Wow, thank you! This made my day: "Consider the possibility that introducing an arbitrarily small tame asteroid
could throw a planet out of the solar system. This would be a different kind
of instability than those that have been so far considered. It would be of
mathematical interest to prove that a system consisting of a sun and three
planets could be disrupted by a single arbitrarily small tame asteroid."
The sci-fi book practically writes itself. A wealthy entrepreneur puts an asteroid in motion to move mars and sets up a long term foundation to keep it operational for the next 40,000 years. In conjunction with the orbital adjustment, terraforming begins and the first enclosed permanent settlements are founded. After the orbital changes are complete, the new planet is open for human development and is renamed from Mars to Musk, after its visionary founder.
Of course things go horribly wrong, and Mars crashes into earth. The moral of the story being if you don't have ultra-superior technology and experience doing the same thing outside of your own solar system and checking the results to adjust your procedures, then nudging things and seeing what happens at planetary scale is playing with fire.
Is there any better embodiment of entrepreneurial capitalism than stealthily appropriating an entire planet, privatising it, and then naming it after one's self? ... I'd be hard pressed to think of one.
Hans Moravec is really into space elevators. Is there some correlation between being an AI researcher and having an interest in space mega-engineering?
Almost certainly, simply because they both strongly correlate with being geeks. And SF geeks in particular. And the very particular sort of hard SF geek who feels right at home at Shock Level 4 [1].
yes, it's known as the nerd space elevator strange attractor. It is frequently observed in nature with its related chaotic entities, the national-scale DC power grid attractor, and the singularity attractor (some argue that all these attractors are really just specific instances of the singularity attractor).
It's a nice hard problem with lots of juicy subproblems that you can work on even through the central problem (materials science) is nowhere near being solvable.
I wonder what will happen to the others planets, on a long scale... in a dynamical (chaotic) system stability is not granted, probably a bunch of asteroids-tools are needed to correct the deviation of all others planets form a desired configuration.
An easier job would be maintaing the habitability of the near-perfect planet we already have x) but it seems we can't even to that! Seems silly when SV tech bros say terraforming other planets will be what "saves humanity" or some such vs.
What it gives us is a backup plan for humanity. There are many reasons the Earth could become uninhabitable, hardly all of them caused by man. For example, an asteroid hit.
0. climate change has already entered an irreversible spiral
1. decades from now, the irreversible spiral having deepened and accelerated, civilization as we know it has been destroyed, leaving no authorities to do anything about climate change
2. decades to centuries from now, climate change makes earth mostly uninhabitable
3. hundreds or thousands of years in the future, if they weren't all dead, humans perhaps would have been able to maintain a self-sustaining colony of all for humanity another planet
there's not a realistic path for humanity to survive an earth-destroying asteroid, and there never will be
Just need to reduce the solar incidence, not eliminate it.
The same technology could be used to reduce gw on the earth:
1. an orbiting sunshade
2. putting something in the atmosphere that makes it more reflective, like sulfur dioxide
I wonder how big a sunshade would need to be to reduce temps by, say, one degree. A specific location could be shaded by putting the shade in geosynchronous orbit. To finance the sunshade, put a Starbucks or Coca-Cola logo on it.
The kind of sunshades that are reasonably being proposed are not large enough to see from the earth without a very powerful telescope.
A single giant megaproject sunshade is not feasible. But it is possible to make many smaller ones, each diminishing insolation by just a few fractions of a percent.
Maybe it's for the better that McCarthy passed away in 2011; if he were still alive, he might have gotten a grant from SpaceX to put his scheme into action.