Spoilers When Pluto “Met” the Borg...
- Thread starter Arpy
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Before Dishonor, IIRC.
Probably. That's how Pluto was discovered in the first place. Neptune wasn't orbiting the way it was expected to, but as if there was another object out beyond it that was nudging it slightly. Telescopes were pointed where such an object was predicted to be, and there was Pluto. They're looking for another outer planet, much heavier than Pluto, in a similar fashion now, but it hasn't turned up yet. Being able to predict only it's mass and location, it could be too dark and cold to see, or too small, if it's somehow super-dense, or the observations that predicted its existence could be inaccurate somehow.
I'd be more worried about what happened after it exploded (the Supercube exploded, right? Wasn't sucked into an alternate dimension or something? It's been a while), with all of Pluto's mass and more besides now floating around near Earth's orbit. That could do some damage just from disrupting the orbits of the inner planets, never mind the collision hazards.
Yes.
In any significant way that would matter within the next few million years? No.
It would have the most effect on Neptune -- there's a resonance between Neptune and Pluto -- but, again, it might take millions of years to create any meaningful change.
Pluto is just one of millions of Kuiper belt objects -- the largest one known, but still pretty small in the grand scheme of things. Pluto's mass is about a fifth of the Kuiper belt's total mass, but the belt's mass is only about 1% of Earth's mass. And it's pretty distant. So any gravitational effects would be minimal.
That would've been better.
If I recall (it's also been a while) the Supercube had been eating up a lot of its own previously acquired mass to repurpose as power to fight Seven's planetkiller, so by the time it swallowed the planetkiller, tied itself into knots trying to replicate Geordi's impossible endgame virus and then exploded, it was already significantly smaller than it would have been at its height. I have conjectured that...
...Vaughn's USS James T Kirk was involved in the clean-up operation, what with an Akira-class's many auxiliary vessels. So there would have been no extra mass in the orbital plane, at least not after the few days it took Starfleet to clear it up.
The Sol system probably has tons of collision hazards in its vicinity, what with all the free-floating junk in the area, and deals with them on a daily basis, giving things nudges or destructions as need be. There's probably an organization dedicated to keeping the area nice and tidy while maintaining asteroidal objects in their most natural state.
On the other hand, space is mostly empty. Contrary to cinematic depictions, you could hang out in the Main Asteroid Belt for a year or more before getting hit by even a tiny pebble, and a century or two before getting hit by anything substantial.
We're already searching out and tracking every bit of space debris we can find, to make sure nothing's on course to hit the Earth. By 2-3 centuries from now, we should have a comprehensive catalog of every significant object out there and have it all routinely tracked. And anything too tiny to notice would be easily dealt with by a ship's navigational deflector or shields.
The place where you'd have to worry about collision hazards is Earth orbit, or the orbital space of other settled bodies like Luna and Mars -- anywhere with heavy ship and satellite traffic concentrated in a comparatively small volume. Those are the areas you'd need to keep clean of debris (although the hazard wouldn't be nearly as exaggerated as it was in the movie Gravity).
As for keeping asteroids "natural," why bother? There are millions of them, most of them are probably lifeless, and they're by far the best source for mineral resources as well as water ice and organic compounds for space habitats. It's far easier to mine such things from asteroids, where they're right up close to the surface and subject to minimal gravity, than from the interior of a planet, and the abundance is enormously greater than what you could extract from a planet while leaving it habitable. Any truly prosperous, post-scarcity spacegoing civilization is going to mine the hell out of asteroids.
Yeah, but there has to be some sort of limit when mining goes too far. Mining 5261 Eureka to destruction might be fine, but mining 1 Ceres might be too much. Or if it's acceptable, what's to stop you from destroying Pluto or Mercury or the Moon?
With a Federation Earth, there's no limit on uninhabited solar systems they can exploit (if need be), and the Earth is still fresh and new enough as to have some affectation to preserving their system in its current state. And they exploit all the major planets and likely larger asteroids and dwarf planets with inhabitations of various degrees, if only in orbit.
With a Federation Earth, there's no limit on uninhabited solar systems they can exploit (if need be), and the Earth is still fresh and new enough as to have some affectation to preserving their system in its current state. And they exploit all the major planets and likely larger asteroids and dwarf planets with inhabitations of various degrees, if only in orbit.
