Giant Space Mirrors and Brand-New Rockets

Happy Friday, everyone! This week’s newsletter is 714 words, a 5-minute read.

Table of Contents

• This Week in the Space Economy

• My Dumbest Idea This Week

• The Terrible Disease That Asteroids Could Bring to …

• What I’m Reading Right Now

This Week in the Space Economy

1. SpaceX launched Starlink satellites which can provide cell service directly to T-Mobile phones. (T-Mobile)

2. ULA’s Brand-New Vulcan Centaur rocket had its first successful launch. (NY Times)

3. Private space company Astrobotic’s Peregrine moon lander, launched on the Vulcan Centaur, had a catastrophic failure in its propulsion system. (Space.com)

My Dumbest Idea This Week

We humans are obsessed with self-preservation and the illusion of permanence. I constantly find myself hoping that I’ll leave some permanent mark on the world, but in reality by the time my great-great grandchildren are born, nobody will know who I ever was.

Sure, we write books, take photos, and save everything digitally, but how do we know those will be available or understandable to future humans a few hundred years from now? All it takes is a giant nuclear explosion or an arsonist at a data center to wipe a bunch of records from existence.

The premise: If we put a giant mirror, say, 100 light years away, future generations could look at it and see the earth as it was 200 years before them. The light reflecting off of our bodies right now would take 100 years to get there and 100 years to come back. No record keeping or “21st Century English” DuoLingo necessary.

Why it’s cool: It appeals to our innate desire for self-permanence and our perpetual interest in history. Also, a mirror requires no maintenance and light is a language future humans are sure to understand. Plus, the positive economic implications of being able to objectively study our past can’t be overstated.

4 reasons why it’s dumb:

1. We’d need a really big mirror. Like, really big. The Hubble Space Telescope is the size of a school bus and its resolution is 100 yards for objects as far away as the moon. To launch something big enough to resolve meaningful details on Earth would be crazy expensive and take a ridiculous amount of time to get there.

2. I’m pretty sure the light would be redshifted into the infrared spectrum by the expansion of space and the vast distances involved. If we’re going to transmit non-visible light, we might as well use electronic signals instead.

3. To focus enough light from Earth back onto Earth, we’d basically be building a giant light death ray. Catch one stray from the sun or a nearby star and we’d fry a hole in ourselves.

4. Space actually has a lot of random tiny stuff flying through it at incomprehensible speeds, and an enormous shiny object floating through intergalactic space would most definitely take some damage.

3 ✨slightly✨ less-dumb alternatives:

1. Encode historical information in our DNA. If there are humans around to read it, then by default the DNA is there to be read. Package deal.

2. Store historical records on a geostationary satellite high above the Earth’s surface. Any intelligent future human (or alien) civilization will have to look there eventually, especially if they like spying and watching TV as much as we do.

3. Bury a clock in a mountain like Jeff Bezos did.

The Terrible Disease That Asteroids Could Bring to Earth

TL;DR - Mining a resource-rich asteroid could bring Dutch Disease to future economies if we’re not prepared for it.

I wrote an article this week on Medium about asteroid mining and an economic phenomenon called Dutch Disease. You can check it out here:

What I’m Reading Right Now

I’m about ¾ of the way through A Brief Welcome to the Universe by Neil deGrasse Tyson & Friends.

It’s a great, easy read in Neil’s usual tone. The guy’s a brilliant communicator and the book flies by because it’s just cool fact after cool fact.

Check it out here: