Neutron star mining?
Suppose you want to mine material from, and eventually completely disassemble, a neutron star. Presumably, you would be extracting heavy elements from the crust, and expecting the neutron-degenerate matter underneath to decompress and undergo beta-decay, turning back into more normal heavy elements as you go. Perhaps you need the material to build trillions of space habitats, or a few hundred spare rocky planets or something.
What would be the easiest, most plausible means of accomplishing this using foreseeable technology? It is permissible to assume any necessary conditions on the particular star's characteristic or pre-existing environment, such as that the neutron star must be part of a binary system with a specific other object, or that it must have pre-existing planets, but fewer and weaker preconditions are of course better.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/91444. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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