Many of the “rocks have rights” crowd would like it to be, though. One of the problems with the Outer Space Treaty was that it was modeled on the Antarctic Treaty.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oh, Paul, please:
With launch costs of thousands of dollars per pound (and unlikely to come down significantly for the foreseeable future)
They are likely to come down to hundreds, or tens of dollars per pound within a decade, now that we have some actual competition and innovation happening in the industry.
I noted in an email to someone the other day that, just as young people have no concept of what quality phone service sounds like, many of them have never heard good music, either, due to the overcompression and crummmy digitalization over the past few decades. I hope that the article is right, and that we can get back to a good listening experience soon.
A breakthrough in understanding of the process. This would be a huge boon to the military, but good for everyone, especially if it can be extended to organs.
In which I talk about the book, which should be for sale in the next week or so (I’ve been having a nightmare experience with the printer, which I hope is almost behind me).
The scientific orthodoxy said that a Chelyabinsk-size event ought to happen every 140 years or so, but Brown saw several such events in the historical record.
Famously, a large object exploded over the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908. But there have been less-heralded impacts, including one on Aug. 3, 1963, when an asteroid created a powerful airburst off the coast of South Africa.
“Any one of these taken separately I think you can dismiss as a one-off. But now when we look at it as a whole, over a hundred years, we see these large impactors more frequently than we would expect,” said Brown, whose paper appeared in Nature.
But our response, and actions to become a space-faring civilization, remains pathetic.