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Congressional Candidate Brianna Wu Claims Moon-Colonizing Companies Could Destroy Cities By Dropping Rocks (washingtontimes.com)
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.
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.
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?
You (and this Brianna Wu person) have caused me to waste a fair amount of delta-vee smacking my forehead.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
"Brianna Wu references Heinlein, Dumb Puppies Don't Know Which Side To Take"
Regardless if it is theoretically feasible, the scenario is not practical in any way. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the scenario of hurling rocks at the earth was believable because the moon colony was 100% self-sustaining, it already had a method of launching extremely heavy loads at the earth (agricultural products), and the colony was going to starve to death if they were forced to continue sending so much biomass to the earth. The only reason they didn't all die immediately after their first launch was because the government on earth did not want to wipe out the colony because it was seen as a very valuable asset if they could just regain control.
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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Look at the conservative voice being bolstered by the Slashdot conservative majority after launching into an attack on me. Just because I pointed out the Ms. Wu has approval on Slashdot roughly equal to that of the Ebola virus doesn't mean I agree with everything she says.
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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."