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[Madness] 'Landing' an asteroid
[Madness] 'Landing' an asteroid
#1
The opposite of unreal estate? Instead of taking a chunk of landmass off the surface of the earth to space, we take a chunk of spacemass and land it back on Earth We can already move them into planetary orbits. I wonder if a safe, controlled landing would be possible? Maybe using some variant of a spindizzy in the core of a small rock.

Find your target rock in the main belt, bring it to Earth, land it in some water basin near your country's EEZ, put a flag on it (Either an existing nation, or the Democratic People's Republic of Atlantis), along with some settlements, maybe some mines and a few troops to keep everyone else away. The benefits to mining the thing are obvious, along with having big ocean with a lot of resources, tourism and the chance to do research on establishing ecosystems. Do a slow enough landing, and there won't be any adverse effects on nearby coastlines.... it's not a sudden shock, but a gradual displacement over the course of a week or two.

Landing a 3km diameter rock in the ocean will make little to no difference to sea-levels, when compared with the massive volume of the ocean. Certain large countries with a view to expanding aquatic territorial claims might even see this as a way to spread their influence.

It makes other things possible too.

Imagine damming the Mediterranean for example? Think of the massive potential energy the flow of tides could create between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Using space-rock makes this a thousand times simpler. You can just go 'drop'. And suddenly, you've got the largest lake - with only a turbine-filled channel remaining supplying masses of electricity into Africa or Europe. You'd need a ship-lift or some form of lock-gate to enable commerce- but you can build these systems before landing.

Of course, cocking it up and making a splash would be.... unpleasant. But there doesn't seem to be a technical reason why it'd be impossible.

Maybe I should lay off the cough syrup?
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
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#2
I want to say Rockhounds did this once? Or maybe alluded to doing this? Swear I read that somewhere in one of the early posts. I'm not sure I'd want to try it with anything larger than 1-200 m diameter rocks though, just on the high cockup potential alone. Soft-landing dinosaur killers is the sort of thing mutual defense accords get written over.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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#3
Hmm...
Hey, Mal - might this be a way tp supply clean water to Antallos? Ice asteroids?
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#4
I thought all the ice asteroids were going to the Mars Terraforming Project - but there's no reason why one or two couldn't be diverted elsewhere.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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#5
With a large rock I can picture the landing process requiring enough paperwork to keep a team of AIs busy. Requests for confirmed flight plans from every nation you'd fly over, demands for on-board observers from nations near your landing site, the usual suspects claiming nefarious intent even if this is your hundredth safe landing...

Even smaller inhabited rocks would probably have a difficult time overcoming the, "Killer rock from space," meme. 100 meter rock = "Those reckless fen are going to kill us all!" while a 1000 meter ship of more traditional appearance would simply viewed as fen over exuberance, "Where will you find a port to offload your cargo at? Nobody has facilities for something that huge!"

Which provides an obvious solution. Made your inhabitable rock and cover it with a hull structure. Presto, no more evil dinosaur killing space rock visible to scare people.
-----

Will the transhumanist future have catgirls? Does Japan still exist? Well, there is your answer.
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#6
Watering Anatallos would be done from within their own system.
 
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#7
*points at Rajvik* What he said.
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#8
Dartz Wrote:... The benefits to mining the thing are obvious, along with having big ocean with a lot of resources, tourism and the chance to do research on establishing ecosystems. Do a slow enough landing, and there won't be any adverse effects on nearby coastlines.... it's not a sudden shock, but a gradual displacement over the course of a week or two. ...
Okay, I'm back from the http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Fridge_Logic]fridge...

What mining can be done better in a gravity well than in zero-g? I'm not a miner, so I don't know what processes need an "up" to work better (or at all). I do know it's easier to move things around in zero-g, once one's accustomed to that process.

And if that displacement is going to take a week or two, then the landing is going to take a week or two, as well. I hope nothing goes wrong.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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#9
I never said it was a completely good idea. Hence the [Madness] tag. But someone might try it.

