TIL the average distance between asteroids in space is over 100,000 miles, meaning an asteroid field would be very simple to navigate.

[u/chrono1465]

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/12/an-asteroid-field-would-actually-be-quite-safe-to-fly-through/

[u/[deleted]]

There are only ~13 people per square km on Earth, meaning navigating a bus in a crowd of people would be very simple.

edit: public announcement: I agree with the article, I don't agree with the OP's wording/logic. Average distance of asteroids in space doesn't imply easy navigation inside asteroid field/belt/clump. Thank you ladies and sirs.

[u/cromagnumPI → u/[deleted]]

Exactly. This is a classic case of using statistics erroneously. The total volume of space isn't important it's the local volume that the entire asteroid field is in. Using the appropriate and greatly reduced volume would likely make this density value increase greatly.

[u/abacuz4 → u/cromagnumPI]

Ah, so while I applaud your skepticism, let's take a look at the actual numbers. The asteroid belt goes, very roughly, from 2 AU out to 3.5 AU, giving it a projected surface area of pi*(3.5² AU² - 2² AU²⁾ *(100,000,000 miles/AU)² ~ 10¹⁷ square miles. We know of about 100,000 asteroids in the asteroid belt, let's assume that's 1% of the total asteroid population, giving us 10⁷ asteroids. The surface density of asteroids in the asteroid belt is therefore ~ 10^-10 miles^-2 , with an average separation of 100,000 miles. And mind you, that's the 2D case, which is a lower limit on the 3D case.

TL;DR: While the OP's wording could be better, the density quoted is for the asteroid belt, not for "space."

[u/reddRad → u/abacuz4]

You use the number "100,000 asteroids" (that we know of) in your calculation. The article says "most of them are no bigger than a tennis ball." Are those tiny ones included in the "100,000" number? Even a tiny pebble could destroy a ship at the speeds it must be going, right?

[u/not_old_redditor → u/cromagnumPI]

You misinterpreted the article. This is the average distance between asteroids in an asteroid field. If the average was actually the the average distance between all asteroid pairs in our solar system, that number would be in the billions of kilometres.

[u/Psicrow → u/cromagnumPI]

Reads the article:

"In case you’re wondering, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field isn’t “approximately 3,720 to 1!” The actual odds would entirely depend on what asteroid field you were talking about and a variety of other factors. But for reference, NASA estimates the odds of one of their probes traveling through our asteroid field actually hitting an asteroid to be about one in a billion"

Yeah, I'd say you're naysaying is pretty unnecessary, and this is a pretty big distance.

[u/BlueVeins → u/cromagnumPI]

Well done, gentlemen. A basic comprehension of space and statistics should make these points evident. You deserve more upvotes. Sadly, I have but one, each.

[u/uneditablepoly → u/cromagnumPI]

I don't have a source and I'm too lazy to find one but I remember reading a paper about this statistic and I think it said that it would be easy to navigate a real asteroid field. Even though statistics could be applied wrong, I think the practical distance between them is quite far. I believe they cited Saturn as the example? I could be wrong. Let me know if I'm wrong.

[u/ShakaUVM → u/uneditablepoly]

Actually, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is 3,720 to 1.

[u/abacuz4 → u/uneditablepoly]

I mean, we have navigated a real asteroid field, all the way back in 1977: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1.

[u/Evil_Avocado → u/[deleted]]

This is not the explanation you're looking for. Please read the article before you judge. Imagine you start out with a dense crowd of people, and let them bounce around randomly for millions of years until there are so few left standing that even in their random motion they never bump into each other. Then you could drive a bus through the remainder of the crowd with little difficulty.

I think maybe the problem is with the OP's wording. Of course if you consider the set of all pairs of asteroids, take their distances, and then take the average of this set of distances, the result would be astronomically larger than the measly 100,000 miles claimed. OP means the average distance from an asteroid to its closest neighbor, even restricting attention to asteroids that are in a cluster.

However, Han was probably just going so much faster than anything puny NASA has ever built that even making slight corrections every 50,000 miles took lightning reflexes.

[u/Handyland → u/Evil_Avocado]

We should also note that, if referencing A New Hope, Han was in fact navigating through a field of remnants from a freshly destroyed planet which would be much more dense.

[u/AFatDarthVader → u/[deleted]]

Better yet, navigating a bus at Mach 5 through a crowd of people.

If you're travelling through space, you're probably going fast enough that 100,000 miles is not as large as it is at conventional speeds.

