[ExI] Power sats as weapons

spike spike66 at att.net
Sat Sep 8 20:14:32 UTC 2012


 

 

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2012 12:50 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] Power sats as weapons

 

On 08/09/2012 16:32, spike wrote:

 

>>.A disadvantage I can see is that a space based laser might not be
effective in maintaining the old paradigm of mutual assured destruction.


>.More importantly a broken solar sat produces *loads* of fragments in the
same orbit: it might be that you don't need any weapons for MAD, but that
the Kessler fragmentation cascade will make any solar-sat system
impossible.-- Anders Sandberg,

 
 
Ja, Anders, but the Kessler frag cascade doesn't really apply to GEO, at
least in the accidental case.  In that orbit, everything is going in the
same direction, unlike LEO, where the meltdown of all assets is becoming a
palpable risk.  If some bad actor decided to take out everything in GEO,
that is also a risk.  Since everything there is more or less in a line, it
may be theoretically possible to kill everything in GEO with one shot, oy
vey.
 
That was the idea behind mid-sats such as Iridium: use a bunch of
interconnected mid-level orbits such that they wouldn't be vulnerable to LEO
frag cascade and wouldn't be nearly as vulnerable to some cable company CEO
who wanted to damage or destroy the competitors.
 
spike
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