Risks from asteroids accidentally hitting the earth (instead of getting into a delicate low-earth orbit) are purely speculative.
Not to mention that simple counting arguments show that the volume of the Earth is much smaller than even a rather narrow spherical shell of space around the Earth. Most asteroid trajectories that come anywhere near Earth will pass through this spherical shell rather than the Earth volume.
Remember—“Earth is not the optimized-trajectory target”! An agent like Open Asteroid Impact is merely executing policies involving business strategies involving asteroids which have been (financially) rewarded in the past; it in no way attempts to ‘optimize impact’.
And the lack of optimization is a killer because impacts just wouldn’t happen. The idea that asteroids will ever impact ignores the simple fact that the Solar System has chaotic dynamics—it is not just a ‘3-body problem’ but an n-body problem where n = millions. Imagine trying to predict that! And consider the simple problem of landing the same rocket you launched: as of November 2015, no one has ever succeeded in this, because everything involved is super-chaotic. Grifting tech hypebros would have you believe that ‘technology improves’, sometimes rapidly, and that by now we might be landing rockets on—if you believe absurd exponential forecasts—a near-daily basis. Such claims are not even worth factchecking.
Open Asteroid Impact strongly disagrees with this line of thinking. Our theory of change relies on many asteroids filled with precious minerals hitting earth, as mining in space (even LEO) is prohibitively expensive compared to on-ground mining.
While your claims may be true for small asteroids, we strongly believe that scale is all you need. Over time, sufficiently large, and sufficiently many, asteroids can solve the problem of specific asteroids not successfully impacting Earth.
Not to mention that simple counting arguments show that the volume of the Earth is much smaller than even a rather narrow spherical shell of space around the Earth. Most asteroid trajectories that come anywhere near Earth will pass through this spherical shell rather than the Earth volume.
Remember—“Earth is not the optimized-trajectory target”! An agent like Open Asteroid Impact is merely executing policies involving business strategies involving asteroids which have been (financially) rewarded in the past; it in no way attempts to ‘optimize impact’.
And the lack of optimization is a killer because impacts just wouldn’t happen. The idea that asteroids will ever impact ignores the simple fact that the Solar System has chaotic dynamics—it is not just a ‘3-body problem’ but an n-body problem where n = millions. Imagine trying to predict that! And consider the simple problem of landing the same rocket you launched: as of November 2015, no one has ever succeeded in this, because everything involved is super-chaotic. Grifting tech hypebros would have you believe that ‘technology improves’, sometimes rapidly, and that by now we might be landing rockets on—if you believe absurd exponential forecasts—a near-daily basis. Such claims are not even worth factchecking.
Open Asteroid Impact strongly disagrees with this line of thinking. Our theory of change relies on many asteroids filled with precious minerals hitting earth, as mining in space (even LEO) is prohibitively expensive compared to on-ground mining.
While your claims may be true for small asteroids, we strongly believe that scale is all you need. Over time, sufficiently large, and sufficiently many, asteroids can solve the problem of specific asteroids not successfully impacting Earth.