spacehacking

SpaceForUs, an excellent space blog by Angus McDonald, has a good article About how Google has launched a lunar prize to reward whoever gets a privately funded rover to the moon.

Over a long enough timeline, the survival rate for each of us drops to zero, but the survival rate for everyone approaches infinity on the edge of a razorblade: Either humanity prospers in outer space forever or we all perish by cosmic murder or technological suicide. If we're going to ride that edge all the way into the sunset, we're going to need to engage in organized counter-eschatology. The war on terrorism is a blip compared to the war on the ends of the world.

There's a variety of threats that could end your life, end your community or end humanity and all life on Earth. Each is known and observed by a certain number of people who try to guard against such an end of the world scenario.

Here's a tool that lets you see a summary of the eschatologies and rank the ones you're most concerned about: End Of America.

Randal Klopping has written a good summary of the threats Humans face from space.

Now I’m no Chicken Little and I’m not going to tell you that the world is going to end tomorrow, though technically speaking, it could! While here on Earth there are very few things that could threaten us as a race, out beyond our skies there exist phenomena’s with the potential to wipe all life off the face of the Earth. The newly discovered scar on Jupiter is a reminder of this. Nobody saw the object, just the scar of the impact.

And as for those who think we should blow up da earth ourselves after we take a nap and fire ze missiles, someone has written an exhaustive treatise on how hard the Earth is to blow up and how it might be accomplished: Can we destroy the Earth? It has a number of scenarios for possible threats to the Earth including plans for setting up Dr. Evil-style bases to orchestrate such plans.

I say without cynicism that today, of all the people in the world, the President of the United States of America would be the person most likely to be able to destroy the Earth should he decide to. If you feel you lack the ability to make it in politics (knowledge of your weaknesses is a strength), you should join the armed forces and shoot for Supreme General or whatever the highest rank is.

Nancy Lebovitz suggested religion as an alternate means of gaining resources, money and manpower. Religion is undeniably a very powerful force. If you could set yourself up as a religious leader you could potentially gain a lot of supporters - who would be much more dedicated to you as a leader than a soldier would be to his general or a citizen to his King/President/Supreme Dictator-For-Life. Setting oneself up as a new prophet doesn't seem to attract much more than scepticism in this day and age, so unless you were very persuasive, you'd probably experience greatest success by hijacking an existing mainstream religion for your own ends. One potential pitfall is that there's a limit to what your followers can provide you in terms of monetary offerings and labour. Manpower alone is not enough. You'd still need at least one scientific mastermind, and frankly I see scientific masterminds as being among the least likely to follow you... But this is a kink you should be able to work out.

Of course, by the time it becomes even possible to destroy the Earth, Madagascar might be the dominant superpower, or the whole world might be unified as a single nation, or maybe the whole galaxy is full of humans, there's no such thing as money, and solid platinum asteroids and robot workers are plentiful. I

don't know. Whatever you can manage. Anyway, once you have everything you need at your disposal, make the calls, submit your proposals, and set the project in motion.

Parralax has an excellent free book about high-altitude balloon launching by L. Paul Verhage brought to our attention thanks to spacepunk Jimmy Brokaw. It covers the mechanics of balloon construction and communications technologies in great detail and is a must-read for our spacehacking balloonists.