[April Fools' Day] Introducing Open Asteroid Impact

I'm not worried about OAI not being able to solve the rocket alignment problem in time. Risks from asteroids accidentally hitting the earth (instead of getting into a delicate low-earth orbit) are purely speculative.

You might say "but there are clear historical cases where asteroids hit the earth and caused catastrophes", but I think geological evolution is just a really bad reference class for this type of thinking. After all, we are directing the asteroid this time, not geological evolution.

A lot of people have this sci-fi image, like something out of Deep Impact, Armageddon, Don't Look Up, or Minus, of a single large asteroid hurtling towards Earth to wreak massive destruction. Or even massive vengeance, as if it was a punishment for our sins.

But realistically, as the field of asteroid collection gradually advances, we're going to be facing many incoming asteroids which will interact with each other in complicated ways, and whose forces will to a large extent balance each other out.

Yet doomers are somehow supremely confident in how the future will go, foretelling catastrophe. And if you poke at their justifications, they won't offer precise physical models of these many-body interactions, just these mythic stories of Earth vs. a monolithic celestial body.

It's important to start crashing asteroids into the planet now, before there is a spacecraft overhang and potentially many asteroids could be deorbited at the same time.  This gives us the opportunity to learn about any dangers from asteroid impact.  A great many doomers claim it will kick dust into the atmosphere and cause global cooling, or that gigaton explosions on impact are untested and risk causing damage, but they have no recent empirical evidence.

All we have is some fossils and 66 million year old data!  Let's find out what really happens empirically.  Move fast and break things.  Think of all the benefits.  

In other related news, I've got a tender offer with some unnamed funders to start an 8 Trillion heavy spacecraft manufacturing venture.  This will pay for facilities earth and moonside to construct spacecraft with the capabilities to move larger asteroids than ever before.  

https://twitter.com/robertwiblin/status/1758251292131053637

In any case, we don't have a choice.  It's a race.  Our only chance to survive the future in this situation is to have our own warships and asteroid movers in space as well, or hide under the umbrella of allies who do...

We don't know how to align asteroids' trajectories, so it's important to use smaller asteroids to align larger ones- like a very large game of amateur billiards. 

I believe that a promising safety strategy for the larger asteroids is to put them in a secure box prior to them landing on earth. That way, the asteroid is -- provably -- guaranteed to have no negative impact on earth.

Proof:

   |  |  | |  |  |  | |
   v v v v v v v v
   __________                     CC
  |        ___     |                   CCCC
  |     / O O \   |          :-)       CCC         :-)
  |    | o C o |   |        _|_         ||  o       _|_
  |     \  o _ /    |          |           ||/            |
  |_________ |          /\          ||             /\
--------------------------------------------------------
                                                                        □

I'm going to be a party pooper here and point out that though this may be presented as an April Fool's joke, its main joke is that in a live debate, it is extremely funny to strawman your opponent's side. That's bad practice whether done as a joke or not.

This is patently absurd. The vast majority of asteroids are incredibly small, and would most likely burn up in the upper atmosphere. Your chances of finding a large one are incredibly small, even assuming you can locate & get to an asteroid in the first place. In order to even get to the asteroids, and protect them on the way down, your ship would need to be bigger than them!

Don't get me wrong, you may make a few bucks from iron mining, but claiming to be in a "race" or that "safety" is a concern? Please.

Given all the potential benefits there is no way we are not going to redirect asteroids to earth. Everybody will have an abundance of rare elements.

xlr8

I will carefully hedge my investment in this company by giving it $325823e7589245728439572380945237894273489, in exchange for a board seat so I can keep an eye on it.

I think you are seriously underselling OAI. Asteroid impacts have the potential to solve many of the looming humanitarian and existential crisis:

• Asteroid impacts are a prime candidate to stop global warming.
• The x-risk from AI is much lower in timeline where OAI succeeds.

Basically, OAI is a magic bullet, which could enable a phase change in human technology. Global poverty will no longer be a thing. The Near East conflict will be solved. It will prevent Putin from conquering Ukraine and keep Taiwan out of the hands of China. It will end all colonialism and discrimination.

This signature made me laugh:

Chicxulub - Kill many birds with one stone

Also, if you haven't done so before, I recommend googling 'Chicxulub'.

I have over 5 Twitter followers, I'll take my board seat when ur ready

Rather than quickly developing large spacecraft that could rapidly intercept and guide asteroids for impact at a suitable location for mining (Canada?), would it be easier to instead alter the trajectory of the earth ("Calling all boffins! You were jealous of Oppenheimer's gang - now it's your turn!") to collide with various asteroids?

Maybe we explode all of the world's nuclear weapons in the atmosphere at one point which may suitably nudge the earth and thus aim the asteroid at a globally chosen "catcher's mitt" impact zone (Canada?), surrounded by eager bulldozers ready for the pickings.

All the doomers (who are mostly white male nerds who read too much scifi) complaining that large asteroid impacts could cause catastrophic climate changes are distracting from the real problem, which is that meteorite impacts TODAY are a tool of oppression used by privileged able-bodied white cis-men. 

STEM people claim that there is no proof that asteroids disproportionally hit minorities, but a more compassionate analysis clearly proves them wrong. 

Regarding direct impacts, it is clear that healthy men are more likely to dodge an meteorite than the malnourished, wheelchair-bound or women and children. Better health care services in Western countries can further improve the survival odds for the minority of privileged people subjected to asteroid hits, leaving disadvantaged minorities to pay the price. 

Looking at https://openasteroidimpact.org/ is it clear that these are the same crowd of Silicon Valley techbros which are responsible for most of the problems in the world. They quote two deities (talk about privilege!) and a bunch of white people. Their board seems to be disproportionally White (and Asian) and male. No statement of diversity and inclusion. 

I think we should therefore shame OAI and its competitors to include mechanisms to their asteroid steering which will further social and racial justice by redirecting some of the profits from the metals to disadvantaged minorities while also making sure that the impact deaths are fairly distributed between different ethnicities. 

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