In the Boskone-era, the benefits are more obvious - less chance of being caught up in an ongoing conflict. But I suppose the benefit is the ability to mine the thing without all the specialist hardware you'd need for space operations. Strip-mine it, Earth style. Life-support and transportation costs are minimised because you only have to move one rock with a spindizzy. You also gain some prime valuable offshore real-estate - and depending on the country, an extension to the EEZ which brings in even more oil, gas and fisheries into your sphere of influence. Or for that matter, somewhere utterly beyond national laws where you can do what you will with it without regard to the environment, or even plant your own flag on it.

It's definitely a novel one for the UN to sort out. If a nationally flagged corporation - or even a nationalised company - lands something in the water and plants a flag on it, what're the ramifications for international relations?

What if China lands an asteroid in the middle of the South China Sea?
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#10
Quote:Dartz wrote:
It's definitely a novel one for the UN to sort out. If a nationally flagged corporation - or even a nationalised company - lands something in the water and plants a flag on it, what're the ramifications for international relations?

What if China lands an asteroid in the middle of the South China Sea?
Hmm...
If for whatever reason it was floating (keeping the spindizzy going enough to keep it at the water's surface, sufficient tunneling, whatever) then IIRC various UN definitions of the term country mean that trying to pull a Sealand by sticking up your flag probably wouldn't work any better than it has for Sealand. Quoting from the always accurate Wikipedia:
Quote:the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
(in force since 1994), which states in part V, article 60, that:
'Artificial islands, installations and structures do not possess the
status of islands. They have no territorial sea of their own, and their
presence does not affect the delimitation of the territorial sea, the
exclusive economic zone or the continental shelf.'[37]
In the opinion of law academic John Gibson, 'because Sealand was
man-made there was little chance that it would be recognised as a
nation.'[36]
Of course Sealand's shortcoming is that it really has very little to offer to any established nation to convince them to recognize Sealand as a nation. A sufficiently sized chunk of stone on the other hand might be able to find something to offer that an old 0.025 km^2 ocean fortress wouldn't. There are of course mineral assets, of which you could offer favorable prices to anyone recognizing your rock as a nation. Depending on the shape of your rock and the nearby coastline you might offer the possibility of a port where the nearby shore doesn't. There is also the possibility of offering some kind of defense/policing treaty is you land in an area where there are seaborn threats (aiming to curb piracy would probably be the best bet, if there's a enough of a martial threat that one side would welcome you then the other side is probably strong enough to be a significant threat to you).
There is also the lawyers & guns question. Do you have them? Get at least one country that wants what you have to offer to officially recognize you and then set your lawyers/diplomats to the task of expanding that legal foothold. In terms of arms, can you make it sufficiently expensive for any country to invade you that they will leave you alone so long as you don't go all Dark Side on them? If your major export is cut price emulation of thionite or mundane readily abused drugs -- expect an intervention sooner or later rather than recognition as a state. Likewise if your rock decides to become involved in other widely frowned upon activities. The best air and shore defenses available will only work until someone in the Pentagon (or other nation's equivelant) says, "Ah-ha! If we do this we can bypass that..."
My suggestion if you really want to be recognized as a nation? 1. Find a way to be economically valuable to your nearby neighbors. 2. Lawyers/Diplomats, you need them. If you are going to be a country you'd better be prepared to play the nation game. 3. Make pains to be a good neighbor. Have a coast guard/search & rescue service and provide aid even to the ships of countries that are hostile to you. Offer use of a landing field/ports to humanitarian missions. Etc.
The other option of course is to land out far in the middle of an ocean and do your best to stay out of anything political. Heck, take your rock underwater and that will greatly reduce the numbers of people who can reach you. (Although some will wonder just why you're trying to be that private.)
-----

Will the transhumanist future have catgirls? Does Japan still exist? Well, there is your answer.
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#11
Quote:robkelk wrote:
I thought all the ice asteroids were going to the Mars Terraforming Project
Well, it is the Martian Way...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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#12
Rockhounds never de-orbited a whole Rock, that I'm aware of. Large chunks of refined ore, yes; a full-on rock, no.

