Hacker News Reader

Comment by james-watson | Hacker News Reader

Treaties are great fun for the specific brand of nerd that loves treaties.

In the real world, the only thing that matters is who has the bigger stick to backup whatever terms they dictate.

No NATO treaties or US treaties would have any weight without the backing of the largest military force on the planet. So in regard to space, it's all meaningless, because there's nothing of value on Mars or the Moon that is economically worth sending a military to enforce a treaty over.

Common sense isn't so common sometimes...

View on HN

Well, there's the rub. While I imagine there's a school of thought that says "fuck you, we're on Mars, we're declaring independence, whaddya gonna do about it?", there's also a school of thought that says "we have nuclear weapons, interplanetary missiles, media control, and the political will to do the obvious".

Economic worth is not what wars are fought over. They are fought over the prospect of losing face. It all boils down to dick-waving, even over the vast expanses of space.

I mean, who would object to a limited tactical strike with no boots on the ground on a radical (possibly insane) terrorist controlled (I hear they abuse children) space-pirate-fortress?

As a prospective space pirate, I believe that would be a good time to shelf the question of raw military might, and bring up the prospect of Kessler Syndrome and Earthbound dissenters/sympathizers.

The Martian independence play is to just put a bunch of fragmentation grenades into LEO, rather than mess around with nukes. Nobody who expects to keep living on Earth would ever do something so foolish, but if you wanted to cut ties with your homeworld in a hurry, without killing anyone directly, that would certainly do it.

Don't underestimate the power of a large boulder dropped into the earth's gravity well.

Yeah, but also don't underestimate the power needed to get it there in the first place. Earth would have a fully fledged industrial complex, the ability to lob nukes across space. A burgeoning Mars colony would still be worrying about producing enough water to survive - launching boulders, or even carving chunks off phobos to fling back at earth - neither are easy prospects, and given that a nuke could make the journey in weeks (big rockets, don't care about slowing down), you wouldn't have much time to do anything other than hunker down and wait for fire.

I thought it was a bit unfair that your comment above was downvoted, so I upvoted it. Anyway, the canonical "reference" is Kim Stanley-Robinson's "Red Mars" :-) In that book independence happens after the Mars colony has reached a sufficient level of development.

The moon is a harsh mistress, indeed.

If you feasibly want to move it, it would have to be a very large boulder. You would have to plan your redirect years in advance.

For anything a martian colony could realistically move in a shorter timescale, even if it hit Manhattan, it might kill a few thousand people.

A much smaller boulder dropped into the Martian gravity well would kill the entire colony.

When akk they have to do is fire a few rocks or boulders back at earth it doesn't seem like a good idea. Of course earth could do the same but hitting a smallish base on mars would be problematic, for Mars they could just redirect a few decent sized rocks toward earth and because it is so densely populated wherever they struck would cause global pandemonium at best.

Exactly. And there is basically no way Earth will be able to maintain military hegemony over Mars in the long term. It would be easy for Mars to obtain MAD capabilities.

Redirecting a rock in space or even firing some metal rods from space toward your target would be sufficient to fuck things up for the recipient of said projectile. No need to mess around developing a nuke when an asteroid will do a more complete job. Now that would be MAD.

Largest Military Force - so China?

At the moment, a 4 year old with a stick in his hand would be the largest military force on Mars...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com