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I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes
by bnjemian 5y ago
I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.
- lmilcin 5y agoBut why? Don't we already have a moon?
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoThink of all of the opportunities to write software to calculate the complicated changes required for astrology.
- legostormtroopr 5y agoWe have moon, but what about second moon?
- throwaway378037 5y agoI don’t think he knows about second moon!
- disillusioned 5y agoWhat if, and hear me out here, we give _our_ moon its _own_ moon? Like letting my dog have a lizard for a pet!
- rishav_sharan 5y agoIt's like asking, why have 2nd breakfast when you had one breakfast. We must channel our inner hobbits and think big
- Koshkin 5y agoR-right... What can go wrong?
- sneak 5y agoWhat sort of propulsion mechanisms (even those that are currently physically plausible but entirely outside our technology, so, for example, solar sails or nuclear torchships, but not, say, warp drive) could possibly be used to achieve such a task?
- messe 5y agoNuclear would do it. Essentially use the dwarf planet itself as reaction mass, accelerating it with either nuclear thermal propulsion or a nuclear powered mass driver. Highly impractical, and would take centuries to slow it down enough.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Diti 5y agoThe Caplan Thruster of this video: https://youtu.be/v3y8AIEX_dU https://youtu.be/v3y8AIEX_dU
- peeters 5y agoScott Manley had a recent video talking about the work involved in moving the Earth, that you might find interesting. Basically the most "plausible" approach might be to move the moon and use it to drag the Earth. Similarly the best way to move another large object might be to carefully move other objects small amounts to do precise gravity assists. https://youtu.be/5StYppuJ_lg https://youtu.be/5StYppuJ_lg
- smegger001 5y agowouldn't that require a solution to the three body problem to make such precise gravity assists?
- ericbarrett 5y agoOnly if the target was far and we did it in one shot. Otherwise you’d just measure the state of things and make corrections for your next maneuver, the way we do for trips outside Earth’s orbit today.
- monkeycantype 5y agoIs it a comety composition? Crash it into mars for some ocean and atmosphere?
- XorNot 5y agoI keep hoping we'll get lucky in my lifetime and something big like that will just hit Mars on it's own. It would be a hell of a world to go from "desert" to "so we've got all these new oceans to name and also you can't breathe it but ground level pressure is one atmosphere".
- tmp538394722 5y agoI think seeing something world changingly large randomly smashing into our next door neighbor would leave me feeling something other than lucky. But sure if it’s gonna happen, let’s get the neighbors a pool! Just let me uh… change my shorts.
- rob74 5y agoI say, better to have it happen on Mars than on Earth! Such an event would probably even have the positive effect of raising awareness and increasing funding of programmes that monitor asteroids hazardous to earth and technologies to deflect them.
- matkoniecz 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker–Levy_9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker–Levy_9 An entire fragmented comet impacted Jupiter in 1994 > Over the next six days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km (7,500 mi) across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal).[24] Two impacts 12 hours apart on July 19 created impact marks of similar size to that caused by fragment G, and impacts continued until July 22, when fragment W struck the planet.[25]
- dzink 5y agoLove the creativity! That said, the moon stabilized earth’s rotation angle, giving us the seasons, and it also drives huge chunks of life ecosystems and weather with the tides. So adding a second body in rotation to Earth with such superpowers would muck with a lot of stuff along the way. Maybe put it around Mars instead?
- krasin 5y agoThe diameter of this asteroid is estimated to be ~160 km, which is 21.7 times less than Moon with d=3474 km. Assuming similar density, the mass of the new asteroid is 10000 less than Moon and it's unlikely to affect much.
- rob74 5y agoAh, ok, good to know! When I read "dwarf planet", I automatically assumed it to be bigger than (or at least comparable in size to) the moon, which is a mere sattelite of a small planet. Then again, even Pluto, which was considered for a long time to be an "actual" planet, is smaller than the moon...
- cbkeller 5y agoEarth's moon is freakishly large by moon standards, as it turns out! > At about one-quarter the diameter of Earth (comparable to the width of Australia), it [the Moon] is the largest natural satellite in the Solar System relative to the size of its planet, the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System overall, and is larger than any dwarf planet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
- niyikiza 5y agoHonorable mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNtTylNR7ks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNtTylNR7ks
- PhasmaFelis 5y agoI'm gonna level with you, I stopped reading at "superpowers" and as a result this sounds like a great idea.
- sp332 5y agoWith such a huge difference between peri- and aphelion, won't it be moving extremely fast when it's nearby?
- peeters 5y agoWell yes, and 11 AU is still further than Saturn's orbit. The asteroid belt contains objects of similar size that are far closer.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 5y agoI want nothing more than for my species to enter the federation of species with a reputation for being the ones who did that absolutely ridiculous prank using 10% of their GDP for a century.
- tradesurplus 5y agoWhy not tow it into Venus or Mars orbit instead? They could do with the benefits of having a decent sized moon. It would make terraforming and long term habitation more straightforward and likely to succeed as well as providing lots of useful materials feedstock atop the gravity well.
- herendin2 5y agoIf this was remotely possible for us then we could also talk about towing the Earth a little further from the Sun to fix climate change (It's not possible in any reasonable time)
- DiabloD3 5y agoHow are you going to deal with the imbalance in charge? It's likely that the to-be-moon has a very large charge differential between it and the Sun, but also likely between us and it.
- loa_in_ 5y agoThat's true. In extreme cases it could really upset Earth's magnetosphere. And since we don't know we can't assume it's magnetically inert.
- temp0826 5y agoReminded me of the game Bungie made pre-Halo called Marathon, which mostly took place on a colony ship that was made out of one of Mar's moons (Deimos)
- yinyang_in 5y agoAll aside, thanks for giving me big laugh :D
- ashton314 5y agoCan we give the moon a moon instead?