SpaceX craft overshot Mars’ orbit and is headed to asteroid belt

Hopefully we don’t intend to keep this treaty forever, or we’ll always be stuck on this one rock.

The world is filled with an unlimited number of concerns about infinitesimal risk. Your question remains boring and distracting, and, as pointed out elsewhere, the risk is not likely enough to be important.

As it turns out, the difference in probability between the things you mention and interplanetary collisions is astronomical -- like dozens or more orders of magnitude -- and a minute of Googling shows that NASA frequently satisfies the planetary protection rules by ensuring that non-sanitized parts of inbound spacecraft miss the planet on the first pass (even though they will in principle be circling in the same general orbit for a billion years).

Seriously, the only way I can see humanity not getting to Mars before the Roadster is if we completely fail as a species.

how short? because i thought the timeline we're talking about is that the Roadster is not going to run into any planet for as long as they've run simulations for, but it's theoretically possible that it might, at some point, hit something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience

It is shipping, in a different dimension.

Obviously those booster rockets might get a bit tired after doing daily commuter flights for a decade or so, therefore there will also come a time when a third world country, e.g. Bangladesh becomes the place where old booster rockets go to be scrapped, so, next to the ships on the beach booster rockets crash down and small children working with no health and safety tear them to pieces.

A genetically modified lichen, or fungus, that was designed as a stepping stone towards a better Martian biome, and a launch setup to seed them effectively isn't too far outside the bounds of present day work with genetics, and present day launch & deployment systems.

It's far less sexy, but a multi-generation approach to terraforming could yield a usable Mars without too much magic...

Viruses and bacteria don't have feelings and the vast majority of the biomass on Earth is not even capable of suffering.

It would also need to reach a balance with its planet and not simply eat up all the resources and die out.

IIRC, many low-probability events were in the development of simple life, so life itself might be surprisingly thin too.

I'm actually not too worried that we're the only example of life in the universe. Instead I'm more worried that the galaxy is filled with planets containing nothing but slime mold.

It would be pretty trippy to think about. A planet not unlike our own in terms of atmosphere, water content, temperature, etc, and it's all slime mold. Entire mountains, covered in mold. Rolling hills of mold. Valleys thick with mold. Mold everywhere.

Ours may very well be the only planet in the universe where life evolved to one day ponder the possibility of a universe filled with mold. Multiverses and Moldyverses.

So, who knows, we may take it upon ourselves to spread life and make the universe less moldy.

I believe the popular statement is more towards 'There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all beaches of earth.'

Once you bring in inland sand deposits etc this would probably not be true given the estimate (I've read but there must be other) of stars to beach sand grains is fairly close given the scope.

And as for planets, I'm not sure the ratio of 'earth like' planets to star ratio in the universe but would suspect this to be less than 1:1 given in the milky way this averages a less than 2 earth like planets for every 10 stars.

It's such a great analogy. Its the closest as I can come to understanding the scale of the universe we live in.

Looking at practical considerations rather than just theoretical, you also need the ability to perform course corrections along the way. The initial trajectory won’t be precise enough to make it work from just the departure burn.

If someone doesn't add a Tesla Roadster mod to the VAB I'll be extremely disappointed in the entire modding community.

However, your language sounds like they were going to circularize at 'about the distance of mars', which they were not (that too would have required a burn months from now). The plan they'd previously briefed was an elliptical orbit where the aphelion is ~Mars' orbitial distance (~1.5AU) and the perihelion is still at Earth's orbital distance (~1AU). However, with the extended burn, they got the aphelion up to 2.61 AU.

SpaceX said that wrt. their original projected trajectory of a Mars Transfer Orbit. Since right now we're talking about something more like Ceres Transfer Orbit, the projection can change (and, as per article, astronomers are asking Elon for details to calculate it), but keep in mind one thing: space is big and empty. The chance of it hitting anything on short timescales are close to 0.

Well, if the recent progress in the space sector continues, I'm confident that in the next few decades someone will make a mission to rendezvous with the Roadster, just for the kicks.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time

It wouldn't just be profitable in the sense that you can sell 1000 kilos of dysprosium to manufacturers; it would be profitable in the sense that those manufacturers could make more products, employ more people, build more electric cars or LED bulbs, etc.

Space mining companies currently have two or three possible products they usually talk about: platinum group metals, helium 3, and water.

Helium 3 would come from the lunar soil. The problem is that it is EXTREMELY rare in the lunar soil, so you'd have to process ridiculous amounts of it. It is ostensibly used as a fusion fuel, but it's actually a tougher fuel to use than deuterium/tritium, and no one has even made D/T fusion breakeven, yet. The only real advantage is that helium 3 produces fewer neutrons than D/T does. But Protium-Boron11 produces even less. And you can make Helium 3 by just making Tritium and letting it decay. So Helium 3 isn't a real market.

Platinum group metals are supposed to be this huge market. But the total value of the platinum market (and the vast majority of the PGM market is platinum by value) is just $5 billion per year. The global commercial space telecom market is already on the order of $100 billion per year. And even here, processing platinum in orbit is a HUGE technical challenge. It's in relatively small concentrations (though perhaps still better than Earth), it's not like there's a big chunk of platinum that you just need to grab.

And water. Water is supposed to be the huge, near-term space commodity. $10,000 per kilogram, "The oil of space." ...except the only current market for water is on ISS, where it is occasionally delivered by Dragon, Progress, and Cygnus. Water is not used for propulsion for any current satellites; instead, they use hydrazine, xenon, or a bipropellant hypergolic combination (usually including hydrazine).

The only other use is for upper stage propellant. But that'd require splitting the water, refrigerating the resultant gases, storing them in deeply cryogenic conditions, then delivering them to the upper stage. This is all possible, but that is only good for a small part of the trip to orbit, the part from LEO to GEO. But the starting assumption of water being super expensive is based on a faulty assumption that launch costs will remain really high, i.e. that reusable rockets won't work. If Falcon Heavy works, the cost to orbit is only like ~$1000/kg to LEO. And if BFR works (first orbital test as early as 2021/2022), costs could be as low as $10/kg. So you have to assume reusable rocketry isn't really viable. But to get water from, say, the Moon requires a reusable launch infrastructure of some kind, usually a reusable lunar lander/ascender. And usually, in order to be cost effective, it has to be totally autonomous. So you're assuming fully autonomous, refurbishment-free launch from the Moon is going to be cheap to develop but reusable rockets on Earth won't. And you're also necessarily assuming that space market growth won't be buoyed by much cheaper space launch, so you're looking at a small part (upper stage propellant) of a relatively small market (the current space launch market, which is a tiny fraction of the space telecom market). And you have to build a bunch of infrastructure on the Moon and in Earth orbit to make it work, it'll probably take over a decade to get working... Why not just invest in reusable rockets on the Earth first?

So I feel like the business case for water mining also doesn't make any sense, in spite of the difference in delta-v needed to reach orbit.

(The caveat to this is if you have a Moon base or something... in which case you already have a need for water on the Moon itself and much of the infrastructure already in place. That is reasonable, IMHO.)

If lifting things from the Earth becomes super cheap (and it most certainly can), then the vast majority of the business case for space mining goes away, and you're left mostly with mining platinum group metals for Earth use (which isn't a very big market). The narrative needs to be rewritten to account for reusable space launch.