Congressional Candidate Brianna Wu Claims Moon-Colonizing Companies Could Destroy Cities By Dropping Rocks (washingtontimes.com) 642
Applehu Akbar quotes a report from Washington Times: A transgender-issues activist and Democratic candidate for Congress says the advent of the space tourism industry could give private corporations a "frightening amount of power" to destroy the Earth with rocks because of the Moon's military importance. Brianna Wu, a prominent "social justice warrior" in the "Gamergate" controversy who now is running for the House seat in Massachusetts' 8th District, suggested in a since-deleted tweet that companies could drop rocks from the Moon. "The moon is probably the most tactically valuable military ground for earth," the tweet said. "Rocks dropped from there have power of 100s of nuclear bombs." After users on social media questioned her scientific literacy, the congressional candidate clarified that the tweet was "talking about dropping [rocks] into our gravity well." Small space rocks can indeed do nuclear-weapons-scale damage if hitting the Earth at orbital speeds. But launching one from the moon, even setting aside issues of aiming, would still require escaping the satellite's gravitational field, a task that requires the power and thrust contained in a huge rocket.
Editors, you stripped the original title (Score:5, Funny)
Original submission: Brianna Wu Is a Harsh Mistress.
You stripped this brilliant title and wrote in your blurb that spans two lines!
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Exactly, and if you saw that, you also saw my post regarding real and imaginary threats...
Back on topic, the lunar lander didn't have,massive rockets, or a lot of fuel, so it's not as outlandish an idea as some people who claim to be experts in physics are claiming it is...
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The lunar lander rockets would only be able to lift a mass that would burn up in our atmosphere. If you want to do some real damage, you need to go big.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwsPLciYPyU
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Gotterdammerung muss fliegen...
I copy/pasted to preserve the accent marks....
Big mistake.....
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It's transcribed "Goetterdaemmerung" (note the extra e's) if you dön't häve the ümlautß
Re:Editors, you stripped the original title (Score:5, Funny)
Wu, got it Wong.
Re:Editors, you stripped the original title (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a theoretical problem for next century. At least. If someone brought it up today as an actual issue, that person does not understand the real world.
Re:Editors, you stripped the original title (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, this really isn't something that is high on my radar as a voter, because we have so many other problems to worry about that are far more immediate and far more important. As a political candidate, you only have so much bandwidth to talk about issues while you have peoples' attention, and thus ought to use it wisely to emphasize issues that are of pressing importance to them. I'm pretty sure that most people aren't worried about a Heinlein-esque scenario at this point.
As an aside, it's sort of fascinating to unpack the way this story spreads, starting with a tweet that gets noticed and turned into a story by a major newspaper, and rebounded among a number of sites, because it's seen as clickworthy (and look at all the attention it's gotten here, just on Slashdot alone). Perhaps this is the takeaway - if you're a politician (or would-be politician), be careful what you tweet about, because you may not have a say in which part gets amplified by the media, and what you wind up commonly known for being about.
Re:Editors, you stripped the original title (Score:5, Insightful)
Brianna Wu is as much a politician as Vermin Supreme. (No disrespect to Vermin, I voted for him.)
Attention whores gonna attention whore.
This was a success when people looked at her again. She's jumping up and down going: 'Look at me, look at me'. That is all.
If she could sing the national anthem through a bullhorn like Vermin, people would look at her for something positive.
Re:Editors, you stripped the original title (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone brought it up today as an actual issue, that person does not understand the real world.
"Does not understand the real world" sounds like a good description of a "transgender-issues activist and Democratic candidate for Congress ... a prominent "social justice warrior" in the "Gamergate" controversy."
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If Heinlein were running, we'd be expected to talk about the idea.
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Original submission: Brianna Wu Is a Harsh Mistress.
You stripped this brilliant title and wrote in your blurb that spans two lines!
This is exactly what happened, but give him credit for not warping the blurb into a plug for renewable energy.
Better headline: (Score:5, Insightful)
"Brianna Wu references Heinlein, Dumb Puppies Don't Know Which Side To Take"
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That's good, that is!
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I googled misogyny and got this:
===============
misogyny
msd()ni/
noun
noun: misogyny
dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.
