this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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Another reason privatization would be a disaster: there's very little difference between hauling an asteroid back to Earth's orbit and hauling one to collide with the planet. The latter is actually much easier due to not needing to slow down at the end.
I wonder how many decades or centuries it'll take before the first megalomaniac demands a ransom to not drop a giant rock on Earth or another colony.
Once intrasolar travel becomes common, kinetic kill vehicles will be an omnipresent threat. Asteroid mining operations will need to have the kind of strict licensing and mandated observation that nuclear weapon decommissioning sites have today.
That’s a huge reason I believe, hope, that we will never do that. A more efficient and less catastrophic approach is to do some level of refining out at the source and only send back together refined, pure minerals.
…. Although I realize the irony of advocating for sending, say a rod of pure tungsten, back to earth
And more realistically, I have a hard time believing that will ever be cheaper to bring to earth than to mine locally. While there maybe a handful of elements worth it, more realistically you are mining for use in space
Hopefully if were at the point of being able to haul massive asteroids back to earth, we also have the technology to intercept it and move it, or destroy it, and we have that capability ready on demand.
Oh no I don't think we would. Once an asteroid is earth bound and past its apoapsis there is very little you can do (even with near infinite propulsion) to make it not collide with the earth.
Destroying it turns one big problem into a billion small problems with the same velocity and trajectory, which is also a no win scenario.
Hopefully, but we're not a very forward-thinking species. More likely we'd only give haulers just enough fuel to make gravity-assisted trips (which are only possible when orbits match up optimally) because it's cheaper that way, making on-demand interception unlikely.
Destruction doesn't always work either. If it's struck close to Earth most of the fragments will still hit, and even if they're too small to survive reentry they will still dump tons of heat energy into the atmosphere.
Physics is a harsh mistress.
I wonder how much heat energy fragments would actually dump and if it would be statistically significant. Somebody do the math!