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.
Why bother terraforming planets, or settling them at all? With current tech we could capture an asteroid, throw it into an Aldrin Cycler orbit, and hollow it out into an O’Neil Cylinder. Boom, instant colony which can hold hundreds of millions of people and naturally cycles between near Earth and near Mars every couple years. Repeat as necessary.
I definitely think this is the cooler way to go. You could even put engines on them so that they could migrate around (slowly; I’m envisioning engines that modify their orbits, not allow for free motion). We could have space stations orbiting Mars and the Moon coordinating drones below for research and asteroid habs that can visit these stations for transfers.
But as the article/book points out, there are still a ton of questions we need to answer before that is possible.
Yeah, I think that is a very slept-on concept. There are MANY asteroids in our system which could serve the purpose. We actually have enough room in this system for nearly infinite humans if it’s done that way.
So you want to have the Side colonies from Gundam?
A capped canyon on Mars could make for a great city, too, without the need for larger scale terraforming.
Who moves the asteroid? Like literally, what nation or nation is moving a planet killer asteroid around near earth, and why are we doing this at all?
Nobody is doing it right now. Its a scifi concept, but the parent is saying that is an alternative to trying to colonize planetary bodies.
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.
They’re not like, that pessimistic about it, but they raise extremely pressing questions that need to be investigated and understood for things to be successful.
Exactly. In the podcast episode I linked, the authors explain how they’re sci-fi nerds and fans of space exploration. They started out writing a book about how cool it would be, but started asking these questions and realized we don’t have the answers yet. That’s not pessimism, it’s practicality