==============
Now, if you are arguing that a man who likes to grab women by the pussy has a dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women;
then that's tantamount to saying that someone who dislikes or has contempt and prejudice against poison likes to drink it.
That doesn't make any sense. A man who doesn't like women would never grab them by the puss
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Re: Editors, you stripped the original title (Score:4, Insightful)
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Fondness for the organs, contempt for the person. It really isn't that complicated.
Re:Don't use a rocket (Score:5, Insightful)
Escaping the moon's gravity is the easy part. The moon is in a really high orbit. To get something from the moon to the Earth, you need to either lose enough of your angular momentum to fall (i.e. accelerate really hard back along the orbital path) or accelerate really hard towards the Earth so that you end up in a sharply elliptical orbit that intersects the surface. Both of these require a lot of energy and would also give the ground target a few days to prepare. You'd likely evacuate the target city and then send something up with a few nuclear weapons (might less mass than big rocks!) to eliminate the threat.
TL;DR: If it were easy for things from the moon to fall to Earth, the moon would have fallen down already.
How do you drop a rock? [re: Don't use a rocket] (Score:5, Informative)
Escaping the moon's gravity is the easy part. The moon is in a really high orbit. To get something from the moon to the Earth, you need to either lose enough of your angular momentum to fall
It turns out, however, the higher an orbit is, the easier it is to kill your angular momentum and drop. So the fact that the moon is in a "really high" orbit helps here. You need about 1 km/sec to kill the moon's orbital velocity, actually less than the 2.38 km/sec escape velocity to throw the rock off the surface.
But delta-Vs don't add; energies add. Once your mass driver has gotten your rock to 2.38 km/sec, it only takes another 0.2 km/sec to kill the orbital velocity and make it drop. (Less, if you want to take an indirect trajectory via the "fuzzy boundary", but those take a lot more time).
...and, yes, actually I am a rocket scientist.
...
TL;DR: If it were easy for things from the moon to fall to Earth, the moon would have fallen down already.
In fact, rocks splashed off of the moon actually do hit the earth, of course: http://meteorites.wustl.edu/lu... [wustl.edu]
140 characters [Re:How do you drop a rock?] (Score:3)
My comments were on the technical part-- this site is news for nerds, you know. Whether you should be "afraid" is a completely different question.
I do point out that this is, so far, 480 posts (on slashdot alone) discussing details of a 140-character tweet. That's 3.4 posts for each character of the tweet, including the blank spaces at the end.
It's possible that you're overthinking it.
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Nope, i think she considers them documentary or business plan.
At it seems that she reads some good books (Score:5, Informative)
a.k.a. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress from Robert A. Heinlein
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Also, anything from The Expanse series, books 5 and 6 in particular.
Re:At it seems that she reads some good books (Score:5, Funny)
Wu being a Heinlein fan and taking his writings at face value explains quite a bit.
But now I'm concerned about what happens when Wu discovers H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick.
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Er... Wu was a creation of Larry Niven....
Re:At it seems that she reads some good books (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think Wu would be that interested in Dick.
Wut (Score:5, Insightful)
Dropping rocks from the Moon? "Dropping" them?
And who the fuck would waste so much money and energy trying to fling shit from the Moon when it's cheaper to use nukes from Earth itself and harder to intercept due to shorter distance?
I still can't believe Wu's parents wasted 500k on this idiot's education. That much money should at least have produced some basic education in physics, and some common sense, even in the stupidest person on this planet.
So, she's perfect for Congress? (Score:5, Funny)
The head of the House Science Committee spends all of his time denying and attacking science. She'll fit right in:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad... [slate.com]
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Who would vote in an egg head into congress? Those are not people you would want to share a beer with. Only people who you want to share a beer with is someone who we want leading our country.
Re:So, she's perfect for Congress? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who would vote in an egg head into congress?
Apparently millions of Americans.
If you look hard, you might find a congressman or two that borders on sanity, but that's not representative (no pun intended). Congress is and always has been a collection of kooks who love to listen to themselves speak. This has not changed since the day of Plato.
And the American public who votes them in has never been an informed electorate.
Companies are already destroying Earth. (Score:5, Insightful)
Any genetics company could unleash killer microbes on Earth.
Agricultural companies could cause mass starvation if they wanted to.
