System. The planet also receives six and a half times the solar flux as the Earth/Moon system, making solar energy a very effective energy source; it could be harnessed through orbital solar arrays and beamed to the surface or exported to other planets. Geologist Stephen Gillett suggested in 1996 that this could make Mercury an ideal place to build and launch solar sail spacecraft, which could launch as folded-up "chunks" by mass driver from Mercury's surface. Once in space, the solar sails would deploy. Solar energy for the mass driver should be easy to come by, and solar sails near Mercury would have 6.5 times the thrust they do near Earth. This could make Mercury an ideal place to acquire materials useful in building hardware to send to (and terraform) Venus. Vast solar collectors could also be built on or near Mercury to produce power for large-scale engineering activities such as laser-pushed light sails to nearby star systems. As Mercury has essentially no axial tilt, crater floors near its poles lie in eternal darkness, never seeing the Sun. They function as cold traps, trapping volatiles for geological periods. It is estimated that the poles of Mercury contain 1014–1015 kg of water, likely covered by about 5.65×109 m3 of hydrocarbons. This would make agriculture possible. It has been suggested that plant varieties could be developed to take advantage of the high light intensity and the long day of Mercury. The poles do not experience the significant day-night variations the rest of Mercury do, making them the best place on the planet to begin a colony. Another option is to live underground, where day-night variations would be damped enough that temperatures would stay roughly constant. There are indications that Mercury contains lava tubes, like the Moon and Mars, which would be suitable for this purpose. Underground temperatures in a ring around Mercury's poles can even reach room temperature on Earth, 22±1 °C; and this is achieved at a depths starting from only about 0.7 m. This presence of volatiles and abundance of energy has led Alexander Bolonkin and James Shifflett to consider Mercury preferable to Mars for colonization. Yet a third option could be to continually move to stay on the night side, as Mercury's 176-day-long day-night cycle means that the terminator travels very slowly. Because Mercury is very dense, its surface gravity is 0.38g like Mars, even though it is a