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The best asteroid defense is colonizing the inner solar system.

PaulHoule 3y ago
… exploitation of carbonaceous asteroids. For that matter colonizing Mars is for people who think Ray Bradbury is a good sci-fi writer. Really ambitious and imaginative people know there is a lot more lebensraum in the asteroid belt: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07487.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07487.pdf
- EA-3167 3y ago
  The problem I have with both of these ideas is that "Build the ship and get there" is the easy part. We don't know how to keep people alive and healthy for a lifetime in an environment we construct from nothing. We don't understand our own microbiome, our response to higher levels of incident radiation, how we adapt to microgravity over decades... none of it. We don't know how to make a colony anywhere other than Earth self-sufficient, and without *total* self-sufficiency there is no backup of Earth, it's just... a colony that requires links to the homeland. These are all genuinely hard problems to solve, probably ones involving generations of experimentation and sacrifice. By contrast slightly accelerating a big rock so that it just misses the one place in the universe we can live... is cheap and easy.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Ceres is a very long-term project, you're not going to move people there, you're going to grow a population out over a long period of time. Unlike Mars though you really can have a 1 g environment as opposed to a fractional g environment and it has the potential to be something a lot bigger than Earth which Mars doesn't. It also paves the way to generic exploitation of outer solar system and interstellar bodies.
  - elmerfud 3y ago
    I would respectfully disagree with your assessment that finding a way to safely accelerate a big rock so it misses us is cheap and easy even in a relative sense. I don't believe it is easy in any sense of the word and it is fraught with potential dangers that would be impossible to accurately predict. For all of history humans have been going places and figuring out how to live there. Yes they've all been a different place on Earth but some of these places are so radically different from one another that the first sets of people died because there was no ability to even support them for a short time until they figured it out. We understand human biology and our needs well enough that these are problems that we could solve. It's also a scope that we can grasp. It is also not easy but most things worth doing are not easy. Missing a giant rock heading towards you until it is too late to do anything about is a very high probability. The only way to ensure survival is to put people in more than one place. If sustainability of our species is a thing we care about then investment in N+1 redundancy for humans is a requirement.

… exploitation of carbonaceous asteroids. For that matter colonizing Mars is for people who think Ray Bradbury is a good sci-fi writer. Really ambitious and imaginative people know there is a lot more lebensraum in the asteroid belt: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07487.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07487.pdf

EA-3167 3y ago
The problem I have with both of these ideas is that "Build the ship and get there" is the easy part. We don't know how to keep people alive and healthy for a lifetime in an environment we construct from nothing. We don't understand our own microbiome, our response to higher levels of incident radiation, how we adapt to microgravity over decades... none of it. We don't know how to make a colony anywhere other than Earth self-sufficient, and without *total* self-sufficiency there is no backup of Earth, it's just... a colony that requires links to the homeland. These are all genuinely hard problems to solve, probably ones involving generations of experimentation and sacrifice. By contrast slightly accelerating a big rock so that it just misses the one place in the universe we can live... is cheap and easy.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Ceres is a very long-term project, you're not going to move people there, you're going to grow a population out over a long period of time. Unlike Mars though you really can have a 1 g environment as opposed to a fractional g environment and it has the potential to be something a lot bigger than Earth which Mars doesn't. It also paves the way to generic exploitation of outer solar system and interstellar bodies.
- elmerfud 3y ago
  I would respectfully disagree with your assessment that finding a way to safely accelerate a big rock so it misses us is cheap and easy even in a relative sense. I don't believe it is easy in any sense of the word and it is fraught with potential dangers that would be impossible to accurately predict. For all of history humans have been going places and figuring out how to live there. Yes they've all been a different place on Earth but some of these places are so radically different from one another that the first sets of people died because there was no ability to even support them for a short time until they figured it out. We understand human biology and our needs well enough that these are problems that we could solve. It's also a scope that we can grasp. It is also not easy but most things worth doing are not easy. Missing a giant rock heading towards you until it is too late to do anything about is a very high probability. The only way to ensure survival is to put people in more than one place. If sustainability of our species is a thing we care about then investment in N+1 redundancy for humans is a requirement.