What effect(s) would result from significantly adding to the world's mass?

Question

As our technologies improve it's only logical that industry will look to asteroid mining as a source of rare minerals & elements that doesn't damage the environment. In bringing these materials to earth the mass of the planet would inevitably increase. What are the dangers?

Answer 1

Significantly? Well if you added enough mass you would probably notice a reduction in the earths rotation. Days would become longer. You get some kind of disturbances between the nearby planets orbits, and even some of our own. Also gravity would increase. It would be significantly harder to raise a large container of beer to your lips...terrible

Answer 2

Well, that would increase the gravitational pull of our planet, and potentially change its rate of rotation, the consequences of which are obvious...

However, when we develop the technology to bring in that much material from asteroids, we'll probably also have the technology to move an equal amount of material away from the Earth, and dump it into the Sun, or catapult it out of the solar system.

Answer 3

The planet earth's mass has increased relative the the earth's initial mass. That means that at one time the spin of the earth was faster. Now the earth's spin is slower.
As the mass of the earth would continually increase its orbit radius in space with also increase. as mass increases then space and time would also increase. This is the rule of spacetime.
Space time a danger?=its all relative.

Answer 4

I suppose gravity could increase, and the ecosystem could get messed up with the addition of new resources and pollution. Any significant changes would require huge amounts of imported resources though, more than we would need to mine for many decades or maybe 100+ years.

Answer 5

The minor changes of mass of the Earth due to such activity, if it ever happens, would be so small as to be all but undetectable.