Any company running nuclear power plants could contaminate large areas.
Any company manufacturing or using explosives could build bombs.
What's the problem with dropping a few rocks?
Eh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't take all that much to escape the moon actually, you don't need a rocket the size of one required to get off earth...
Aiming, fair enough though.
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
The lunar module would also burn up in our atmosphere very quickly.
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
You won't do much damage by throwing lunar modules at the earth.
If you are just flinging rocks, anything less than the Chelyabinsk meteor wouldn't be worth is, and that thing weights about 10000 tons. By comparison the LEM weights 2 tons dry and 15 tons total, with 8 tons fuel.
Scale it up, to launch an equivalent of the Chelyabinsk meteor, you need about 80000 tons of stuff, 40000 of it being fuel. This is a bit of an expensive way to break a few windows.
Specially designed projectiles (rods from god) could be significantly more threatening but consider they have to be built on site from local resources for this to make sense, otherwise just to skip the moon part and throw it from earth to earth, following a suborbital trajectory. Again, a far-fetched scenario.
LEM (Score:3)
By comparison the LEM weights 2 tons dry and 15 tons total, with 8 tons fuel.
Uh, but that's to land and then take off again. The LM Ascent Stage is what you need to compare to:
Dry mass: 2,150 kg
Propellant mass: 2,353 kg
--but, as noted above many times, nobody's suggesting a rocket to do this. Heinlein proposed this decades ago. You'd use a mass driver.
Re: Eh? (Score:2)
If a self-driving car full of explosives blows up in a crowded market, is it a suicide bombing?
Sigh... (Score:2)
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And they get what she gets for doing it: Being told she's an idiot.
That's the beauty of /. When someone is a moron you have a very easy way to immediately tell him or her.
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No, that is outsourced to the private sector where people can do something called "comment" and "reply".
And since real life ain't YouTube and Twitter, you cannot disable it.
It takes a brave woman... (Score:5, Funny)
There you have it, people! Corporations are just waiting to throw rocks at you from the moon!
Can someone please give this woman an award for being so stunning and brave?
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Hmm... IgNobel Prize for Physics?
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And so original...... Seriously... if It were a risk.... At least she thought of that one first!
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Can we please mod submission "troll"? This has to be one of the worst Slashdot stories ever. It's got "social justice warrior" in the damn summary. The original submission is tagged "literallywho", a classic GG troll.
Slashdot got trolled. I was too busy to mod it down in the firehose, but I shouldn't have to. BeauHD should have binned this one, not posted it to the front page. It's click-bait shit for the alt-right.
Re:It takes a brave woman... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not trolling because she is running for something, it would be otherwise. While I understand your "writing style" point, people who would be inclined to vote for her have to know this, hence "stuff that matters".
What? (Score:2)
Ok that Brianna person is a fool, no doubt but then what about moronocy of the submitter who said "Small space rocks can indeed do nuclear-weapons-scale damage if hitting the Earth at orbital speeds." ??? Wtf
Small rocks hit the earth all the time at orbital speeds and they burn up in the atmosphere. Even if it didn't burn up in the atmosphere, a small rock at "orbital speed won't do much damage. Even without an atmosphere (which we have btw, last time I checked it would need something measured in tens of fe
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The old saying rarely fit better (Score:5, Insightful)
It's better to keep your mouth shut and have people think you're an idiot than to open your mouth and remove any doubt that might remain.
Maybe she should concentrate on social issues. Physics ain't her strong side.
Re:The old saying rarely fit better (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe she should concentrate on social issues. Physics ain't her strong side.
Her track record with gamergate doesn't exactly make me want to trust her opinion on social issues either.
Re:The old saying rarely fit better (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assuming a lot about her knowledge on social issues there.
Re:The old saying rarely fit better (Score:4, Insightful)
I know that she does care about social themes. I don't agree with them, but that doesn't make them invalid or wrong. I am also not expert on social issues that I could judge whether her claims are valid. I can only say that I see things differently, not more.
Physics, on the other hand, ARE right or wrong. And there I can say with some credibility that this is bullshit without even having to worry that I might be wrong.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm sure she cares about the moon rocks too.
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IOW, if it's possible that it could be done, it's a military threat, even without any actual intentions of doing so.
