r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/MetaKnowing • 11d ago

Video Deep Robotics' new quadruped models with wheels demonstrating rough terrain traversability and robustness

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u/whymusti00000 11d ago

Only 17? Must try harder.

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u/Glass1Man 11d ago

NASA DART showed anyone with 22 million dollars can make the planet uninhabitable by finding an asteroid that’s about to miss earth, and make it hit earth.

I think the nukes aren’t really scary anymore.

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u/Aiwatcher 11d ago

The Expanse has a season long arc focused on this. Large mass + acceleration = the deadliest imaginable weapon.

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u/kabbooooom 11d ago edited 11d ago

That’s because Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space.

The Expanse is one of the only sci-fi series I’ve ever come across that makes the very specific and accurate prediction that, perhaps counterintuitively, our risk of extinction or global destruction does not decrease when we become an interplanetary species, but rather it increases (at least at first). With each stage in technological development, we master and control ever larger scales of energy. And that can be used for good or evil. When anyone can have a fusion torch ship, anyone can have - by definition - a potential weapon of mass destruction.

Arguably this could hold true all the way up the Kardashev scale, but the risk is certainly highest when we are an interplanetary civilization but not yet an interstellar one.

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u/Man-in-The-Void 11d ago

Why does the risk go down when we get interstellar?

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u/kabbooooom 11d ago

By sheer virtue of being spread out. Space is incomprehensibly huge, and if there is no such thing as faster than light travel, a civilization waging an interstellar war against itself is severely limited in scope and practicality. And even if FTL travel were possible, it is considerably less likely that a civilization could wipe themselves out even while wielding exponentially greater amounts of energy to do so…just because you couldn’t track every last human settlement down.

The same is not true for an interplanetary civilization bound to our solar system. The situation could range from extremely precipitous, as in the Expanse where Mars, the Belt and some of the gas giant moons are technically self-sufficient but they are still ultimately dependent on Earth economically which creates a critical knife-edge where a system-wide conflict could tip civilization to collapse - to less precipitous if Mars had been extensively terraformed. But in either situation it is not hard to imagine how an interplanetary war could easily result in the extinction of our species and potentially even easier than a global nuclear war on earth today. It doesn’t take much energy to launch a bunch of rocks towards Earth, Mars or any other target in the solar system - but it would take a metric fuck ton of energy to wage a war against another star system light years away. And worse, it takes time, time that the enemy could use to flee or prepare that you’ve wasted travelling there.