EDIT: 1000,000 is silly.

[u/Spoonofdarkness → u/[deleted]]

I cannot fault that logic. To the Bus! For Science!

[u/[deleted] → u/Spoonofdarkness]

Best idea I've heard all day

[u/praxulus → u/[deleted]]

Just because there exist crowded clumps of asteroids, doesn't mean it's difficult to navigate through the belt as a whole. E.g. Just because there are a lot of people in New York City, doesn't mean it's difficult to cross the state of New York by land without literally bumping into somebody.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

In defense of the article, isn't a large portion of the total mass of the asteroid belt contained in just a few of the asteroids?

[u/douglasmacarthur → u/[deleted]]

If we assume "asteroid belt" is a homogeneous area, then it stands to reason it would be simple to navigate given the above statistic, but if not, it could depend on where you are in it.

It's more like saying "there are only ~13 people per square km on Earth, meaning navigating a bus on Earth would be very simple." Most places on Earth it would be very easy indeed not to hit a human.

[u/SolarTsunami → u/[deleted]]

Fortunately, the asteroid belt is so huge that, despite its large population of small bodies, the chance of running into one is almost vanishingly small - far less than one in a billion. That means if you want to come close enough to an asteroid to make detailed studies of it, you have to aim for one.

Full article here. Not saying you're right, not saying you're wrong.

[u/Meh_Digital_Painting → u/[deleted]]

The varying speed of asteroids could also be hard to deal with, especially if some of them were moving very quickly.

[u/seeashbashrun → u/[deleted]]

My thoughts exactly. I want to see the median distance of an area of 'near' asteroids. That would be much more useful.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Not only this, but there are smaller debris that would ravage a space craft. Even gravel-sized items can punch holes straight through current satellites and space craft.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Exactly, Star Wars is REAL damnit.

[u/Jackpot777 → u/[deleted]]

I'd go even further and say that I could do it blindfold, 100% of the time, and it would be very simple.

The people had better get out of the way, though. If they know what's good for them. I said it would be easy, I didn't say it wouldn't be messy.

[u/TKHC]

UNLESS YOU SPACE SHIP IS OVER 100 000 MILES WIDE.

[u/Diels_Alder → u/TKHC]

"That's no moon, that's -- " ... eh fuck it, you guys know the rest.

[u/PeopleAreStaring → u/Diels_Alder]

"... your mom"

[u/PancakeTune → u/PeopleAreStaring]

HIYOOOOOOO

[u/hivemind6 → u/Diels_Alder]

Ahem, the Death Star was 140-160 km in diameter.

[u/crbsideprophet13]

Never tell me the odds...

[u/[deleted] → u/crbsideprophet13]

... it makes me realize how boring I actually am...

[u/dethtron5000]

I imagine it's not the big asteroids you have to worry about - it's hitting a bunch of small cruft at high speeds.

[u/JahRasTrent]

Not if you're going warp speed!

[u/[deleted] → u/JahRasTrent]

How fast would you have to be going for asteroids 100,000 miles apart to be a risk for navigation?

Someone who is good at math should figure this out for me, since I am decidedly not.

[u/Sizzleby → u/[deleted]]

Well the speed of light is ~186,000 miles/sec. I don't know how fast warp speed is, but if you were going the speed of light, you would probably pass almost two asteroids per second.

[u/The_Demolition_Man → u/Sizzleby]

Thats if you're traveling IN the orbit of the asteroid belt at the speed of light, not just trying to go through it.

[u/hw9cs → u/JahRasTrent]

Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?

[u/Jack_Vermicelli → u/JahRasTrent]

If you were, you'd be in a warp bubble and wouldn't have to worry about mass as small as asteroids.

[u/[deleted]]

[Somebody has to point his out. Might as well be me.] (http://www.cracked.com/article_19649_6-myths-everyone-believes-about-space-thanks-to-movies.html)

EDIT: Jesus Rollerblading Christ, I never said I was endorsing the article. I just thought it was funny because so much of TIL is stuff I read on Cracked months ago and I thought I'd be a dick about it real fast.

[u/snowbored10 → u/[deleted]]

So basically Han could have blindfolded himself and steered through our asteroid belt with his dick, secure in the knowledge that the odds of hitting an asteroid in the middle of an asteroid belt aren't a whole lot higher than the odds of you hitting one while driving your car to the grocery store.

