[Rockhounds] How ending mining would change the world

[Tim Fisher]

You don't have to look any farther than Stephen Hawking himself to find
someone who advocated for maybe not trying so hard to contact alien
civilizations:
"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in
America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said. "We
only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop
into something we wouldn't want to meet."

Tim Fisher
Http://OreRockOn.com 
Email nospam at orerockon.com



-----Original Message-----
From: Rockhounds [mailto:rockhounds-bounces at rockhounds.drizzle.com] On
Behalf Of Alan Silverstein
Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2022 1:30 PM
To: rockhounds at rockhounds.drizzle.com
Subject: 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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