Them: "You can't just start mining asteroids, you might damage the local ecosystem!"
Me:
(Yes, people have unironically made this argument to me.)
oh it's like top 3 most common arguments
of course number 1 is always "to even visit an uninhabited rock in space is literally the same thing as christopher columbus slaughtering tainos, because if you squint there might be some aesthetic commonalities in some remote respects, which is enough"
@rechelon Number 2 is definitely "It's not currently economical so it never will be," and number 4 is probably either "Mining is extractivism and extractivism is always bad in principle" or "Rockets always emit greenhouse gases"
Or maybe just calling you a Musk simp.
@sorceressofmathematics @rechelon which is extra dumb when Bezos is the one who is serious about near earth asteroid mining while Musk is distracted by Mars
@elfprince13 @rechelon Yeah, IIRC Musk is pretty skeptical about asteroid mining.
@rechelon @sorceressofmathematics on a related note there’s a fantastic (and concerningly surface-plausible thought experiment) talk out there from a Cambridge physicist outlining a 50 year program to dismantle Mercury and build a Dyson swarm powering a rail gun to colonize the galaxy
@elfprince13 @rechelon Yeah, once you can get the process going it becomes pretty self-sustaining.