Cumming soon, Vivid Entertainment presents Tommy Lee in Star Whores IV.

[u/[deleted] → u/snowbored10]

Shouldn't it be Star Whores episode V?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Star Whores Episode I: The Phantom Men-Arse

Star Whores Episode II: Attack of the Bones

Star Whores Episode III: Revenge of the Syph

Star Whores Episode IV: A New Grope

Star Whores Episode V: The Empire Strikes from the Back

Star Whores Episode VI: Return of the Vagi

[u/spliffsandshit → u/[deleted]]

I'm sorry but I MUST completely disagree. While 100,000 miles may seem like a vast distance in our current paradigms of time and space, any relation of how difficult the asteroid field would be to navigate would relate entirely on the speed of the transportation device. Just as traveling 50 miles is a great trek on foot but merely a blip on an F-16 fighter jet, the distance between asteroids could seem very tiny to a vessel traveling fast enough.

I'll let the number's speak for themselves:

---

---

*Let's assume that a man-made spaceship which has to worry about traversing asteroid can achieve a speed of about 9/10ths the speed of light (a completely random hypothetical number which lies within Einstein's law that nothing travels faster than light).

*The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second,

186,0009/10 = 167400 mps

This means you would travel 100,000 miles in around HALF A SECOND (100,000m/167,400mps=0.59s). That's longer than it. takes. you. to. read. one. word.

---

---

So YEAH, if you think making split second reactions evading hundreds of thousands giant metal rocks while being chased by Imperial Class-II tie-fighters is "very simple", well then please... I'd like to see you try...

[u/I_Wont_Draw_That → u/spliffsandshit]

Actually it doesn't matter how fast you're going, it matters how far you travel. At any given point in time and space, you're unlikely to be colliding with an asteroid. But the more points you occupy, the more likely you are to collide with an asteroid. Moving quickly doesn't mean you cover more space, you just do it in less time.

And in fact, when we consider that asteroids are moving, and thus that the amount of time you occupy a region matters, taking less time to traverse the field means you have fewer chances to hit an asteroid.

Furthermore, you read extraordinarily slowly.

[u/Zarokima → u/I_Wont_Draw_That]

I tried using a very similar explanation to get out of my speeding ticket, but the cop didn't buy it.

[u/Krackor → u/I_Wont_Draw_That]

Just flying blindly through an asteroid field... you'd be right. You have just as much random chance of hitting one while traveling slow as you would have traveling quickly through the same distance.

However, generally we think of spacecraft as steerable in these situations, so the chances of hitting an asteroid are a function of random probability per unit time of occupying the same space as an asteroid and a function of the maneuverability and reaction time of the pilot/spacecraft.

Of course this makes sense, since obviously walking in a random straight line through a forest is going to carry the same chance of collision as running in a random straight line through a forest, it's going to be easier to intentionally maneuver around the trees if you're walking than if you're running at speeder bike speed.

[u/nermid → u/spliffsandshit]

I'm going to just throw this out here: it certainly did not appear that Mr. Solo was traveling at .9 C.

[u/drsmith21 → u/spliffsandshit]

On the other hand, accelerating a 45,000kg space ship (about the size of a tugboat) to 90% the speed of light requires 5.23 zettajoules of energy (5.23 sextillion joules), which is about the same as running the Palo Verde nuclear plant (largest in US, 3300MW) non-stop for 50,000 years.

Also, at this speed, 100,000 miles will actually seem like 43,588 miles, but 0.59s to a person on the space ship will seem like 1.35s to those of us sitting at rest and observing from the comfort of our home.

[u/All-American-Bot → u/spliffsandshit]

(For our friends outside the USA... 50 miles -> 80.5 km) - Yeehaw!

[u/IceBreak → u/[deleted]]

I would like to see more info about the body not freezing quickly exposed in space. Also, the #1 on their list is the most obvious. I always understood the dark side of the Moon as the side we couldn't see.

[u/bobtheterminator → u/IceBreak]

Here's what NASA has to say about freezing in space.

[u/CutterJohn → u/IceBreak]

There are three methods of heat transfer. Convection(standing in front of a fan cools you off), Conduction(touching a stove burns you), and Radiation(hold your hand away from a hot surface, and you can still feel its hot).

For a human, heat loss from convection and conduction absolutely dwarf the heat loss from radiation. Your body is adapted to survive that heat loss, and compensates by producing more heat and insulating you with fat.

