I opened the article in Chrome on Android and it was indeed an awful experience but I then switched to the HN browser tab and enjoyed the ad free browsing
If you live in/know about Germany, could you suggest a good alternative to the Kabel Deutschland basic CBN router? I have no clue how the registration to the network would work if I buy a third party router connected directly to my cable input.
You can register the modem via a web portal during the first connection. After a few days you get the activation code via snail mail. But third party cable modems are expensive in Germany. You can also use the provided modem in bridge mode and use a better router behind hit.
We got a DSL login per email a few weeks before the connection became active. Went to the router's admin panel and filled them in under "Internet connection". Once the link came up, Internet worked.
Reminds me of this game, Plague Inc [1], where you can simulate a plague that starts silently until the symptoms become too strong and starts a race between the deadly decease and the governments looking for a cure together and closing borders to prevent it from spreading.
One of my most frustrating memories was Madagascar shutting their borders down at the first sign of disease in any other country. The bane of my teenage existence.
Got bitten in 2010 while camping in Czechia, we failed to remove the tick properly and the head stayed in my skin so we had to butcher me a bit more and it left a tiny wound. Two days later I got the famous painful rash that I had no clue about, red circle, swollen and painful. I went to the doctor who immediately told me "you might have Lyme disease", I had never heard of this before but I understood that it required 3 weeks amoxicillin. I did several blood tests and got positive once to the borreliosis then negative after the treatment. So I thought everything was over but a month later I was feeling extremely tired, body and brain wise, I started to freak out that the disease was still there but blood tests were negative. This was during my exams period and as a student I was under high stress and the spot where I got bitten was still a bit swollen. The doctor told me that it was normal but the only way to be sure that the disease is completely gone at this stage (around 2 months after being bitten) is to do a lumbar puncture which I did (kudos to pregnant women who go through this
! I'll never do it again). The test showed negative, there was no way that I could still have the disease so it calmed me down and I accepted that it was just due to stress and hypochondria. Today I'm totally fine, this was my first bite and I hope the last one. This little bug is a pure nightmare.
If I am understanding what you are asking, then yes - in theory, one (ok - an advanced species; note, that is not humans - not yet) could consume all the materials of the Earth, convert them, and turn them into "things" that are in space; in short, strip mining the Earth until it was completely gone.
Certainly that could be done in theory - but the amount of energy it would take would be of a scale we haven't even begun to barely imagine. We certainly aren't generating that amount to do it, or harnessing such amount either.
So practically, the answer to your question is "no"; what we "send away" from the Earth is negligible.
In order for you to understand why, I encourage you to research the scale of things you are trying to understand. The Earth is big - really big. It may not seem like it, but it really is. What might cause you both a bit of "fright" and "wonder" though is the atmosphere: Compared to the Earth, the atmosphere is thin - very thin. For instance, if you imagined a baseball as the planet Earth, the atmosphere would be a very thin layer over the surface of the baseball, much lower than the ridges formed by the lacings.
Then you compare the scale of the Earth (it's size) to that of say - Jupiter (heck, just the Great Red Spot!). Then compare Jupiter's size to the size of the Sun (hint: Jupiter is tiny).
Then compare the Sun to the size of our nearest neighboring star. Then compare the size of that to other known stars.
Eventually you get to the size of our galaxy - which is an insanely large collection of stars...
Then take a look at the Hubble Deep Space image - and realize that all of those points, far in the background - that all of those are each a galaxy, separated by vast distances from each other...
...and then realize that what we see on that image is only a tiny amount of the whole universe.
The Earth? Compared to all that, we aren't even the size of a quark on the butt of a bacterium...
I would be more worried about the opposite occurring -- all these initiatives to mine asteroids are introducing new inputs into the closed loop that is the Earth's physical manifestation
We already have a lot of mass of random junk falling into the atmosphere from space all the time. A result from a quick google search:
> Estimates for the mass of material that falls on Earth each year range from 37,000-78,000 tons. Most of this mass would come from dust-sized particles.
I guess this means the Earth gets slightly bigger and gravity becomes slightly stronger over time, but it's a much smaller effect than, say, the ocean's tides creating drag that slows the rotation of the Earth.
Presumably, the materials we mine and bring back aren't going to have the same composition as micrometeorites, since space gravel exactly isn't economically valuable. As long as we aren't bringing back super toxic or environmentally damaging stuff that's rare on Earth, I'm not too worried. Also, I expect all but the most valuable elements (e.g. gold, platinum) will be re-used in space to build infrastructure.
It's interesting that a robust space launch economy could compensate for the thousands of tons of annual space gravel, and cause the Earth to maintain its mass at a constant value.
In terms of energy, it'd take about a week's worth of the sun's total power output to disassemble the Earth. So on one hand yeah, it'd be very doable for an advanced civilization to deplete the Earth's resources that way, but on the other we're pretty far from that level.
There's obviously an upper limit but we are very far from reaching that. Satellites are made up of many components much of which is aluminum most composed of bauxite. Apparently we have a lot reserves and are able to meet demand for quite awhile into the future.[1]
Worst case we can always recycle that space junk but it's still way cheaper to recycle what we have on our surface before we run out of mines or grab stuff from orbit.
