| ▲ | pfdietz 4 hours ago |
| Moving 1000 tons of Te back to Earth, and moving maybe 10^14 tons to hit Earth, are rather different capabilities. |
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| ▲ | andrewflnr 3 hours ago | 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. |
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| ▲ | pfdietz 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 1000 tons is how much Te is mined each year on Earth. Global annual production of platinum is 180 tons. | | |
| ▲ | andrewflnr 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | How is that relevant to the weaponizability of space mining systems, the thing I was actually talking about? | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 2 hours ago | 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 an hour ago | 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. | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 18 minutes ago | 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. |
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