Slashdot Mirror
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.
... he/she/it is already confused. This is just more confusion on its part. Perhaps it should learn some physics and try and figure out just how much energy and rocket power it would take to get a city destroying sized rock off the ground even in the moons 1/6 G assuming anything big and sturdy enough could be built on the moon to carry it.
He.
It's a guy in a dress.
It's not just "writing style", it's the summary creating a narrative. Reporting the facts is fine, the comments will provide the inevitable abuse, but the summary is designed to prime the reader for outrage and tell them what their opinion is.
And really, do voter's "have to know" about this? It's one tweet. If it was a pattern of science denial or mistakes then fair enough, but one tweet would be meaningless if it were not just another excuse for GamerGate losers to troll her.
If it really needs to be here, it should have been posted as a question. "Could private companies threaten Earth with kinetic weapons?" and some mention in the summary that the concern was raised. I imagine that the discussion would still be full of dead-naming and other asshattery, but at least the story itself wouldn't just be an outright troll.
Perhaps we should add "social justice warrior" to the story submission lameness filter.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC