Chinese Want To Capture an Asteroid 481
geekmansworld writes "The Chinese want to capture an asteroid into earth's orbit and mine it. From the article: 'At first glance, nudging an asteroid closer to Earth seems like one of those "what could possible go wrong" scenarios that we generally try and avoid, and for good reason: large asteroid impacts are bad times. The Chinese, though, seem fairly optimistic that they could tweak the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid by just enough (a change in velocity of only about 1,300 feet-per-second or so) to get it to temporarily enter Earth orbit at about twice the distance as the Moon.'"
Re:China, don't get ahead of yourself. (Score:2, Interesting)
Funny, somewhere in my memory, I think I read in Analog ( a sci-fi / fact magazine ) about a pissed off miner that made a huge egg type asteroid of the size of a very large city, and floated directly over a nations capital, as it floated slowly downward, the government had to move, since if they shot it down it would kill everybody quickly, and the goal was only to crush the capital and make every think about the action that they do.
Personally, I think china is looking to do this. Why... heavy bombing from space using a solid objects should only create blast/earthquake damage but no real radioactivity. I am not talking about the weather related events or other events ( global cooling ), just the radioactivity from a similar bast damage devices if it was a nuclear based design.
Re:University research paper. Bad Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
I think its a little late for that. Reddit is the defacto geek hangout and its technology and programming subreddits are a zillion more times interesting than the stuff that gets posted here, and the stuff here is usually 3-12 hours behind anyway. Hacker News is where I got for smart discussions anyway.
Slashdot is just nostalgia at this point. I visit but its back burner stuff at best.