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Earth has been hit by objects in the past, with devastating effects. Scientists largely agree that it was an asteroid or comet impact that started the chain of events that wiped out the dinosaurs around 60 million years ago.
[...] impacts from objects in space are just one of several ways that humanity and most of life on Earth could suddenly disappear.
We are already observing that extinctions are happening now at an unprecedented rate. In 2014 it was estimated that the extinction rate is now 1,000 times greater than before humans were on the Earth. The estimated number of extinctions ranges from 200 to 2,000 species per year.
From all of this very worrying data, it would not be a stretch to say that we are currently within a doomsday scenario. Of course, the “day” is longer than 24 hours but may be instead in the order of a century or two.
So what can we do about this potential prospect of impending doom?
[...] But the threats we face are so unpredictable that we need to have a backup plan. We need to plan for the time after our doomsday and think about how a post-apocalyptic Earth may recover and humanity will flourish again.
As computer experts, you are familiar with backup plans. What should we do to backup human survival ?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 14 2017, @03:38PM (1 child)
I agree on most of the points except for 5). Bringing the mining stuff to the asteroids is probably better than moving the asteroids.
Generally mining involves going through tons of crap to get the few grams or kilos that you want. Go look up the actual ppms if you don't believe me. So it makes no sense to move the tons of crap you don't want.
The problem here is that many asteroids are in wacky solar orbits where they're only convenient for a short time, and the rest of the time they're just as inconveniently-located as Mars or worse. The idea with Earth-crossing asteroid mining is that you grab them when they're nearby and process them, and you grab ones that are smaller so you can feasibly control its location.
Later on, though, if you want to mine the Asteroid Belt, then you're right: it makes a lot more sense to just move the equipment to the asteroids. They're in stable orbits out there anyway, and they never come close to the Earth, so it makes more sense to mine them out there and then use fuel to move the processed ores to Earth.
The steps should be first to develop the artificial gravity
We already have that: it's called "rotation". That's the only way to generate "artificial gravity" right now. We haven't built anything big enough to actually try it out on though.
and radiation shield technologies
We have that too: it's called lead and water. Water is surprisingly good at protecting against certain types of radiation, for harder stuff you'll need dense stuff like lead.
With both these things, you need a sufficiently large station, and enough infrastructure in space, to make it feasible to mine all this stuff somewhere (asteroids, Moon) where there isn't a huge gravity well so you can build a station that uses them. Mining has to come first; it's too expensive lifting enormous quantities of mass into orbit (or worse, a Lagrangian spot); we have to get our resources in space. And we need an economic case to do all this in the first place. Just building space stations has no economic case unless a bunch of governments or billionaires are willing to fund it for kicks. Asteroid mining provides a real economic incentive to develop space-based technologies, for applications that are useful on Earth right now. Another article here talks about a shortage of Cobalt and how its price has doubled because it's in high demand for EVs; if there's cobalt-carrying asteroids in earth-crossing orbit, it may make economic sense to develop technologies to mine them.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Wednesday June 14 2017, @04:44PM
We have the ideas and theories for generating artificial "gravity" in orbit/free-fall, but we don't have any mature tech for it. Even this was cancelled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module [wikipedia.org]
So we don't even have any _scientific_evidence_ that humans or our favorite livestock or even mice can do OK long term on Mars level gravity. Or Moon level.
Thus it is stupid and unscientific to even fund projects to put humans on Mars till such tests are done. If it turns out we need more than Mars G it's much easier to fake suitable "gravity" in orbit than on the surface of Mars. We do not have practical tech for doing a similar thing on Mars or Moon surface (maybe only those who can enjoy those spinning amusement park rides for hours can stay ;) ).
If we had no choice - no time to test, then sure, but that does not appear to be the case at the moment.
We do not need to build those expensive huge space stations to develop and test our technologies. Stations using tethers and counterweights can do the job for the early stages.
Don't forget getting stuff to and fro the Mars surface. From Low Mars orbit to Mars surface the delta-v is 4.1 alone. Mars surface escape velocity is 5km/s. That's not a small figure.