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Let’s not send a few thousand people to Mars as a big experiment in survival.
The authors of the book in the article, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, were also on an episode of Factually. Between this article and that episode, I’m pretty down on any cool scifi future in space.
Part of the point they raise is exactly this problem, people like to say “someone” or “some company” etc but it’s literally a problem with the idea, who gets to do it? Who are we trusting with this life destroying capability? The reality of the idea demands we consider these questions.
We’re already entrusting the safety of ourselves and everyone else on this planet to governments and corporations, every day. This particular concept doesn’t inherently carry more risk than, say, the keeping and storing of nuclear weapons all over the planet or research into biological warfare conducted by just about every country - in fact, the risks of asteroid harvesting could (and very likely would) be far less than those things.
One thing to make clear - “near Earth orbit” does NOT mean “low Earth orbit”. Near Earth can imply a Lagrange point, lunar orbit, cycler orbit, etc. There are many ways to store something like a large asteroid in a way that would be just as safe as having a natural satellite (the moon) or having nothing there at all, so this is not really a limiting factor. There is a vanishingly small chance that a captured asteroid would hit Earth - that’s simply just extremely unlikely unless you were trying to do it on purpose. That’s a whole other topic - kinetic bombardment may be a real problem in the future, especially if we don’t pursue space infrastructure while another nation / group does. But you wouldn’t need big asteroids for that - something the size of a city block would do just fine.
So, who will do the asteroid wrangling first? Probably SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, or some other space agency or nation which emerges as a power in space over the coming century. I don’t think this is actually a very important question overall and especially right now, since we don’t have any real space infrastructure to speak of at the moment. There is also nothing illegal about doing it - anyone could capture an asteroid and return it to orbit the Earth, right now. Except if they do that (actually insert it into Earth’s orbit), it would fall under the same classification as the Moon and would become the property of all humanity. This is why such an asteroid would likely not orbit the Earth itself - maybe the Moon or another close point we can easily access.
But, one thing is certain - someone (yes, that terrifying unknown) is going to do it. Even if it’s just for mining purposes, as long as we continue to advance as a species, we’ll be moving big rocks around the system eventually. This idea may seem outlandish to someone who hasn’t considered it, but the truth is that we have the tech to do it right now, it’s not that complex, and there are less risks than projects we’re already doing now.
As for why? Well, ending the resource limitations of our species, having access to nearly limitless energy, and allowing all of mankind to live at the same level of abundance and prosperity seem like pretty good reasons to me. Right now our whole species is standing shoulder to shoulder in a single room, arguing about the resources inside of that room and who should be in charge of them, and basically nobody is even thinking about opening a door and seeing what’s on the other side of it.
Any government with launch capability, I guess. I get what you’re saying but this is already how it works. NASA recently modified the orbit of an asteroid and I’m sure they’re already studying how to do more. Any govt with launch capability probably already has access to nukes, though, so I don’t think this is an existential threat.
So if tomorrow Putin said he was going to make a space colony by altering an asteroid orbit and secretly had the capability, you’re confident that’s not a serious problem you’re just handwaving?
Yes asteroids are an existential threat. This us the exact problem with these discussions, they’re being talked about like these spherical cows in a vacuum, but these are real serious things that need to be discussed. Space law isn’t settled, there’s almost no confidence this type of space settlement doesn’t massively increase our existential risk.
Putin already has nukes. They are a much more immediate existential threat and we have a framework in place to deal with it. I also don’t know what you’re proposing. If any entity has the capability to move an asteroid, how do you propose we stop them? NASA has already moved an asteroid and they didn’t ask for anybody’s permission.
They didn’t move an asteroid towards earth, or near it. Nukes are nowhere near the destructive power of an asteroid, and why add another threat at all?? like just why bother add a threat. You are better off building a city at the bottom of the ocean.
There’s just such a fundamental disconnect here about the proposal to just “move an asteroid and build a space hab there lol ez” and addressing the geopolitical, medical, and engineering problems that actually raises. These are real genuine questions with geopolitical ramifications that y’all are just handwaving away.
