Never Tell Me the Odds
· 25.10.2023 · 22:59:11 ··· ··· Wednesday ·· 3 (3)
Today I Found Out Contrary to C3P0’s estimates in Empire Strikes Back, it should actually be quite safe to fly through an asteroid field. The reality is that the objects in asteroid fields are generally hundreds of thousands of miles apart and most of them are no bigger than a tennis ball. For instance, if you added up the mass of all the asteroids in our solar system’s asteroid belt, it’s a mere 4% of the mass of our moon with about 1/2 of the total mass from just four asteroids- Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. So that’s our asteroid belt. Could there be one out there that would be dangerous to fly through? Unlikely, unless it was formed extremely recently- the reason being that even if the asteroid belt is initially packed with debris that are colliding everywhere like what is depicted in Empire Strikes Back, this would relatively quickly (on a galactic time scale) sort itself out with most of the mass being ejected from the belt. Eventually, the system would stabilize itself to something like our asteroid belt. And if you’re thinking just now that maybe the Hoth Asteroid Belt was a newly formed phenomenon, it was actually described in the Expanded Universe as having been formed several million years before the events of Empire Strikes Back, via a collision of two rocky planets. For further reference, our asteroid belt is thought to have originally contained approximately one thousand times its current mass and within about a million years stabilized down to in the ballpark of the mass we have today. It’s also worth noting that objects that are greater than about six miles wide in our asteroid belt are estimated to have about one random collision every 10 million years or so on average.
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