And a linear accelerator on the moon could certainly be built that is capable of bombarding Earth. Not likely to be done that way, but it's possible.
Of course, it's also possible to build a linear accelerator on the moon that is NOT capable of bombardin
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***sighs*** someday, I'll remember to NOT use the LT symbol for anything other than tags.
In the above, after the word "say" insert "Less Than 100kg per projectile)."
Re:The old saying rarely fit better (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but no.
Yes, it is technically possible to build such a device. But aside of the logistic nightmare, it's trivial to detect long before reaching operational status, it's trivial to destroy (compared to the time and effort necessary to build it), it is something that maybe five nations of this globe are capable of pulling off and none of them could afford to pretty much piss off the rest of the world for such a stunt.
It's something straight out of a James Bond (or rather, Austin Power) villain play book. Yes, it's doable, but SO over the top that there are cheaper, easier, more accessible and way, way less noticeable ways to accomplish anything that could.
In other words, sorry, but that's not even going to be acceptable as a "saving face" answer. It was a stupid thing to say, that's basically all there is to be said.
Another insult to the community (Score:5, Insightful)
Here we go again.
I am sure there are trans people out there who are actually well educated in astronomy, physics, and have common sense to not tweet shit they don't know anything about;
and they are currently covering their faces with their hands and thinking "What the fuck did we do to deserve this idiot as our representation?"
I know that the US Congress is filled with idiots, but that doesn't mean that the first trans person needs to be one as well and serve
as a stain on the community's reputation.
I am sure there are corporations out there somewhere itching to nuke their sources of income, in some parallel imaginary Universe that can only exist in books.
Re:Another insult to the community (Score:5, Insightful)
I know two transgender people, and neither of them feels that Wu represents them.
Why should I feel represented by someone just because they happen to have something in common with me? Does a paraplegic need someone in a wheelchair just to feel "properly" represented? What I want is a representative that knows and understands my problems and that I believe to handle them sensibly.
Assuming you're white, did you not feel represented by your President the past 8 years?
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Assuming you're white, did you not feel represented by your President the past 8 years?
I can't speak for the GP but as a Reagan baby, I've never felt represented by a president.
Re:Another insult to the community (Score:5, Insightful)
She isn't claiming people should feel represented by her because she is a trans woman, but rather because of her opinions and her willingness to talk about trans issues that are distorted or ignored by others. She also has experiences that non-trans people don't, simply because they are not trans and did not transition or get transphobic abuse, or find their bathroom habits subject to law enforcement scrutiny etc, and she says those experiences give her a somewhat less common perspective that you may feel is worth bringing to the debate in Congress.
Everyone has to judge how well she represents their views and interests for themselves, of course. But it's not about someone having something in common with you per se.
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As far as I'm aware, she's never claimed to be trans and there's no evidence that she is, either. The top three links regarding it on Google are all conspiracy theorists and assholes, the fourth is her saying that she refuses to confirm or deny it because the question itself is transphobic.
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And bluntly, I don't give a shit.
I don't care what's between people's legs, at least 'til I want to take them to bed with me. And twice when it comes to a politician. What I care about is their political agenda and whether I can identify with it.
SJW is a dumbass (Score:3, Insightful)
News at 11
Homeopathic WMDs! OMG! (Score:3)
Homeopathic WMDs! OMG!
So, let me see if I have the summary right:
1. Take a large rock in space
2. Dilute that rock with space, yielding a large space rock tincture
3. Repeat the process until you have a small space rock tincture
4. Drop the small space rocks on Earth, from the height of the moon (works because the moon is "up" and the Earth is "down")
5. Kaboom!
6. ???
7. Profit!
My god! What if she thinks to use space dust, instead! The more you dilute a homeopathic tincture like that, the more effective it becomes! We're all doomed!
I question Wu's chances. . . . (Score:5, Informative)
. . . .running against an established Congressman (Stephen Lynch) who has been in Congress for 16 years [infogalactic.com], who has routinely been winning elections by 70%+ for years [ballotpedia.org].
Wu's only real "in" here, is that Lynch is considered moderate. No idea on how that particular congressional district trends. . .