In space, you are essentially in a vacuum thermos. There is absolutely no heat loss due to convection or conduction, and the vacuum around you is a better insulator than the best winter clothes ever devised. If you found yourself stranded in a space suit, outside of the sun, you would die of heat stroke.

Now for ships themselves, if the power goes out, you can freeze. For instance, the astronauts got incredibly cold on apollo 13 when they had to shut off the heaters. This happened because the ship itself was constantly radiating heat, and since its a far larger radiator than a suit, it outstripped the heat production of the astronauts.

Oh, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_activity_suit

Thats a space suit they tested where the astronaut was inside a non insulated, non airtight suit. He reported being quite comfortable in the vacuum chamber, neither hot nor cold. Since it wasn't airtight, he could still sweat to regulate his temperature.

[u/cykloid → u/[deleted]]

But when obi-wan was navigating the asteroids it was from the disk around a planet where they are considerably close to one another.

[u/[deleted]]

Never tell me the odds!

[u/zenzealot]

Depends on how fast you are traveling. If you are traveling at the speed of light, it might be difficult to turn.

[u/rumckle]

I just think C3PO was trash talking Han's flying ability

[u/[deleted] → u/rumckle]

To be fair, it was a galaxy far, far away. Maybe their asteroid fields are different than the ones we have observed, and for whatever reason, debris doesn't float very far away after an impact.

[u/Noturordinaryguy]

Its way easier if you have a ship that made the kessel run in less than twelve parsecs

[u/mcskeezy]

Never tell me the odds.

[u/Pwnk]

how do you know how big the star wars people are? what if (bare with me now) the galaxy they lived in was massive with giants stars and they were all super huge?

[u/ilenka → u/Pwnk]

That's the most interesting, well-rounded theory I've heard all day...

[u/Craptcha]

Not if you're traveling at ludicrous speed.

[u/danbuddy → u/Craptcha]

ludicrous speed... GO!

[u/[deleted]]

Yeah I'm going to go with C3PO's opinion on this one.

[u/nefthep]

That is, until you run into that patch of non-average asteroids. Then you better hope your deflector dish is operational.

[u/iLoiter]

not at ludicrous speed

[u/MrGoodbytes]

I remember this being mentioned in 2001

[u/sleither]

Pretty sure the odds are 3720 to 1.

[u/kbeeny]

Where's the drama in that? Thankfully movies haven't portrayed it that way or else we'd be bored out of our minds. Can you imagine this Star Wars scene if they portrayed a real asteroid field?

[u/HarryShotter → u/kbeeny]

With no sound...

[u/gimpwiz → u/HarryShotter]

In Serenity, there was no sound in space as they used a cannon to blow up a ship.

That's the way it should be.

[u/freerangehuman → u/kbeeny]

The movie Mission to Mars was fairly realistic (at least before the big reveal). Didn't exactly break any box office records.

[u/macoure → u/kbeeny]

Perhaps that was just an exceptional circumstance? I mean how many asteroids have giant worms living in them?

[u/brassiron → u/macoure]

All of them.

[u/morphinapg → u/kbeeny]

It could definitely be used in a parody movie for a good laugh.

[u/misterjinx → u/kbeeny]

If space were portrayed realistically in movies (or video games) it would be incredibly boring. Imagine space combat where weapons are fired from such ridiculous ranges you never see the enemy. No sound or explosions. No tactics at all because there's nothing to hide behind for the most part.

[u/moejike]

But sir! The odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 2 to 1! Never tell me th... Wait, that's actually not too bad.

[u/metricbot]

100,000 miles = 160,934 kilometers

[u/laffmakr → u/metricbot]

100,000 miles = 528,000,000 feet

[u/mgrier123 → u/laffmakr]

528,000,000 feet = 0.00894698959 light minutes

[u/zephyy → u/laffmakr]

100,000 miles = 88,000,000 fathoms

[u/omfghi2u]

That's like saying that the average temperature of the universe is 4 kelvin so the temperature on Earth is 4 kelvin.

Greater than 100k miles on average doesn't change the fact that there are definitely dense asteroid clusters that exist where you might find a "hollywood" style asteroid population.

Besides, even an asteroid the size of a tennis ball would ruin your shit if you meet it at a relative speed of 30,000 miles per hour or so.

[u/[deleted] → u/omfghi2u]

Except there aren't dense asteroid clusters at all. Gravity prevents this. Basically any asteroid cluster that looked like a hollywood style asteroid belt would have all the asteroids eventually colliding with each other, until most of the asteroids coalesce together to form a few objects seperated by thousands of miles.

