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pfdietz | on: Semi-transparent, colored cadmium telluride photovoltaic panels in agrivoltaics
Moving 1000 tons of Te back to Earth, and moving maybe 10^14 tons to hit Earth, are rather different capabilities.
andrewflnr | parent
1000 tons of Te would only be a fraction of what's brought back by a realistic mining operation. Don't you also want all the platinum and palladium and gold hiding out there? Don't you want the iron for building space habitats? No, we'll bring back as much as we can manage, whether it's availability or transport logistics or fear of attacks that turns out to be the limiting factor.
pfdietz | root | parent
1000 tons is how much Te is mined each year on Earth.

Global annual production of platinum is 180 tons.

andrewflnr | root | parent
How is that relevant to the weaponizability of space mining systems, the thing I was actually talking about?
pfdietz | root | parent
It shows that the claim that space mining enables mass-extinction level events is nonsense. Space mining can involve 11 orders of magnitude less mass annually than the K/T mass extinction impact.
andrewflnr | root | parent
The bar for mass extinction is much, much lower than the K/T impactor. The bar for widespread human suffering and death is much, much lower again. (edit: the bar for general terrorism is much, much etc.) You and myrmidon keep trying to anchor the conversation around these strawman criteria and mechanisms (i.e. "orbital bombardment", as if that was the topic). I'm sure it's just motivated reasoning but god damn is it hard to distinguish from bad faith argument.
myrmidon | root | parent | next
The Chicxulub impactor was at least a billion tons. Interplanetary shipping of objects that size is so far into pure fantasy land it's not even really worth speculating about.

Even to just get into "very large nuke" territory, you'd require impactors in the million ton range (200m diameter stony asteroid). LEO payload for Saturn-V/Starship is in the 100 ton range, for comparison, so you'd need about 10000 of those (~10km/s of delta-v is barely enough to fish anything out of the asteroid belt, see [1]).

If your hypothetical rogue government/terrorist org adversary can get control of the equivalent of 10000 Saturn-V, then them pursuing some harebrained asteroid redirection plot afterwards is the least of your problems.

I'm not bad-faithing or strawmaning anything here-- my point is simply that any space mining program that is plausibly imaginable within the next centuries (which is gonna limit things to <10000 tons of payload in my view) is a non-concern from a military utility perspective (that would be roughly a chelyabinsk meteor at the very most, for reference, and depending on trajectory and structure might not even hit the ground).

[1]: https://planet4589.org/jcm/pubs/sci/papers/2018/Taylor18.pdf

pfdietz | root | parent
> The bar for mass extinction is much, much lower than the K/T impactor.

Clearly not, otherwise there would have been many more mass extinctions.

In any case, shifting that by a couple of orders of magnitude doesn't save the argument.

andrewflnr | root | parent
Many more mass extinctions, you say? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events These are still just the highlights.

Meanwhile, consider what a relatively minor event caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer . I don't know the exact size needed for an equivalent meteor impact, but it's a lot smaller than the Chicxulub impactor and we still don't want to get anywhere close to it. Even something like the Chelyabinsk meteor, which injured over a thousand people, would be a half-decent terror weapon.