American Empire: Pax Americana

[evanrick]

Today's crises in Crimea, and Syria indicate that America's overwhelming military might is not all that effective...

the rest of the would would love to watch America fight their battles for them.

 

[kallipolis]

the rest of the would would love to watch America fight their battles for them.

I can't speak for the rest of the world...I'll leave that privilege to you.

 

[Kulindahr]

I think that is an incredibly extravagant and costly way to locate and retrieve conventional resources we're already familiar with.

We'll be much farther ahead to figure out some kind of nanoparticle robot with a captive genetically engineered microbe that produces some sticky enzyme that can glue moondust together. Then we just launch trillions of them at the moon, and in 800 years when they have finished enveloping the entire sphere in a greenhouse, we take possession of our garden world.

Exploration and development will be less about exploiting known 20th century resources, and more about figuring out how to use the resources we haven't even realised are resources yet.

The folks currently working on it expect a return of several trillion for an investment of a handful of billions. They'll be able to basically hold the world's economy hostage because they could undercut the price of iron, nickel, and possibly several other metals for every producer on the planet.

And if the materials come through for an elevator to orbit, the cost of retrieving an asteroid will drop to a few billion, for something like a 10k% return on investment.

The moon could be turned into a garden in a much shorter time span by finding the right comet and throwing it at the back side. When the dust settled, you'd have a shirt-sleeve atmosphere. Of course the day-night cycle would be really off, which could result in some really strange weather....

In 800 years we'll be looking at make Venus habitable, if we already haven't by then -- and probably have moved Mercury out to be Venus' moon for the convenience of mining it.