this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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That would be nice.
Doing some math here even an aluminium (if this material is fine) foil 1 nanometer thick (if this thickness is fine) with one tenth the radius of the Earth (1% of the area of the Earth) would require enough almost 3 thousand tons. That's should be doable with current tech within a few years to a couple of decades even if you need a few times this mass to carry orbit keeping equipment although it would be a huge project unless some lighter material could be used.
But if the foil needed to be any thicker/heavier than this then it might be easier to do with asteroid mining/in space production.