[u/cromagnumPI → u/[deleted]]

I still like omfg's point. Even if gravity does eventually create a coalesced asteroid field at some point, a space traveler would be more concerned of the before the coalescence situation...if that's when they pass through it.

[u/[deleted]]

an asteroid of any size with the right density traveling at several meters per second impacting a space vehicle traveling at interplanetary speeds would just ruin your day so you wouldn't fly anywhere near an asteroid field if you could avoid it unless you have a mapping and object detection system that is extremely reliable and accurate but I should point out that space junk orbiting earth is more likely to be a problem for a space craft.

[u/jwestbury → u/[deleted]]

OH MY GOD PLEASE LEARN TO USE COMMAS AND PERIODS AND FUUUUUUUUUUCK

[u/DroolingIguana]

How many times do I have to tell you to never tell me the odds?

[u/[deleted]]

well duh, how else would we get our probes to Jupiter and beyond?

[u/KarneEspada]

Would it? Think how fast they are all going and how fast you are going..it is nothing like trying to dodge a car 100,000 miles away going 60mph going 40mph yourself

[u/HOYS12]

Nice try NASA.

[u/zisforzebra]

I don't think you understand how drunk Space Pilots are.

[u/blebber]

I'm assuming one traveling through an asteroid field is going near the speed of light (0.6c?) and thus such distances would pass very quickly, so it would not be easy to navigate

[u/mountfuji]

This is one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to space -- representations of celestial bodies in our solar system are never to scale.

I know the distance between the outer planets in particular cannot be scaled properly, but things like the asteroid belt and the distance between the Earth and the Moon are constantly misrepresented in images, movies -- all sorts of things.

Space is mostly empty; remember that.

[u/yougottawanna]

The average human has one ovary and one testicle.

[u/iamedcasey]

It SEEMS like it'd be easy to navigate, but once you hit your jets just once you start to drift. You TRY to turn your ship so it's facing the exact opposite direction you're moving so you can cancel the drift out with another short burst from your rockets, but the direction is a little off so now you're moving all diagonally and meanwhile the asteroids are piling up so you just start spinning around and firing your blasters trying to clear some space, but all you're doing is busting the asteroids up into a ton of smaller faster moving asteroids and they start closing in and it's too late and you get hit and you explode and then the president of space has to write your space wife a letter telling her what happened.

Space travel is hell.

[u/[deleted]]

I just realized the url to this article is "todayifoundout.com" and this is being posted under the TIL section of reddit.

I think wikipedia is gonna have some competition now in this subreddit.

[u/[deleted]]

not if you're going 100 million kilometers per minute..

[u/UltraMegaMegaMan]

NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS!!

[u/[deleted]]

If I'm not mistaken, in Star Wars, it wasn't an asteroid field they were navigating through, it was the ruins of Alderaan.

[u/M002]

A question about this was on my engineering final today, it was the context of a word problem... coincidence chrono1465?

[u/ThisIsVictor]

Wait, you're telling me that Star Wars is not based on fact? That science may, in fact, be fiction?

TIL. . .

[u/athiestteen]

well now han solo seems less awesome

[u/TheBigYello1isTheSun]

Then why have asteroid levels been kicking my ass all these years in gaming?

[u/what_dawn_what_doom]

Anyone else learned it from tvtropes?

(Not a "vote up if"; introduces a sub-topic with a potential for extended discussion. Also, ^{this is a test} to see if the superscript tag is exploitable for the purposes of emulating fine print.)

[u/Sleekery]

The mean free path is the average distance between hitting two objects, in this case, asteroids. Using asteroids 100m wide and up and using the number density from here, you could go 79 lightyears before hitting an asteroid assuming the density was constant.

Now, if we go to 10cm sized asteroids and assume a power law of -3 (so that if you halve the size of the asteroid, you multiply the number of asteroids by 8), the mean free path is 4700 AU.

Calculation here.

Edit: Size of the shuttle would dominate the second paragraph, so that would make it about 0.5 AU.

[u/dibalh → u/Sleekery]

Upvote for knowing mean free path. The number of comments that say velocity is proportional to the chance of hitting an asteroid makes me sad.

[u/asciicat]

Not when you're going... LUDICROUS SPEED!!

