make, and support, for this kind of exploration, and actual extraction.
That being said, though, doesn't mean you wouldn't want to at least try to set something up, as a self sustaining process in itself, to go after as much of the material out there that we can. So you then have to ask yourself: how do you go about allocating for that process; especially in regards to the rest of the world, and all of the many, "aligned," meaning/belief systems that we have to deal with now as a world of nations, and monarchies, and theocracies, and ideologies? Well, I have a proposal to make on that issue.
What I am suggesting is to make it possible for a group of people, people who don't want to live by too many rules (and don't wish to be part of a specific aligned group), to do this in partnership with the new Federation. And for that our new Federation would have to commit to building a network of "Commons/Support/Maintenance/Transfer/ and disputes handling stations. Structures that could support hundreds as they come back from the big "out there" for repairs, refueling, resupply, and delivery of what the prospectors have been able to find, taking the best we have in sensors along with with which to find it with.
The new Federation would also have to do the research and development effort to create a new class of exploratory, prospecting/processing ship. A completely modular design that could make use of a common, main centerline, support truss, and transfer buss. Something that could be stacked to whatever desired length, or width and height, so as to allow for the attachment of any number of standard functional modules.
Key to this, though, would be one other interesting design feature concerning how actual ship habitat space is created. And for that we need to think of a new (if this hasn't been already thought of, which wouldn't surprise me at all) kind of revolving ring to provide artificial gravity. Instead of the usual ring design we've seen in countless movies, and TV shows, where the ring segments are fixed parts of a wheel and spoke construction, which is great if you don't have to accelerate, or decelerate, every so often. For our purposes, however, a better design would be to have something that would be more reminiscent of gondolas suspended from a big ring that would do the actual rotating.
The beauty of such a design is simply this: it would allow you to use either acceleration, or deceleration, or the ring turning, to create your artificial gravity. If you then arranged things so that the engines where a big module that could not only traverse the length of the entire ship, on the inside of the main buss truss works, but could also rotate their orientation, you would never have to turn the ship around at all, to do deceleration burns. You would also never have to let the habitats go long without full gravity either as translation from one form of down, to another, would occur by slowly decreasing your burn (at whatever end) while you increased ring speed, or the exact opposite with increasing ring speed, while decreasing burn. All the while the gondola like modules would simply swing slowly to their new, proper orientation to either having a change of velocity, or simply spinning the wheel back up if the ship were coasting, or stopped relative to a big rock that needed looking at.
In any case, though, what I am talking about here, in large part, is no more than what a lot of current, very popular, games have been trying to sell as a very involving, entertaining experience. All of these massively multiplayer, open ended universes that allow you to start with a beginner ship, and then leap out into space to seek your fortune. This would involve a great deal more training, and actual work, on an individual's part, but the basic idea is the same. It would also not be quite so open ended, but it would be a life's adventure. A real life's adventure. With very real risks, but also with the possibility of finding water, and other needed minerals, that our migration efforts will desperately need; a need that a balanced prospector, with a little luck, might build into one significant, big, living ship system; built of family, friends, and those who see a simpler way to cooperate. People who could come to see the benefits of trading fairly, if you're treated, and traded fairly with. Something that the new Federation will need to understand as a very necessary cooperation in, and of, itself, if it wants this kind of high risk exploration to be done without a lot of bureaucratic administration to keep all of the aligned nations satisfied that they weren't being left out of the hunt for necessary raw materials.
The idea then would be to have these prospectors take on the slow, tedious task of sniffing out where specific deposits might be found. They could tag finds, process what they could in place for their own needs, and extra trade return, and then get a cut of what the bulk processing might return once the "rock" in question was robot-tug transferred to a centralized processing facility, by Federation robot tugs. That bulk processing would then be divvied up by the new Federation to the member nations participating in the migration effort. The prospectors would then have trading material with which to secure more supplies, amenities, and better ship modules to do their jobs with.
Just more to think about as we plan for not only our mass migration, but also for our exploration of our own solar system.
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