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. . . .running against an established Congressman (Stephen Lynch) who has been in Congress for 16 years [infogalactic.com], who has routinely been winning elections by 70%+ for years [ballotpedia.org].
Wu's only real "in" here, is that Lynch is considered moderate. No idea on how that particular congressional district trends. . .
Given that she's trying to knock off a popular incumbent in the primary who's done nothing to hurt his chances for re-election over the years, this was a long shot under the best of circumstances. Her only possible means of attack is to argue that Lynch is not liberal enough, which seems like a low percentage move to me. Lynch once said that being "least liberal" member of the House from Massachusetts is a bit like being the slowest Kenyan in the marathon. You're still a lot more liberal/fast than most o
Re:I question Wu's chances. . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Wu's only real "in" here, is that Lynch is considered moderate.
Well, he's considered a moderate Democrat in Massachusetts, but as he once retorted "Calling me the least liberal member from Massachusetts is like calling me the slowest Kenyan in the Boston Marathon."
Wu, on the other hand, is batshit crazy. Her prospects of unseating Representative Lynch are less likely than a moon-colonizing company destroying the city of Boston with projectile moon rocks.
Dropping rocks from the moon? (Score:3)
A huge rocket? (Score:4, Interesting)
"But launching one from the moon, even setting aside issues of aiming, would still require escaping the satellite's gravitational field, a task that requires the power and thrust contained in a huge rocket."
Now you're just trolling. The Apollo moon landers managed to take off from the moon with a very small rocket. Yes, you'd need a comparatively larger one to launch a large rock, but the summary is misleading. It certainly wouldn't be a huge rocket. Now, you'd want to launch it retrograde from the moon's orbit so it would be moving slower than the moon's orbit around the Earth. That would make it take on an elliptical orbit around the Earth that picked up speed as it approached the Earth. The moon is going about 3.68 km/s in orbit and the escape velocity is 2.38 km/s so you'd only be going 1.3 km/s relative to Earth. You'd have to kill enough velocity that it would actually hit the Earth, but you're already 2/3 of the way there by escaping the Moon's gravity so it's not a "huge rocket" at all. In comparison, the delta-v required to actually get to the moon is somewhere around 15 km/s. This is basically straight from the plot of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." If your goal was to hit Earth with a big rock, you'd probably find it easier to do an asteroid redirect mission and nudge a large near Earth asteroid onto an impact course. Getting to the moon in the first place is about 15 km/s delta-v but getting to a near-Earth asteroid is more like 13.5 km/s, and then you can use something like a small ion thruster or solar sail to nudge it around and hit the Earth 3 passes later.
LOL! Isn't it cute ... (Score:2, Insightful)
... when totally clueless people try to be smart?
Wu (Score:4, Insightful)
A few numbers (Score:4, Informative)
The Moon Escape velocity is 2.38 km/s while on Earth it is 11.186 km/s.
Since energy is proportional to the square of the speed (E=1/2*m*v^2) we can conclude that it is (11.186/ 2.38)^2 = 2 time easier to reach free space from the Moon than from Earth.
However, even if a rock is launched from the Moon at 2.38 km/s, it still inherits the inertia of the Moon. Simply speaking, the rock would not fall to Earth. It would be in an orbit similar to the Moon orbit.
The orbital speed of the Moon is about 1km/s so the rock must be given that additional acceleration to cancel its orbital speed.
At that point, the rock is immobile (from the Earth point of view) and it will start falling toward Earth because of ... gravity.
When it reaches Earth, its speed will be equal to the Earth Escape velocity (a bit less in fact since the rock did not start falling from an infinite distance) so 11.186 km/s.
The kinetic energy is given by the formula 1/2 * m * V^2 so for 1kg the kinetic energy at 11km/s is 1/2 * 1 * 11000^2 = 60 * 10^6 Joules
As a comparison, 1kg of TNT provides 4 * 10^6 Joules so each kg of moon rock would be equivalent to approximatively 15kg of TNT
The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons of TNT = 15 * 10^6 Kg so a similar effect would require a 1000 tons of Moon rock and the ability to accelerate that rock to a speed of 2.38+1 = 3.38 km/s.
Re:If he's transgender... (Score:5, Funny)
No, you just have to roll the rock over to the edge of the moon and push it off. Simple. No need to lift it.
