That’s the bonkers claim made by top scientist Pekka Janhunen, who says millions of people could inhabit a megacity in space by 2026.

“The motivation is to have a settlement with artificial gravity that allows growth beyond Earth’s living area,” Dr Janhunen wrote.

Those pods would be linked by powerful magnets and generate artificial gravity by slowly rotating.

Residents would mine resources from Ceres 600 miles below the settlement and haul them back up using “space elevators”, Dr Janhunen said.

“Lifting the materials from Ceres is energetically cheap compared to processing them into habitats, if a space elevator is used,” he wrote.

“Because Ceres has low gravity and rotates relatively fast, the space elevator is feasible.”.

Janhunen, who worked with a number of Finnish researchers on the paper, has thought of that, too.

Dr Janhunen also admitted that the energy required to lift building materials from Ceres to orbit would represent a major obstacle