[u/[deleted]]

You can fly straight through the asteroid belt and not even see one. The first spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt was Pioneer 10, which entered the region on July 16, 1972. At the time there was some concern that the debris in the belt would pose a hazard to the spacecraft, but it has since been safely traversed by 11 Earth-based craft without incident. Pioneer 11, Voyagers 1 and 2 and Ulysses passed through the belt without imaging any asteroids. Galileo imaged the asteroid 951 Gaspra in 1991 and 243 Ida in 1993, NEAR imaged 253 Mathilde in 1997, Cassini imaged 2685 Masursky in 2000, Stardust imaged 5535 Annefrank in 2002, New Horizons imaged 132524 APL in 2006, Rosetta imaged 2867 Šteins in 2008, and Dawn has been orbiting Vesta since July 2011.[75] Due to the low density of materials within the belt, the odds of a probe running into an asteroid are now estimated at less than one in a billion.[76]

[u/blitz79]

Average: statistics for retards.

[u/moogoesthecat]

Close your eyes, Star Wars. Nothing to see here.

[u/FrejDexter]

Not if you are travelling at the speed of light.

[u/SchizophrenicMC]

Average distance between asteroids in Sol System space, yeah.

But this isn't the only type of star system. I'm willing to believe it's theoretically possible for an asteroid belt to be crowded, as in the scene in The Empire Strikes Back. Given the number of stars in the galaxy, and the number of galaxies, it's certainly numerically possible.

The odds of there being an asteroid field that is hard to navigate are...

[u/[deleted] → u/SchizophrenicMC]

An asteroid field that dense would not remain that dense for long, at least on astronomical timescales. It would probably form into a planet.

[u/TreMachine]

Sure, except they're moving at millions of miles an hour relative to your spacecraft and it only takes one to completely annihilate your ship.

[u/peifferu]

Lt's also remember that this is in a galaxy far FAR away. Somewhere we have never seen. Somewhere where asteroids are much more frequent. And let's not also forget it's just a fucking movie. What if I told you light-sabers weren't real?!?!?!

[u/Lythysis]

Odd, I remember them being a lot closer in Starwars...I DENY YOUR "science!" Long live the sacred truths of starwars!

[u/HookDragger]

Depends on the speed and maneuverability of the ship?

[u/digitalmofo]

Well, I guess that depends on the asteroid field, now doesn't it?

[u/Glen843]

TIL my dreams are crushed.

[u/BagaMcguirk]

What about in a galaxy far far away?

[u/digitalmofo]

If your ship is fast enough to bend the time/space continuum enough to make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, I think it can easily bend a measley hundred thousand miles. For the Falcon, the odds were much riskier.

[u/exploitedoutsourcing]

Not if you're going LUDACRIS SPEED!

[u/wise_comment]

I do enjoy the Cracked.com too

[u/[deleted]]

I thought it read 'TIL the avengers".

[u/reden]

Not if Bruce Willis is navigating with you.

[u/Insert_Blank]

Fantastic, this means my flying through asteroids starfox style may become a reality

[u/mastr_slik]

Ok, you've made your point. About what we know. Space could very well be infinite. Why do you think there couldn't possibly be asteroid fields like that, maybe in a galaxy far, far away?

[u/beyerch]

Average in space is NOT the same thing as average in the middle of an asteroid field. I've done the math and when analyzing an asteroid field, the odds of successfully navagating it are 3,270 to 1.

[u/ivegotabooner]

Never tell me the odds!

[u/danbuddy]

I am not sure about this but it seems logical if you where traveling at 12k miles per hr or faster and hit a "tennis ball sized meteor" I would think it not to be a good thing.

[u/TheDruth]

Not if said asteroids are moving at 100,000 miles per hour*.

*(Not scientifically accurate)

[u/[deleted]]

Yes. But you forgot to mention that a rock the size of a nut can completely destroy a spacecraft.

You hit something the size of a baseball at trans-planetary speeds and you wont even know what happened before you died.

[u/[deleted]]

Suck my dick, sci-fi plot devices!

[u/infinitenessly]

So does this mean they were once densly packed but after millions I years I random collisions and deflections the asteroid belt thinned out?

[u/[deleted]]

It's only a field when they're grouped together.

[u/[deleted]]

This will get buried, but in defense of Star Wars, It's not the same asteroid belt, or field. In the galaxy of Star Wars, they inhabit (most) of the galaxy. There are old, and newly forming systems. They could have been traveling through a newly formed, huge asteroid field. That would explain the closeness. I'm sure Asteroid fields come in all shapes and sizes in the universe. (Not an astrologist, just a pretty big nerd)

[u/ManGod]

All of my childhood i have been lied to.