Look I want sieve settlements too, but it’s not doing anybody any good anymore to pretend anything about it is solved, easy, or even has good reasons to happen right now.
I’m not handwaving them away. We were having a fun conversation about theoretical concepts and you jumped in with “what about madmen who wanna destroy the world”. I have no political power on the global stage so that question is so far outside my scope that it’s absurd.
You’re also handwaving away the fact that there’s nothing we can do. It doesn’t matter how settled space law gets. If somebody with the capability wants to do that, they will unless someone else forcibly stops them. Laws won’t matter at that point (see all the humanitarian crises going on right now despite being against some law and how most of the world isn’t actively stopping them)
And, yes, NASA tested asteroid redirection on an inconsequential asteroid. But that was a choice and now we know they have the capability. We’re not adding a threat, it’s already there.
Lastly, if you read my other comments in this thread and crossposted threads, you’ll see me reiterating that the point of this article is that there are a ton of unanswered questions about space colonization and I don’t think it’s going to happen in our lifetimes. There’s plenty of time for you to figure out how to write a law to stop physics/math or outlaw rocketry or whatever. So excuse me if I continue to imagine cool sci-fi futures.
I responded to a comment saying “but what about this” and pointed out that it doesn’t actually address any of the problems with space settlements.
The question is literally in the scope of this article because it’s one of the main topics the weinersmiths discuss! In a post about the book where they discuss that!
And space law does matter. The oceans, Antarctica, both are examples of very similar space law that’s been respected to date. This wacky pessimistic “space will be the wild west” is frankly absurd. It’s an easy zero thought answer that takes no effort to consider and takes no real world history into account, just vague “world bad mkay”
There’s a huge difference between dart and redirecting an asteroid to a specific near earth orbit. These are not comparable existential threats.
Yes! The article is about the exact unanswered questions like what I’ve brought up here. Your push back is just confusing and just seems overly defensive rather than engaging with the exact answered questions that are the topic of discussion.
And we may be settling space anywhere from ten to hundreds of years from now, but this isn’t some “haha what if” it’s genuinely a current topic of discussion due to the ever increasing feasibility.
It does address some of the problems. We already have a lot of the capability. Like I’ve said, moving an asteroid has already been demonstrated. Capping the dig sites makes it reasonable to maintain an atmosphere inside the hollow body of the asteroid and the body of the asteroid protects inhabitants from radiation. We can build soil using basic principles we’ve used for millennia here on Earth and raise crops so the hab could possibly be self sustaining. This addresses most of the scientific issues the article presents.
You keep ignoring a lot of what I’m saying so it feels like you’re not actually arguing with me and this is a personal bugaboo for you. I never said “space will be the wild west”. There are already laws in place that work and prevent a lot of bad things. What I was trying to get across is that laws don’t actually stop people from doing bad things. Putin invaded Ukraine, Israel is bombing civilians, etc, even though those are against international laws. The laws are a deterrent but can’t actually stop someone. And the international community has shown they will not forcibly stop countries from breaking these laws. What would stop people from doing something like this is the same as what currently stops countries from using nukes.
They redirected an asteroid into an orbit farther from Earth. That’s not a huge difference from bringing its orbit closer to Earth.
My push back is because we are just randos on the internet having a fun conversation about hypothetical far futures, not an organization with space launch capabilities, and you started yelling at us for being irresponsible with existential threats. No matter how this argument here end, nothing will change in the status of space law and the ability to ram asteroids into Earth. So we wanted to spend our time theorizing about the fun questions and there’s no international law requiring us to submit a thesis on how we would prevent a global apocalypse before we play armchair scientist/explorer.
There’s just so much wrong here, and so much absurdity.
And really, “were just randos so I won’t engage with the topic of the post and how dare you for ruining our fun because surely nobody should be remotely serious in their conversations about something that may be killing people within our lifetime” just ain’t the argument you think it is.