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Re: If he's transgender... (Score:3)
The turtles are 100% covered by the elephants, so the turtles will be perfectly safe.
Re:If he's transgender... (Score:5, Interesting)
Rocket power? Science fiction has typically suggested that you would use magnetic accelerators to send rocks from the moon to the earth, probably with solar power. It's not trivial, but it's theoretically possible to launch stuff from here to there [wikipedia.org] using these means, let alone from there to here.
I'm not suggesting that it's trivial, far from it. You have to build the track and then you have to build the projectile. But if you're going there to build heavy industry, then yes, you absolutely could throw masses at the planet relatively cheaply.
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The physics might work, but even assuming the technology is developed I doubt earth governments would allow the construction. And they'd have a lot more power at their disposal - 1 nuke would be the end of it.
Re:If he's transgender... (Score:4, Insightful)
More or less any industry on the moon would need a "cheap" way of getting mass to Earth. Without that, there's no point in putting the industry on the moon.
So when the BigBadBallBearing company builds their factory on the moon, they will include the means to get their products back to Earth, and those means, like many other tools, can be used for good or bad purposes.
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She is not wrong (Score:2)
The reaso
Mach 3.5 catapult launcher (Score:2)
4300 km/h is my first rough guess of the needed Moon-relative launch velocity to kill the Earth-relative orbital velocity that the Moon naturally grants the projectile.
Given the mass requirements of high velocity atmospheric-entry I suspect that's a pretty big launcher needed.
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Good luck with magnetic linear acceleration of a silicate rock.
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Equality will not come by enforced inequality. If anything, it breeds contempt and hands fuel to those that wish to oppose it.
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Republicans are more interested in their candidates being religious than being literate, Democrats are more interested in their candidates being for "social stuff" than being literate.
We're doomed.
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Her claim to fame is being a victim of harassment
Careful, don't contradict what she says - that would be sexist. Anyway who's to say that in the post-truth world of alternative facts you can't drop rocks from the moon to Earth?
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Look at the idiot trying to defend an idiot. How cute.
And Hank Johnson was just "joking" when he talked about Guam capsizing too, right? A "kinetic weapon" on the moon is tech far over Brianna Wu's head. Besides, why put it on the moon when you could just have it in orbit for several orders of magnitude less cost? No. She literally said "dropping rocks". ROCKS. All the bit about lunar gravity (which is slight but nonzero), orbital mechanics, trajectories, and having to survive re-entry through our atmosph
Re:I don't know what Slashdot thinks about her... (Score:5, Insightful)
The double standard in effect here is also telling. The POTUS says all kinds of stupid shit on Twitter, at least weekly. Yet he is not held to everything he posts there but Slashdot readers are on a roll attacking this person who wants to run for congress over this tweet. The fact that she is even aware of the amount of damage something dropped from space could do suggests she likely has a better grasp on physics than our POTUS, even if her tweet did not show a good understanding of the matter of launching something from the surface of the Moon.
And your claim of her saying that someone would just "throw" the rock is supported by what? Yeah, nothing. But go ahead and insert whatever you want into the argument, you'll win this one by majority vote alone (as you've already seen). Slashdot will happily bash her at any opportunity while praising the GOP in the same breath regardless of which one shows a better understanding of physical reality.
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your attempt to defend the indefensible
I encourage you to go back and try reading what I wrote, before you make such sweeping assumptions about its content. I never defended any position of hers in my comments. I merely pointed out that she is a very popular target of the Slashdot conservative majority. Being as you likely didn't read any of the actual text involved - one would have to go far beyond the slashdot summary and even beyond the shitty Washington Times article that said summary links to in order to do so - it doesn't surprise me t
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Re:When did Slashdot become Brietbart? (Score:4, Insightful)
If people like her would keep their idiot mouths shut, the Moonie Times and right-wing zealots would stop being right about some things.
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I remember a day when slashdotters would instead ponder the point at hand, then enjoy themselves as they work out the maths and engineering details to accomplish it.
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I've been noticing the same thing, I used to be considered "OMG he's a fucking Fascist" around here and now I'm just a smidgen right of center. Before posting anything in a AGW thread was instant karma death, now I even get modded up more often than down. The group-think here seems to have done a 180!