[ExI] Planetary defense

[Anders Sandberg]

John Grigg wrote:
> I'd like to think the Pentagon will get involved with planetary 
> defense, at least where nasty asteroids are concerned.  And "economic 
> defense" from the exploitive and criminal individuals in Wall Street & 
> Corporate America, might also be added to on their list... 

It is fun to watch the different cotteries in this community. There is a 
laser gang, thinking about how to ablate asteroids. Then there is the 
kinetic impact gang and the gravity tractor gang. And then there is the 
nuke gang, running hydrocode simulations of big explosions. You can 
guess who have ties to military defense labs.

While asteroid protection might look like a good military project 
(long-term, costly, requires a big integrated organisation, never-ending 
struggle) it also has the downside of being very different from the rest 
of military operation. It is not anything like an army, navy or airforce 
operation - there are few possibilities for using the system for 
anything in the other military branches, and their kit is mostly 
irrelevant to stopping a NEO. Building a IPBM - an interplanetary 
ballistic missile - is more about the launch system than the warheads, 
plus understanding some tricky timing in when to detonate the warheads 
(you want the optimal standoff distance). You need the experts on nukes, 
but also plenty of space engineers, and astrophysicists.

Wall Street intervention has tried in Kazakhstan, where president 
Nazurbayev sent businessmen "profiteers" to re-education camps. 
Strangely the economy took a nosedive.



-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University