Oddbean new post about login | logout But if they can zoom around in cloaky planet plasma suckers, they can zap a space rock
they hype up the power of all the nukes in the world but i'm pretty sure a 1km diameter rock that is certain to collide with us would not be able to be bumped off course with all those nukes, and blown up right next to it out at pluto... the weight alone is immense, and then add the velocity of thousands of meters per second but it's fairly unlikely considering it's a pretty tight window when you count that our planet is flying around the sun at 400m/s
That would be a bad way to do it. If you have a space economy, you have matter streams. You mine a rock somewhere, but need the goodies somewhere else - you don't fill the cargo hold of s ship with ore, you conveyer feed pellets into a magnetically propelled mass driver and stream pellets across space, into a receiver at the other end. To change a rock's trajectory, you aim a matter stream at the rock for whatever duration is required to break any gravitational resonances it may be following. Or just eat that rock too.