[Rockhounds] How ending mining would change the world

[axel.emmermann at telenet.be]

Terraforming Mars is a futile exercise.
Mars has no strong magnetic field to keep the solar wind at bay.
You can't "give" Mars an atmosphere... the sun would blow that away as soon as it forms.
Secondly: living on Mars would seriously shorten your life due to radiation. Same problem, no atmospheric shielding.

Cheers
Axel

----- Oorspronkelijk bericht -----
Van: "ajs" <ajs at silgro.com>
Aan: "Rockhounds at drizzle.com" <rockhounds at rockhounds.drizzle.com>
Verzonden: Zondag 17 april 2022 22:30:24
Onderwerp: Re: [Rockhounds] How ending mining would change the world

> ...flinging asteroids at Earth as a weapon is a very cool concept.

"Cool" depending of course on which side of the fusillade you live.  :-)

And, yes as others have said, it's not a new concept.  Now, what was the
book I read decades ago where it was important to play gravitational
billiards in the asteroid belt to redirect one large asteroid to gently
capture one small black hole that was orbiting THROUGH the Earth,
threatening to eventually settle at the core and consume the planet?
The fictional weird genius who figured out the mechanics said something
like, shucks, t'weren't nothing, I just started with what I wanted to
end up with, and worked backwards...

This is similar to the notion that any (alien) species capable of
interstellar, or even efficient interplanetary, travel has command of
such powerful energies that they are very dangerous to anyone they don't
like.

That said, my personal odd vision goes like this:  Let's get to Mars as
fast as we can, but only temporarily settle there.  Explore the hell out
of it, then evacuate again and bombard the planet with comets until it
has a real atmosphere and water, before we return for good...
Brute-force terraforming, you see, and yeah, I realize that a "little"
bioengineering might be needed to jumpstart the ecosystem.  But hell, we
could probably right now engineer a cyanobacteria-like single cell that
can float and survive in the upper atmosphere of Venus, and eventually
make THAT planet habitable.

Although it's entirely likely that by the time we could live on the
surface of Mars or Venus, we'd no longer want to spend much time down in
a gravity well anyway...

Final thought:  Given that orbital billiards creates weapons of mass
destruction, how do you reliably keep any (human) system from being
misused, subverted, or just making a terrible mistake?  That includes
visions of bringing resource-rich bodies into Earth orbit for mining.

Cheers,
Alan Silverstein

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