70% of meteorites from 3 collisions in asteroid belt within past 40M years
skyandtelescope.org
skyandtelescope.org
For a lot of people, they know that super nimble spaceships aren't real, but they may have never thought about asteroid belt density. People often see something in media that seems plausible, and assume that's what it's like in reality, even if the media portrayal was way off. I can guarantee it's happened to you at some point.
For an example in our own system, see Saturn's rings.
The aftermath of a recent collision between large bodies might be attractive to future spacefarers because it could expose the differentiated insides of planetoids in a convenient high-density but accessible form for mining. So it wouldn’t be entirely unrealistic for “future stories” to be playing out in these rich and dense regions instead of the space equivalent of the middle of a barren desert.
A statistically representative locale for a story on Earth would be in the middle of an ocean, but that’s not where most stories come from.
I do like the idea of prospectors diving into the debris of a recent asteroid collision to gather halfway pre-refined resources. With the rarity of asteroid collisions relative to human lifespans, I imagine the response the way deep sea creatures respond to a whale fall, sudden massive availability of resources. I might try to write that someday.
That's also an undesirable "area" of space for mining. A too-recent collision would be a dangerous area because of the excessive density. A "just right" area for mining might be a hundred thousands years old, but not tens of millions or older.
The terran analogy would be a volcano: Too soon and you're still ankle-deep in lava. Some decades later you have the most fertile land on the planet for your crops. A billion years later it's no different to any other part of the planet and not especially productive.
> whale fall
That's precisely what I was thinking of!
> I might try to write that someday.
I'd read that story! It's a ripe context for drama: the luck of discovery, the gold rush, the fight over the territory by rival groups, the "frontier" aspects and lack of civilized law and order, etc...
This doesn't seem like it should be a problem. The space miners don't need to jump straight to the middle of the debris field; they can just start at the very edges. The density of the debris field won't be uniform; it'll be spread out, even shortly after the collision. They can just go to the less-dense areas at the periphery, where it's safer.
"Sci-fi" already tells you what's the fictional part of the story: the science/tech, and maybe some fundamental rules around those. Fantasy is where you get to rewrite the basic rules of the universe.
In the span of a few decades we went from no planes to flying at almost Mach 10 in air (X-43) and 600.000km/h in space (Parker probe), and from AM radio to a super-computer in everyone's pocket. So you can bet any person can reasonably imagine that in a few centuries we could be advanced enough to build today's sci-fi. That's because they have a few real anchor points in the history of human civilization or even their own lifetime and an easy assessment of the progress of science between them.
Most people also actually think asteroid belts are that dense. But that's because even basic concepts about gravity aren't immediately apparent from day to day experience. Basic grasp of gravity will never allow you to believe it naturally "wears off" in an asteroid field so the chunks stay close enough to even collide but magically never clump together, or that 1000 years "in the future" will change what was constant for billions of years.
It only seems arbitrary if you don't bother to think about it.
I would wager it’s because the space involved is incomprehensible. It’s not obvious why rocks being 600k miles apart forms any kind of feature. That’s 24 trips around the circumference of the earth. I had honestly presumed they were closer. Not sci-fi movie close, but maybe a few miles in between?
Space is incomprehensibly large to me.
Of course this assumes we're talking about hard sci-fi, which doesn't include stuff like Star Wars.
Ramscoops don't actually work, you lose velocity collecting the mass. Everything else is subject to the tyranny of the rocket equation unless we're inventing new physics.
IIRC, it had to do with taking a velocity hit at like 0.9c and then the best you can do is send that atom out at 0.999c out the back. And also the scoop size was gigantic to get mass in sparse interstellar space.
What makes you think that GP thinks that? The mere fact that they didn't mention that, among all extant silliness in scifi media, in the context of a discussion about asteroids?
It would been like seeing an object 1/3000 the size of our moon at twice the distance away.
It's worse than that: 60% of that mass is contained in only 4 asteroids, the largest of which is the dwarf planet Ceres. So if you ignore those 4 bodies for a moment, the rest of the asteroids are only around 1.2% of the Moon's mass.
The op headline is also using meteorite, which by definition is a rock which reaches the surface of the earth.
5% of my brain: only 3 collisions caused all that havoc? What happens if there's another??
It’s afraid