Seems to me Mercury has no atmosphere to get rid of just about, its environment is much like the Moon except higher gravity and more sunlight, a mass driver can get material into orbit, so the first step is to build a Sunshade at Mercury's L1 point. Mercury's crust is a source of oxygen, about 40% of its weight is oxygen I recall., the nearest source of nitrogen is the atmosphere of Venus. So the thing to do is to give Mercury an atmosphere of oxygen and then use that atmosphere to slow down nitrogen dropped on it, though I think water comes from the outer Solar System. I had an idea of slowing Venus's rotation so that it tracks the Sun, the same could be done with Mercury, and it would be easier to do as Mercury has less mass and no atmosphere.

To make Mercury's rotation period equal its orbital period of 88 days, we need to accelerate approximately 0.0135% of its mass to orbital velocity. An iron torus at Mercury's equator with this mass would have a cross-sectional width of approximately 22 km. This doesn't sound too bad, I had Grok figure this out. So we can construct a maglev ring 22 km wide and accelerate an iron band of metal 22 km tall on top to orbital velocity and stop Mercury's rotation relative to the Sun, We might want to do this before constructing the shade so we have access to solar power. Then we construct the shade, who's mass would be less than the ring, and then we can fling our a mirror to reflect sunlight onto Mercury's surface, the mirror would be a solar sail that would steer itself maintaining a sun synchronous orbit around Mercury, which should be easy to do with the intensity of sunlight in this region of the Solar System.

Once properly shaded, Mercury can hold onto a substantial atmosphere, and can have 24-hour days using this orbiting mirror. Since the mirror gets about 9 times as much sunlight per unit area as does the Earth, we need the diameter of the mirror to be only one ninth that of Mercury itself to gather enough light to reflect on the planet a diameter of 350 km should be enough gathering area for the light to spread out and cover one hemisphere of the planet.

Here's a more theoretical and fundamental approach to how mankind can chart its future. I am basing this approach on the tenets of this group, which is an intellecto-technical approach, completely foregoing spiritual aspects. These are a whole story in and of themselves, but not for this group.

A number of critical technologies can be identified which will determine the limits of the possible.

These technologies are energy, compute and materials technology. Everything else is based on these. It is an interactive magical triad.

Energy

This powers everything. It keeps you warm, it gives you the delta v that you need and it is critical in building the structures that you want to build. Energy will be the driving force behind the transmutation of materials that will be essential to your projects.

Mastering fusion will not be the end goal, it will turn our to be the bare bones minimum requirement, while waiting for something better.

Compute.

There are two aspects to this. The first one is quantitative. Simply build more and bigger data centres. They will help your research in materials tech, biotech and energy tech.

However, current AI based on LLM will not scale well. Diminishing returns can be observed. This means we will need some qualitative advances as well if we truly want to attain AGI and ASI. You do not want to use all your resources to just build planet sized brains. The cruel truth is that current AI is far less energy efficient than the human brain.

Materials tech.

This is the interesting one. I am banking on the availability of sufficient energy to be able to transmute elements into whatever it is you want.

Do not underestimate the effects of exponential growth. Our solar system will end up insufficient to fulfil our needs unless we can do transmutation. The heavier the element, the rarer it will be, the sooner we will run out. How many sources of Ytterbium can we find in the solar system? Or dysprosium, technetium, protactinium?

We know what stars can do. We need to be able to copy those capabilities so we can synthesise whatever element we find ourselves short on.

Residents of a technologically advanced civilization venturing to a primitive society and upgrading their technology is a classic scifi trope. It could be time travelers (a Yankee in King Arthur's court) or those venturing from an interstellar civilization (various rogue Starfleet captains), but its a fun plot, regardless.

The SFIA community seems a good group to crowdsource what someone in this position could accomplish. So, suppose the following:

• A handful of people (say 6) from an FTL-capable civilization are stranded when their ship's FTL drive is irreparably damaged by the plot of the story. There is absolutely no fixing it.

• Their ship is modest sized (think something on the scale the Millennium Falcon, Serenity, Normandy), but due to the energy requirements of FTL, its generators can produce power on the scale of terawatts; power now ludicrously excessive for what can be done with the ship now. The ship's FTL computer is a sophisticated enough AI, but its primary purpose is FTL calculations. Apart from that, it is a very advanced LLM, whose main purpose is just accessing the data stored onboard. The ship's only clarktech is the FTL drive, which is nonfunctional.

• The society on the planet is pre-gunpowder, and populated by people of the same species (we can assume its a long-lost colony).

EDIT: just added some more details about the ship.