Thanks for this analysis! I was thinking about this issue a lot recently and I’ll definitely refer to your post going forward.
I wonder if large scale space resource activities might incidentally increase the risk of an asteroid impact in the long term though? Our Solar System has had billions of years for asteroids to settle into orbits. Asteroid mining and small alterations of asteroid trajectories could build up in the long term into chaotic effects. So we might get a situation where asteroid orbits are way more chaotic and difficult to predict across the Solar System, posing threats (or, more likely, extreme costs for deflection activities) to humans that might live in space or to anything with a gravity well. This might be similar to sending our Solar System into a situation more similar to the Late Heavy Bombardment 4bya, where large asteroid impacts were extremely common.
I think this threat is addressed by the same recommendations you make though for asteroid weaponization though, I’m particularly hopeful about advocating for more equitable governance of space resources. These policies will start to be locked in during the 2030s with the ISRU for lunar bases—unfortunately many nations like USA and Luxembourg appear to have little intention of sharing space resources and are using unilateral space policy to incentivize private industry.
Thanks for this analysis! I was thinking about this issue a lot recently and I’ll definitely refer to your post going forward.
I wonder if large scale space resource activities might incidentally increase the risk of an asteroid impact in the long term though? Our Solar System has had billions of years for asteroids to settle into orbits. Asteroid mining and small alterations of asteroid trajectories could build up in the long term into chaotic effects. So we might get a situation where asteroid orbits are way more chaotic and difficult to predict across the Solar System, posing threats (or, more likely, extreme costs for deflection activities) to humans that might live in space or to anything with a gravity well. This might be similar to sending our Solar System into a situation more similar to the Late Heavy Bombardment 4bya, where large asteroid impacts were extremely common.
I think this threat is addressed by the same recommendations you make though for asteroid weaponization though, I’m particularly hopeful about advocating for more equitable governance of space resources. These policies will start to be locked in during the 2030s with the ISRU for lunar bases—unfortunately many nations like USA and Luxembourg appear to have little intention of sharing space resources and are using unilateral space policy to incentivize private industry.