China Hopes To Redirect a Nearby Asteroid Within the Next Four Years

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• Re:

  The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is such a great story by the way. Certainly one of, if not the best hard sci-fi story ever imho.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Re:

    Yea just dont listen to the audiobook on internet archive. On that one Lazarus Long sounds like Hank Hill. Otherwise not bad though.

  • Re:

    I heard years ago that it will be made into a movie.

    Whatever happened to that?

    • • Re:

        There was an announcement seven years ago and then nothing.

        It appears that the project is dead or at least stalled. That is too bad since it would make a good movie.

  • A good story, but implausible now

    The reliance on technology on par with a telephone switch board made the story a little weird. An updated version of the story would mostly work if it was video based instead of audio bug based. Maybe with some hand waving excuse that the Luna regolith would prevent WiFi from working so easily as it does in the real world and thus require tunnels and cables between the colonists.

• Re:

  Steering asteroids toward Earth takes orders of magnitude more precision than steering them away from Earth, because the fraction of the universe comprising "not Earth" is a much part of the universe (and hence easier to hit). If you're off by a factor of two or three in steering an asteroid away from Earth, it still misses Earth. If you're steering it toward Earth, it's may or may not hit Earth, and may or may not hit the target on Earth you don't want it to hit.

• Re:

  They have too many nuclear weapons for that to make a difference. Asteroids are much more expensive to move and the lead time is too long to be useful in war. They're also not hard to block either. Any asteroid small enough to divert towards a target is small enough to deflect, and anything too big to deflect is suicidal.

• Footfall

  There's also this Larry Niven novel about invading space elephants [wikipedia.org]. The humans used nukes, the aliens space rocks.

• Re:

  I doubt it will be a big problem. Spacecraft are obvious and easily tracked. Any kind of a redirect mission would be even easier to keep tabs on, and any redirecting has to be done years in advance. Also, your targeting is probably going to be good to +- a hemisphere or so. Nukes are easier.

  In the book they were chucking moon rock with a rail gun launcher. That's a lot faster, easier to target, and doesn't have handy rockets marking the trajectory.

• Re:

  Either that, or the inherent perversity of the universe will note that every remotely plausible scenario (and several frankly impossible ones) have already been done to death, and so the world will end in a manner so ridiculous and inane that nobody ever even considered making a story about it.