We may not be the only species to think of this:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26582/

Space miners wanted; Short hours; good pay. 18 month labor contracts required. Please apply at your local Mercurian Mining Development Corporation headquarters.

Gary 7

@35. Joseph G: You forgot to wonder if there was any earth on Earth.

Ivan.

@17 Jess Tauber: The only problem is the high delta-V needed to get goodies back from Mercury. But I guess with all that solar power, you can just build some huge frickin’ mass drivers
I’ve actually wondered about that – other then photovoltaic power, would it be hard to set up a solar power system on Mercury? I’m thinking of a more efficient heat-engine kind of thing, like those solar towers with steam generators. I was wondering if it’d be possible to economically cool something like that, the days being so long there and there being no substantial atmosphere to carry away heat? Heat engines don’ work if the whole darn thing is really hot

@34 DrBB: That is an intriguing idea. I kinda hope it’s wrong, as I’m a hopeless romantic when it comes to colonizing other star systems. I always just assumed that hot Jupiters were by far the easiest to find using current planet-finding methods (both radial velocity and transit methods, at least). The transit method one is particularly infuriating, due to the small odds of a star’s ecliptic being aligned with our point of view enough to use that method. I’ve seen estimates that for every terrestrial planet we find using the transit method, there are about 50 that we miss!

What a cool and (AFAIK) plausible speculation. Instead of being bizarre anomalies, the hot Jupiters we keep finding end up being the norm and we’re the exception, due to a catastrophic crash-and-blast of one such beast earlier in the history of Sol system. Caveats notwithstanding, I love it!

Re beliefs, since nothing’s at stake for me either way this is the hat I’m gonna wear for now until somebody proves it untenable. Thanks for posting it!

Suppose almost ALL planets that grow fast and acheive a certain mass TYPICALLY hang on to their primordial atmospheres, just like we currently think Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune have: what would THOSE planets look like if the bulk of their thick and deep-soupy atmospheres were catastrophically ripped away to expose their cores?

Well, if I’ve understood the current ideas about how they formed, without (the bulk of) their atmospheres they might look rather like Mercury. Or Earth.

However implausible it may seem in the light of current consensus, the possibility exists – within our current knowledge or uncertainty – that almost all large planetary bodies which grow from a protoplanetary disk may ROUTINELY acquire a primordial atmosphere directly from the protoplanetary disk…and become ‘gas giants’ as a normal course of events. Nobody yet knows what the ‘typical’ planet-growing’ recipe involves, and from what little we actually do know it is still possible that the conventional and currently established scenario for how solid particles in a gaseous medium like the protoplanetary disk gather together via gravitational and electrostatic forces into growing planetesimals to do their growing thing holds considerable weight. But maybe that’s not all there is to it. Maybe there’s more to it and it’s fiendishly complicated, but maybe it’s SIMPLER than we think. Nobody yet knows.

It may not be all that complicated a problem. While we have an abundance of knowledge about basic forces that must be involved, we still do not know precisely in detail how planets form.

But we do know enough to appreciate that catastrophic events can drastically change the game. Suppose almost ALL planets that grow fast and acheive a certain mass TYPICALLY hang on to their primordial atmospheres, just like we currently think Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune have: what would THOSE planets look like if the bulk of their thick and deep-soupy atmospheres were catastrophically ripped away to expose their cores?

Mercury, being nearest to the Sun and curiously also plying the most eccentric orbit of any planet (unless one discounts Pluto in that category) no doubt harbors secrets to the formation of our planetary system. Messenger will inevitably uncover some of them. The wild and (I admit disconcerting!) possible scenario I’ve outlined above may be ruled out by the science that comes from this mission (whew!). On the other hand, we can’t ever afford to ignore new and potentially shattering possibilities simply because they may not square with our preciously adopted current beliefs: a ‘belief’ is a canard that is just about as important as worrying about what hat you prefer to wear. If anybody wants genuinely to think scientifically, they have abstained utterly from the tyrrany of fashion, in favor of something that demonstrably and ACTUALLY WORKS to keep their head warm.

The Sun from Earth subtends about a half degree. At Mercury’s average distance from the Sun, it would be appear “only” about 2.4 times larger, or around 1.2 degrees across. Believe it or not, the Sun (and our Moon) seen in our skies is like the width of a pencil eraser as seen from arm’s length (about 2 feet from your eye). In order to appreciate how large the Sun is (on average) as seen from Mercury, hold a common half-inch marble at arm’s length.

By comparison to some “Hot Jupiter”-type exoplanets that have been discovered, our Mercury is as ‘distant and cold’ as the rest of the terrestrial planets in our system. In fact, it may possiblyturn out to be something of an anomaly that our Solar System doesn’t have a planet interior to Mercury’s orbit…but that may not necessarily mean there wasn’t one there that had been consumed by the Sun sometime in the 4.6 billion years since our system’s formation…