Comments on: Close Encounters of the Worrisome Kind? Chinese Satellites Meet in Space

By: Darrell

Darrell — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:50:34 +0000

@Wesley:
Chinese more peaceful than us? Surely you jest sir. No, they aren’t trying to start a war with us (they don’t need to, they just need to call in our debts to destroy us), but they are certainly not peaceful. Consider the ethnic destruction of the Tibetans and the ousting of the Dalai Llama from his home country. My point is, they don’t need nukes, nukes are old hat or for terrorists, no country in their right mind needs them anymore, all they need to do is have massive leverage on a global market, or a huge army.

By: Wesley

Wesley — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:45:53 +0000

The Chinese are more peaceful than the US! Why don’t you compare nuclear arsenals? To accuse the Chinese of preparing for war just because they’re advancing their technical abilities in space is just plain ridiculous!

A much more plausible theory is that Discover thought the story needed something extra so they tried to juice it up…

By: nick

nick — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:47:36 +0000

@Rhacodactylus : Everything is zero sum when your budget depends on scaring a country into spending half a trillion dollars a year defending against the shadow puppets you’re casting.

I’d like to point out that in the right (or maybe wrong?) hands, both a screwdriver and a hammer can be weapons of violence – the objects themselves don’t matter, the intentions of the wielder are the only things that matter.

Instead of screaming “The Chineseseses are gonna gets us! Attack them first!” Why don’t we focus on figuring out how to defend against satellite sized chunks of space junk – i.e. have a system on satellites that warn/evade/destroy anything getting close enough without talking back. At the very least some spraypaint or paintballs to target incoming camera-like objects. Bonus: Newtonian physics will propel you farther away from the incoming maybe-hostile when you shoot the spraypaint or paintballs at them.

By: Andrew Moseman

Andrew Moseman — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:22:54 +0000

@Rhacodactylus I have to image that the answer to “is this sinister or benign?” is truly “both.”

By: Rhacodactylus

Rhacodactylus — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:10:37 +0000

I love people who’s minds go immediately to “China could only be doing this to destroy our satellites,” not everything in the world is zero sum guys, sometimes peoples motives aren’t sinister.