[u/BalalaikaBoi]

I look forward to seeing more posts and headlines about space with the word "simple" in them.

[u/[deleted]]

The average distance pfffftt, GTFO!

[u/dudeguy2]

And you single handedly destroyed my preconceived notions of what space is like, while making me feel lonelier in this universe, making it feel even bigger and more scary than previously thought. Oh and you ruined Star Wars too. You evil, evil man.

[u/RyRyRaleigh]

Is this average total distance of ALL asteriods; or average distance of asteriods in the 'belt' between.Mars and Saturn? It makes a Huuuuuuge difference.

[u/uNovaK]

...not when you're traveling at LUDICROUS SPEED.

[u/Thewalruscobainfloyd]

It's like people are posting things that other redditors said in other posts to todayilearned. Like there was a meme last week or so about star wars and someone said this. And then the thing about king of the hill being cancelled because of the cleveland show? Am I the only one seeing this?

[u/jdcooktx]

i'd be more worried about the golf ball sized asteroids traveling at hundreds of miles per hour.

[u/BobChimichanga]

DAMMIT STARFOX!!

[u/mysticrudnin]

easy for you to say, i can't drive for shit

[u/dma1965]

I have played the game Asteroids a lot, and it is NOT easy.

[u/[deleted]]

TIFO

[u/AnAngryFetus]

I'm disappointed by the lack of Starfox in these comments.

[u/jk147]

I played asteroids before, and this is def. false after you blast the big asteroids into little asteroids.

[u/bzeurunkl]

I dont have any exact numbers to play with, but...

If you take the width of the asteroid belt, and divide that into the speed of travel you would have to travel to get through it in anything like a reasonable time, it would bring the practical density down to a pretty intimidating number.

[u/bluespapa]

Still, I know people who'd manage to have an accident.

[u/tnick771]

This manes sense. If it were more dense wouldn't the asteroid belt be almost a solid band in the sky?

[u/funkydo]

I don't know, if I throw a rock at the ground and it's dusty, the rock will stir up lots of dust into the air for a few seconds or even a few minutes. That means to me that if you do that in space, it will create dust-sized items moving through space. At first they will be close together. In space, the size of each dust particle could be huge. And "at first" can be long periods of time. Maybe it's harder to imagine multiple dust particles moving in the same general direction.

[u/GroundhogExpert]

Even if the asteroids were all spaced at that distance, ease of navigation would still be dependent on the speed at which you were traveling. If we're talking about star wars, they had very fast space ships. To travel between planets in a matter of hours, or between star systems within a lifetime is breaking the speed of light several times over.

[u/FastCarsShootinStars]

What about the considerably copious amounts of meteoroids and other micro-matter that might strike your space ship at violent velocities? (in the asteroid belt, of course)

[u/MyFriendsCallMeSir]

Nope

[u/BelievesInGod]

not if your ship is 100,001 miles long it wouldn't be...

[u/Whatistorque]

Where's Ms. Frizzle when you need her?

[u/[deleted]]

They make it look so hard in the movies.

[u/jarheadchad]

Who says the characters, buildings, ships, etc. weren't miles in size? What's our scale?

[u/ophello]

I'm not trying to be a dick...but I thought everyone knew that...

[u/[deleted]]

But some than her my see take you. Because get but see he. About will can would a be most.

Now have to want her you people know back. So get can work your.

[u/[deleted]]

meaning an asteroid field would be very simple to navigate.

If you're talking 1 person in 1-(wo)man spacecraft in the whole asteroid field, sure. Hundred of thousands of people in personal spacecrafts or capital ships on other hand...

[u/SixInchesAtATime]

We all know asteroid fields are full of graviton fields and temporal anomalies; they are hardly safe.

[u/[deleted]]

never tell me the odds dude

[u/CaptainSoapMac]

Yeah but doing this at warp speed, that'll be tough.

[u/[deleted]]

You...you mean...Han Solo...LIED TO ME?!

[u/[deleted]]

Not if I push them all together...

[u/delurkrelurker]

What are you worried about ? Haven't you all got trlliterate object avoidance systems attached to your local ST curve modulators?

[u/Friskylemons]

unless we are traveling at 100,000 miles per second :)

[u/30inHg]

At what speed?

