Hmmm. I don’t recall the Senate’s every endorsing the Copernican view of the solar system… .D’you suppose the earth might be flat after all?
Like the saying goes: “Business as usual”.
Ok, surely then they know we have the technology currently to change the course of a 5+ km long asteroid and plow it into the earth and destroy most of mankind right? It would be expensive and might take a while, but we certainly can do it.
You know what, we should simply set up CO2 generating plants next to the hometowns of all these Republicans who think CO2 shouldn’t be regulated. Sure, they probably wouldn’t do much (though maybe in a valley you could get into some interesting issues), but most of these people are NIMBYs and they’d have to justify why they don’t want CO2 generating plants in their neighborhood if CO2 doesn’t do anything.
WTF am I thinking about Jerry Pournelle here?
I don’t know. A friend of mine did a researching project with DARPA on redirecting asteroids. Well. On the more nefarious version of the possibility of redirecting smaller asteroid and the feasibility of controlling exactly where it landed.
Turns out, totally feasible. We could level Pyongyang and blame it on random chance. Well, except for everyone watching us launch a bunch of rockets and possibly watching them with high powered telescopes and possibly noticing why an asteroid was changing course.
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Ah…
Yeah, Project Thor, also known as “rods from the gods” or the “Tungsten Telephone Pole”
As far as superweapons go, I’m actually really impressed with the idea. You can get energy deposition comparable to small and medium sized nukes with no fallout, better penetration of armor and once those rods are up in orbit, they’d be very hard to track visually or on radar and there’d be little obvious warning of one incoming until it hits the upper atmosphere and lights up. They’d also be moving so fast and be so brittle that trying to knock one off course would likely just cause it to break up and bombard a larger area.
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Neal Stephenson revisited the weapon in Anathem.
But the point is that although some people believe that Nuclear Winter is a well established example of humanity mastering the ability to destroy the climate, it’s less well established than anthropogenic climate change, and the persons who are politically motivated to be skeptical of global warming do overlap, perhaps substantially, with people who are, for whatever reason [1] skeptical of global winter.
[1] It’s hard to argue for nuclear deterrence, if all, rather than some or most of the scenarios involve the death of humanity.
Kinetic bombardment is also mentioned in one of my favorite short stories, The Clockwork Atom Bomb, where a guy from the UN’s nuclear authority goes to Africa to clean up the aftermath of high-energy physics based weaponry.
The premise was, some collider managed to make electromagnetically charged, rapidly spinning, miniature black holes, put them in magnetic containment devices and used the Penrose mechanism to turn them into artillery launchers, basically leeching angular momentum off of the black hole in order to accelerate huge projectiles into really high ballistic arcs.
The main story deals with the cleanup. After these huge wars, people stole these contained black holes, drilled pinholes in their containments, and used them to generate energy (Penrose mechanism used to blueshift an IR laser into UV), and as garbage disposals. But of course, the containments were only designed to hold black holes that got lighter as they were spun down, instead of heavier from everyone dumping their sewage and waste into them.
Needless to say it was an interesting story, and relativity saved the protagonist from getting shot (bullets follow gravity after all)
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