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Mars wouldn't instantly become uninhabitable once the shield collapses. Atmosphere loss is something that occurs over the timespan of millions of years, it woul

Mars wouldn't instantly become uninhabitable once the shield collapses. Atmosphere loss is something that occurs over the timespan of millions of years, it would be entirely reasonable for a civilization with sufficient spacelift capacity to terraform Mars without a shield, with the understanding that the atmosphere would require active management over millennia. Also "throwing space rocks will be trivial for a terrorist cell" makes a lot of presumptions about how social organization will work in orbit. IMHO there will never be the spacer society presupposed by so much sci-fi, because any spaceship with an interesting propulsion system is also always a weapon of mass destruction (and not just against orbital infrastructure). The solution to this is that weapons of mass destruction are only owned and operated by large, powerful states with things to lose. It's worked for nukes for 80 years soonish.

Yizahi 3y ago
Fusion bomb is technologically hard problem even today. Fission is simple but required a of the material which can only be produced by technologically hard devices. This gates it for now. But even today we can see that countries wishing to destabilize neighbors can simply gift complete assembly to their allies. Like russia did with North Korea, and is now probably doing with Iran. So ownership of the tech by large political entities doesn't matter if one of such entities decides to defect and abandon common rules. So, yes, there won't be some independent spacer terror cell. But what if one of the space faring countries will decide to simply sponsor some Hamas 2.0 to attack their opponents? Considering that this will be a new age of conquest possibly, where nothing in the Solar System is yet owned by anyone and there will be a lot of takers. Like a simplest question - who's are Luna and Mars? :) Next issue is that chemical rockets are much simpler and cheaper, also they are not gated by any tech or material. Sure, there are important secrets around nozzles and stuff, but I suppose a simple crude rocket will work just fine. So assuming we are at the level when humans can travel to the asteroids to mine them (also a big if, due to it being economically unfeasible) they can setup such a kamikaze rocket. Attack will be from outside of the ecliptic plane, so likely undetected. Attack can be scaled to more than one rock, so that every single point of failure, every dome etc must have dozens of anti-spacecraft level defense rockets (nukes most likely). It is not feasible. Of course all of this is about far far future, we can't predict what will happen.
- Tuna-Fish 3y ago
  > Attack will be from outside of the ecliptic plane, so likely undetected. It won't be. There is no stealth in space, and telescopes are really good. Once there will be a lot of man-made objects in space, it will be trivial for a state actor to continuously track the exact position (and complete history) of every single man-made object large enough to have an engine in the solar system, and I would assume that everyone with major space interests would do that.
  - widforss 3y ago
    There is no stealth in space, but space is also very large.

Yizahi 3y ago

Fusion bomb is technologically hard problem even today. Fission is simple but required a of the material which can only be produced by technologically hard devices. This gates it for now. But even today we can see that countries wishing to destabilize neighbors can simply gift complete assembly to their allies. Like russia did with North Korea, and is now probably doing with Iran. So ownership of the tech by large political entities doesn't matter if one of such entities decides to defect and abandon common rules. So, yes, there won't be some independent spacer terror cell. But what if one of the space faring countries will decide to simply sponsor some Hamas 2.0 to attack their opponents? Considering that this will be a new age of conquest possibly, where nothing in the Solar System is yet owned by anyone and there will be a lot of takers. Like a simplest question - who's are Luna and Mars? :) Next issue is that chemical rockets are much simpler and cheaper, also they are not gated by any tech or material. Sure, there are important secrets around nozzles and stuff, but I suppose a simple crude rocket will work just fine. So assuming we are at the level when humans can travel to the asteroids to mine them (also a big if, due to it being economically unfeasible) they can setup such a kamikaze rocket. Attack will be from outside of the ecliptic plane, so likely undetected. Attack can be scaled to more than one rock, so that every single point of failure, every dome etc must have dozens of anti-spacecraft level defense rockets (nukes most likely). It is not feasible. Of course all of this is about far far future, we can't predict what will happen.

Tuna-Fish 3y ago
> Attack will be from outside of the ecliptic plane, so likely undetected. It won't be. There is no stealth in space, and telescopes are really good. Once there will be a lot of man-made objects in space, it will be trivial for a state actor to continuously track the exact position (and complete history) of every single man-made object large enough to have an engine in the solar system, and I would assume that everyone with major space interests would do that.
- widforss 3y ago
  There is no stealth in space, but space is also very large.