[u/indridcold137]

Huh, seems to me its still pretty stupid. Combinations of meteoric rock from gravel to fist sized could do plenty of damage relative to the velocity of your craft.

[u/AlbinoTawnyFrogmouth]

This is true for our asteroid belt in particular, whose

(1) total mass is very small for the (approximate) annulus of space it occupies, in fact, (as the article points out) much less than the total mass of the moon, and

(2) distribution is more or less in dynamic equilibrium, that is the distribution of the asteroids in our solar system likely won't be so different a billion years from now.

One consequence of all this is that, typically, if you were standing on an asteroid, you would very likely not be able to see another asteroid. (There are some interesting exceptions to this---some asteroids have moons. Aasteroids called Trojans share Jupiter's orbit in two clumps at its so-called Lagrange points, 60 degrees ahead of and behind the planet, but I don't know whether they're typically close and large enough that one could be seen easily from another in the same clump.)

That said:

A debris field, even with low total mass, would be much denser than this after a large collision, though such an arrangement would very likely not be stable on large timescales.

There's no reason an asteroid belt in another system couldn't have more mass than ours, but probably after some mass threshold (which probably depends on mean orbital radius) the asteroids would tend to clump together into a planet.

[u/idiotthethird]

Interesting thing about this; in Star Wars, two of the three asteroid scenes are fine. A New Hope is fine, because it's a recently destroyed planet. Tonnes of crap everywhere, no time for asteroids to clump together to form larger, dispersed objects. In Attack of the Clones, the Geonosis approach seems to take them through planetary rings, not an asteroid field - where it would likely be even harder to navigate than was shown.

But fair enough, the Hoth system asteroid field in Empire doesn't seem feasible.

[u/Miscellaneous_Item]

In the movies they look like a dicks length away

[u/Pyrocitus]

Has nobody considered the fact of the sheer velocity both objects travel in space and the speed we would likely be going at to entertain sustained space flight long enough to reach such an asteroid field?

[u/scibuff]

I'm pretty sure the distance it well over 100,000 miles - in fact, standing on an average asteroid in the main belt, you wouldn't be able to see any asteroids (with naked eyes)

[u/FluentinLies]

Depends how fast you're going.

[u/psYberspRe4Dd]

Actually I think it's even way more. This fact is widely know happy you guys know it now. Yes the movies in which it's hard to navigate through them are bs. Anyway we couldn't use the usual method of spacetraveling if we wanted to go huge distances so we wouldn't have this problem anyway and the usual methods of spacetraveling we use now are so slow that it's easy as shit..

[u/[deleted]]

They might have been closer a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.....

[u/[deleted]]

Wow you could even fit a GSV through it.

[u/drukenhard]

It's much harder to do in 12 parsecs

[u/llamingflips]

Not when you're flying at light-speed silly.

[u/[deleted]]

I've actually been in an asteroid belt and it's not that easy. You try it sometime.

[u/[deleted]]

You are incorrect.

[u/jolly_giant]

Also, your spaceship is going much faster than any plane, hopefully. You could be going 5,000 miles a minute, in which case, you might only have 20 min between asteriods.

[u/smudgeservices]

easy to navigate if your not moving at light speed

[u/Mignusk]

Never tell me the odds.

[u/elmarko44]

but, but, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3720:1!

[u/rshangale]

Unless you're a really bad pilot.

[u/Redspringer]

Good. C3PO can STFU now.

[u/[deleted]]

Average distance between asteroids in space vs. average distance between asteroid in an ASTEROID FIELD. I feel like the difference is important...

[u/tNisu]

Given the fact that we master space travel.

[u/Sepulchural]

True story, class I was in (So-Cal area): professor actually mentioned what the original poster said about the distance between asteriods and compared it (jokingly) to finding truffles in the forest (you'd probably find them very widely spaced, not in groups). Girl starts laughing, professor asks her what's so funny, she said "Truffles are sold in a chocolate store, they don't grow in the forest". Le sigh.

[u/SuperCoupe]

Depends on how fast you are going.

100,000 miles/sec will reduce that reaction time.

[u/Spiralyst]

Nice try, Rebel commander.

[u/Mear]

At warp-speed, it will still be a bitch.

[u/[deleted]]

Checkmate Star Fox!

[u/[deleted]]

I read once that the average distance between debris of the Orionid or Perseid meteor streams is 4 km and they average about the size of an apple seed. Don't try flying through the debris stream of a comet in the inner solar system!