ChristianKl comments on Help Build a Landing Page for Existential Risk? - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Mass_Driver 30 July 2015 06:03AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (32)

Comments (32)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: EngineerofScience 08 August 2015 01:30:21PM 0 points [-]

Also, can I write in my asteroid essay the potential helpfullness of asteroids? We belive that one asteroid(just one!) could be worth $1,000,000,000,000. In other words, catching one asteroid could be worth one-trillion dollars. Could I mention that in my hundred word blurb?

Comment author: ChristianKl 10 August 2015 10:18:14PM 0 points [-]

Astroid defense seems mostly about better mapping abilities and not about mining asteroids.

Comment author: Vaniver 11 August 2015 02:27:12PM 2 points [-]

It seems to me that roughly similar capabilities are useful for mining asteroids and deflecting asteroids with known impact trajectories (i.e. step 2 in the Don't Die plan), and this puts this into the class of opportunities where succeeding gives you more than just not dying (like AGI).

Comment author: Wes_W 21 August 2015 12:55:27AM *  0 points [-]

On the other hand, asteroid mining technologies have some risks of their own, although this only reaches "existential" if somebody starts mining the big ones.

The largest nuclear weapon was the Tsar Bomba: 50 megatonnes of TNT, roughly equivalent to a 3.3-million-tonne impactor. Asteroids larger than this are thought to number in the tens of millions, and at the time of writing only 1.1 million had been provisionally identified. Asteroid shunting at or beyond this scale is by definition a trans-nuclear technology, which means a point comes where the necessary level of trust is unprecedented.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit