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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7737 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Chemical rockets do a lot better in the worst case scenario for a rocket launch.

I agree that they’re too weak for the real extrasolar timelines.

If there was a bunch of fissile material sitting around in the asteroid belt, maybe that would be a good reason to get up there. Unfortunately, a cursory search tells me that it only got concentrated on Earth by some sort of geological distillation. Probably not available outside of gravity wells.

Fissile material is extremely valuable per unit mass, and we're never going to run out of it on Earth, so you wouldn't save much by farming it out of the gravity well. What WOULD be valuable is mining and smelting a large amount of metal or rock that you can use to build large structures in space.

I don't see why we should be worried about a little fallout in the atmosphere, we detonated thousands of H-bombs and there were no significant radiological consequences. Millions of people die every year from air pollution already.

Wait for fusion IMO.

The risk isn't from a nuclear explosion, it's from an explosion that scatters nuclear material which is way more likely in a rocket than a bomb.

Er, yes, that's what "fallout" means. You missed @RandomRanger's point. One rocket's worth of nuclear material in the atmosphere is barely a blip. Note that even a normal rocket is chock-full of toxic chemicals, which is why we don't launch near population centers. Most normies tend to be off by many orders of magnitude when they intuit how dangerous "nucular" things are.

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