🚀 go-pugleaf

Maybe a near comet approach could be a good thing. I did a rough calculation 
and estimated that there must be something of the order of 10 to the power 11 
metric tonnes of water. Maybe in 130 years time somewhere on the Earth could do
with some water, eg the interior of large continents affected by drought. I 
know that one of the effects of the greenhouse effect is to make sea levels 
rise, but that is salt water, no good for crops, and still would be hundreds of
miles from a continental desert region. The comet presumably is almost pure
water and therefore would be ideal for crops, drinking etc.

So if in 130 years technology is sufficiently advanced, it could be possible
to alter the orbit of the comet so that it goes into a stable orbit around the
Earth. The trick then would be to "chip" bits off the comet and "land' them
in the appropriate region of the Earth. This would be the most difficult bit
since viz the probable cause of the Tunguska event (see previous article on
comet hitting Earth) you would end up doing the equivalent of nuking the region
The comet could also be an almost infinite supply of water for lunar bases if
there are any by then. 

Maybe this is all too much "pie in the sky" (no pun intended :-), 130 years is
much too short to evolve technologies to do this sort of stuff, witness  what
could be viewed as comparativly slow progress in maned spaceflight in the last
20 years (still that's probably a function of the spending). So this sort of
stuff is more like 500 years off in the future. 

			John Black.