Conversely, of course, the trajectory of a non-threatening near-Earth asteroid can be known well in advance, but there’s no obviously benign reason for anyone to bring a lot of delta-v to one.
So having a steady traffic in commercial heavy lift could be a positive externality as well, for whoever wants to find a close-call asteroid that has been recently marked as 100% safe and give it a little nudge.
> Well the number one threat to Earth is an impact event.
Challenged— that’s the number one natural threat to (human civilization on) Earth. Or maybe the number one threat assuming we survive the next thousand years.
The number one threat at this moment is deliberate annihilation of the ecosphere by a very small number of insane humans.
The number two threat is negligent annihilation of the ecosphere by a plurality of merely shortsighted humans.
Not only is a Mars colony uniquely susceptible to these existential risks, the process of building one could plausibly make them worse.
Space folks like to talk a lot about how the technology you use to survive in space is technology you can use to live better on Earth. They don’t like to talk about how the technology you use to get to space is the same technology you use to murder human civilization anywhere it hides.
> It's like people who object to love being a chemical reaction. What else could it be possibly be?
Did you learn that by study, or did someone tell you that? Where else have you looked for love?
You might find “love” contained in the electrical impulses in a computer program. It might be in the words of a screenplay. A complicated mechanical automaton might experience love. You could notice it in a melody, or in the pattern of behavioral incentives among a society of human beings.
None of these things are chemical reactions in any systematic sense. You may notice chemical reactions everywhere you find these things, but that’s just because chemical reactions are contingently intrinsic to your own cognition. You’re only noticing yourself noticing the subject, and what you learn from that is almost entirely arbitrary.
Heartbreak is a form of neurotransmitter withdrawal, and it can be treated in similar ways to substance abuse issues. That’s because “love” is a “chemical reaction”. But that’s just a random fact about earthlings. It won’t help you write a pop song, let alone make a friend.
This is the reason “reductionism” has become a bit of a dirty word in philosophy. You feel like you are understanding the world better and better the whole time you are decomposing it into its constituent parts. Then you get to the bottom and you realize that the universe is made of many kinds of constituent parts, and you have decomposed a useful idea all the way down into nonsense.
It’s probably worth remembering that the term “fake news” has essentially no coherent meaning at this point.
It seems quaint now, but in 2016 when the term was publicized, it was very specific and direct: there was an epidemic of utterly fabricated political clickbait being shared from anonymous websites. Stories that were literally no more than unattributed fiction were widely circulated on social media, seen by millions, and a huge proportion of those people were taking them to be genuine (if politically motivated) news reporting.
Maybe at the time, it seemed like someone would do something if they pointed out that this was happening.
Of course, what someone did was immediately adopt the term to describe (what they saw as) low-quality, poorly-sourced, or overly-opinionated political reporting. And then a bunch of people who thought that reporting was actually pretty good started throwing the term back at what they thought was overly-opinionated, and suddenly the discourse was about bias in the mainstream media, and no one seemed to care much anymore about the tsunami of literal fantasies being deliberately spread by propagandists unknown.
So having a steady traffic in commercial heavy lift could be a positive externality as well, for whoever wants to find a close-call asteroid that has been recently marked as 100% safe and give it a little nudge.