There was a story that involved a joint effort by several parties to stop a Rock-retrieval run that had gone wrong when the miners had a life-support failure, however.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
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#13
There's also the early-Season-2 story about buying up empty Irish housing and relocating it to Mars - Noah had no idea that it was possible to land Unreal Estate, so he was considering how to move neighbourhoods "the hard way."
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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#14
China may definitely be the first to try

Either a takeoff and landing from somewhere on the mainland, or a brand new rock dropped. It's already been established that China is up to *something* out in the Main Belt. And they certainly have the political clout the shout down any international complaints. I doubt anyone's going to risk triggering a war over it - not unless someone fucks up. And given the Chinese environmental record.....
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#15
They're getting better with it. Part of the reason for the whole Three Gorges Dam project was so they could not only cut back on burning coal for power generation, but also on energy consumed by mining, processing, and transporting said coal. It's working thus far. In fact, the dam will soon pay for itself not only in generating electricity, but also money saved from cutting back on coal production. It's even made it safer to send large barges up the Yangtze River, which is more efficient than sending goods overland. The only real concerns are soil erosion in the newly flooded areas and whether enough silt to shore up river beds downstream is getting there. Time will tell, but it looks like all concerns aside, Three Gorges is a huge win for the Chinese.

They're now looking to build even more hydro power along the Yangtze. I wish them honest good luck in that endeavor.

Really, they do understand that pollution is a serious issue. Nothing underscored this better to the PRC than the Beijing Olympic Games. The Chinese are conservatives, and sometimes that means you want to conserve your natural treasures, of which China has quite a few. The problem is that they want to do so while maintaining the economic growth they've been enjoying. Coal is their biggest energy resource. They hardly have anything else, and renewables are just out of reach by virtue of the technology still being out of their pricerange for the scale of their demand - it's not cheap to force one billion people to suddenly start buying LED lighting or even CFLs as opposed to good old incandescents. Simply put, they have to take the time to build themselves up to that point, and unfortunately that means more coal powerplants until they can afford to go green.

Until that day, burn baby, burn.

Another thing to keep in mind: the Chinese Government can be coldly pragmatic. In a country where the population hovers just over one billion, losing a few thousand in an 'industrial accident' is of no major concern in the long run. It is merely a setback, and there are many more hungry workers out there. People are a resource and few countries take that to the sort of extreme the Chinese do. (Note that this is one of the manifold reasons the Chinese want to keep the general population out of the political loop. They're in the business of getting things done, and nothing gums things up faster than having to give voice to a billion people. Like I said, coldly pragmatic)

Would the Chinese do something like this? If it nets them a profitable enough return, then yes, in a heartbeat.

Also, they'd be practical enough to set it down in a spent open-pit mine. This way, they have a safe place to put it that will not only keep it from suddenly shifting, but also all the infrastructure and equipment they need will be in place already.
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#16
Actually, I can imagine China doing this. It would not be due to a cartoon villainy, "Bwahaha! That pesky Captain Planet can't stop the Great China from poisoning the Earth!"

Look at the territorial claims they're making in the ocean. Now imagine if the people pushing these claims realized, "Hey, if we could *create* a new island a few hundred miles out where there was no island before, then our claims could also be extended out a few hundred miles more." And when their military people realize that said rock could be preprepared to be an instant naval installation and air field... And seeing as how they're on the UN Security Council they can simply veto any resolutions against these new islands without having to actually pass any resolutions that other countries or groups might try to use to get automatic approval of the same thing.
-----

Will the transhumanist future have catgirls? Does Japan still exist? Well, there is your answer.
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#17
I wonder how difficult it would be to find a place in the ocean where the ocean floor does support an additional huge mountain without trouble.
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