Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agnostic Paladin" data-source="post: 477722" data-attributes="member: 575">Tethers aren't elevators. Although, they are still cool.Vulnerable to terrorists? I suppose. So are airports and Canaveral.Jürgen, diverting asteroids might be feasable right now if we knew it was coming decades in advance so we could design and build a ship to get us to it early enough, but as it stands, comets (which are the real dangerous planet killers) are poorly understood. They also tend to be moving faster, making getting to one early enough to divert (or blow apart if they really are loose iceballs) even harder. Most plausible defense ideas are basically ways to divert threats enough to make them miss, and I still think I'd feel safer if we weren't all living on the same target.Wulf, I don't see what altruism has to do with anything. The altruists are the ones who want to us to concern ourselves with helping every human on earth to live comfortably before we waste resources on exploration and research. Going to Mars can be as much about greed and other base motivations as you feel things ought to be. All it'll take is some company deciding that they can make absolute <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />loads of money in the long term if they're willing to invest unprecedented levels of money in devloping the infrastructure to make regular travel and material hauling possible. There are people (like me) who'd go to Mars just because it's there. These are the same sort of people who'd start long-term terraforming projects knowing they'd never see the end results. People like that who have money are liable to spend that money to hire others and create foundations who's mandate is to continue long-term terraforming projects.Rome wasn't built in a day, but no one said 'well, let's just not bother then.'</blockquote>

Verification