[wgrover]

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/future/mars.pdf

[MichaelMoser123]

Wow, thank you! This made my day: "Consider the possibility that introducing an arbitrarily small tame asteroid could throw a planet out of the solar system. This would be a different kind of instability than those that have been so far considered. It would be of mathematical interest to prove that a system consisting of a sun and three planets could be disrupted by a single arbitrarily small tame asteroid."

[zorked]

This is considerably more interesting that the original link...

[cbsks]

The sci-fi book practically writes itself. A wealthy entrepreneur puts an asteroid in motion to move mars and sets up a long term foundation to keep it operational for the next 40,000 years. In conjunction with the orbital adjustment, terraforming begins and the first enclosed permanent settlements are founded. After the orbital changes are complete, the new planet is open for human development and is renamed from Mars to Musk, after its visionary founder.

[coldtea]

Of course things go horribly wrong, and Mars crashes into earth. The moral of the story being if you don't have ultra-superior technology and experience doing the same thing outside of your own solar system and checking the results to adjust your procedures, then nudging things and seeing what happens at planetary scale is playing with fire.

[OneDonOne]

I thought it was the short stories "Sunken Gardens" and "Cicada Queen" by Bruce Sterling from his Shaper/Mechanist universe.

Oh well.

[justinjlynn]

Is there any better embodiment of entrepreneurial capitalism than stealthily appropriating an entire planet, privatising it, and then naming it after one's self? ... I'd be hard pressed to think of one.

[twic]

Hans Moravec is really into space elevators. Is there some correlation between being an AI researcher and having an interest in space mega-engineering?

[Sharlin]

Almost certainly, simply because they both strongly correlate with being geeks. And SF geeks in particular. And the very particular sort of hard SF geek who feels right at home at Shock Level 4 [1].

[1] http://sl4.org/shocklevels.html and literally on http://sl4.org/

[dekhn]

yes, it's known as the nerd space elevator strange attractor. It is frequently observed in nature with its related chaotic entities, the national-scale DC power grid attractor, and the singularity attractor (some argue that all these attractors are really just specific instances of the singularity attractor).

[gumby]

It's a nice hard problem with lots of juicy subproblems that you can work on even through the central problem (materials science) is nowhere near being solvable.

[martincmartin]

John McCarthy was Moravec's PhD advisor.

[effed3]

I wonder what will happen to the others planets, on a long scale... in a dynamical (chaotic) system stability is not granted, probably a bunch of asteroids-tools are needed to correct the deviation of all others planets form a desired configuration.

[BearhatBeer]

Careful, AI has been known to lie.