Chinese Want to Place an Asteroid in Earth Orbit and Mine It – “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”
August 31st, 2011Fantastic plan, comrade!
In other news: Chinese Bullet Train Crash Kills 40.
Via: MIT Technology Review:
Most of the discussion about near Earth asteroids focuses on whether they represent a threat to Earth and what to do take if they turn out to be heading our way.
But today, Hexi Baoyin and pals at Tsinghua University in Beijing offer a different take. The question they ask is how to place an asteroid in orbit around the Earth.
Their conclusion is a little surprising. They say it’s relatively straightforward to nudge a small asteroid in our direction. They’ve even discovered a number of candidates nearby that we might want to bring as little closer.
…
A particularly good candidate is a 10-meter object called 2008EA9 which will pass within a million kilometres or so of Earth in 2049. 2008EA9 has a very similar orbital velocity as Earth’s. Baoyin and co calculate that it could be fired into Earth orbit by changing its velocity by 410 metres per second. That’s tiny.
This nudge should place the asteroid in an orbit at about twice the distance of the Moon. From there it can be studied and mined, they say.
This is a great idea, for an advanced enough civilization. The monkies on this rock can’t possibly pull it off without putting a giant hole somewhere damned inconvenient. We should revisit this plan in a hundred years or so, if we still exist.
@jburke
Just curious, but what about humankind will have actually changed in hundred years?
I always get a big kick out of such predictions when they come from “official” sources, as they are typically floated when someone is looking for long-term funding in front of the short-term media lens…
“..We’ll gladly fly monkeys to Mars on Wednesday, if you’ll only give us 100 billion dollars to play with today…”
…or some variation along similar thematic lines.
By way of a more concrete example, let’s review what we’ve accomplished as a species in the LAST hundred years :
1) Two *acknowledged* World Wars.
2) A third war “rebranded” as Cold and dressed up in the finest Orwellian regalia.
3) Consistent patterns of ongoing genocidal behavior
4) Consolidation of the interlocking structures of leadership & ownership that define modern “royals” and their “globalized” fiefdoms.
5) The “War on…”:
Drugs, as a cover for drug running operations
Terror, as a cover for state-sponsored terror
Etc…
And this list is FAR from complete, but I think you get my drift.
A hundred years might change the whiz-bang factor of the technological trappings, which will connect us all to the Grid, and keep the bulk of the remaining human population allowed to live and breathe under permissions extended by the latest God Emperor of Terra Firma… distracted.
Now, if there truly is something beyond the pale awaiting us in the next century, along the lines of the various “awakening” theories so often used to link human consciousness to the different 2012 interpretations… well, that would be nice.
However, deep down there’s nothing much over the last hundred years that leads me to believe that the hundred will lead us along — or shunt us onto — along some radically different historical track where elite power simply disappears up its own arse and decides a global empire wasn’t such a good idea after all.
And the extension of the whole Mayan calendar into “woo-woo” territory, as our host might describe it, is just as laughable (read: tragic) as the whole Monkeys to Mars scenario or the “War on Food” currently being waged by US Federales at the behest of the corporate masters at Monsanto and ADM and their chokehold on executive, judicial, legislative and administrative power.
From the small volume of existing evidence, it appears that the Mayans were simply pointing at 2012 at an inflection point, a rollover of the galactic odometer, if you will. It wouldn’t be all that surprising that we might be in for another round of cataclysm associated with said transition, if only from the standpoint of purely physical phenomena.
Or perhaps the Foo Fighters will finally land in the public square and introduce themselves…
…leading to the last and perhaps most important question of all : will Dave Grohl’s use of alien technology to enhance the raw power of rock and roll be the death of us all?
If we could only get water and electricity out of the air easily for free, that would probably be enuf to end this world’s evil power structure. Well I guess we can with water, but you know, if we could just get enough to wash clothes, dishes, ourselves, and to drink and grow food, along with free electricity from the air somehow (what Tesla was working on). Solar power could be considered free electricity from the air. TPTB will and probably have been making sure that solar power gathering technology has stayed poor. Just rambling….