The moon actively engages with Earth. Pluto does not, nor does Mercury. The rest of the planetary system can be gone save for Earth and the Moon and little will change overall as it's the sun that gets the lion's share, that binds everything else together. Hell you can replace Earth with a black hole of the same mass and nothing much else would change either.
Asteroids are floating rocks that are a danger if we don't shepherd or move them, and a UE might undertake such projects just for employment alone in the realms of science, economics, and engineering, moving all the roids about to stable orbits for millions of years to come, full analyzation of their contents and prospecting, that sort of thing.
There's nothing more to it than that. These are rocks that are ours to command, not anything else.
I guess I’m wondering how much planetary orbits would be affected in the system. Would temperatures change?
Though, by the replies above, I guess it wouldn’t matter for a while. We’d all ascend like Zalkonians by the time it did. Or be able to move another Pluto in its place like the T’kon were able to with stars. More immediate concerns would be cleaning up the debris from the Borg ship.
In-universe, was anyone living on Pluto at the time? Or one of its moons?
Though, by the replies above, I guess it wouldn’t matter for a while. We’d all ascend like Zalkonians by the time it did. Or be able to move another Pluto in its place like the T’kon were able to with stars. More immediate concerns would be cleaning up the debris from the Borg ship.
In-universe, was anyone living on Pluto at the time? Or one of its moons?
Mining Ceres would be great. It's the best source of water and organics for space colonization in the Inner System. Even for habitats in Earth orbit, it'd take less energy to ship water and carbon in from Ceres than it would to drag it up out of Earth's gravity well. And there's little need to worry about it running out anytime soon. The ice mantle of Ceres is estimated to hold more fresh water than the entire Earth.
In my original fiction, the Troubleshooter universe, Ceres is the wealthiest, most influential community in the Main Belt because of its central importance to space colonization. It's the key to opening the Solar System to human habitation.
As for other asteroids, what's the harm? There are millions of them, and it would take millennia to exhaust their mineral wealth. Heck, many of them are just loose clumps of rubble anyway. They're not some precious ecosystem. They're a quarry.
Honestly, I find a future where humanity dismantles the lifeless planetary and subplanetary bodies of Sol System and converts them into megastructures with a surface area equal to thousands of Earthlike planets to be preferable to a Star Trek-style future where humanity colonizes thousands of Earthlike planets to the detriment of their native ecologies and evolutionary futures. Indeed, realistically, FTL travel will probably never happen, so colonizing our own system is likely to be our best bet for future expansion.
As I said, Pluto's mass is inconsequential on the scale of the system and its distance is too great to make a difference. It's not like the system was static to begin with; planets are constantly having their orbits perturbed by other planets or by passing stars.
The general absence of space infrastructure -- asteroid and moon mining, comet harvesting, O'Neill habitats, asteroid colonization, etc. -- in the Star Trek universe is something I've sometimes pondered. Some of the novels (particularly the Reeves-Stevens' work, and also Spock's World) have some of that, and Enterprise's Travis Mayweather came from a space habitat culture (which I thought made him potentially the most interesting character on the show, but then I don't recall the series doing a damn thing with it). I can kind of justify its absence in-universe -- if you have access to cheap and easy FTL, where getting out of a planet's gravity well is the hard part, which Star Trek has, if one guy can, on his own, convert an old nuclear missile into an FTL vessel, then you have easy access to potentially infinite numbers of Earth-like worlds where you can live and harvest resources. That wouldn't entirely preclude the development of a Belter culture -- there are always people who would like the challenge of living close to the edge -- but it probably wouldn't be a big part of your civilization, so long as your civilization has access to cheap and easy FTL.
Again, it's vastly easier to mine from asteroids than from a habitable planet. You could strip the entire crust of the Earth down to the mantle and still extract only a fraction of the mineral wealth you could get from the Main Asteroid Belt. Plus those minerals are much, much harder to get to when they're buried deep inside a planet rather than just floating around in loose piles of rubble, and they take much more energy to haul out of a planet's gravity well (though that's less of an issue in a universe with antigravs and transporters). Really, the idea that anyone would prefer mining a planet to mining an asteroid belt is utter nonsense. There are no advantages. Okay, sure, it's a livable environment, but if you can build the ships to travel to another star system, then you have the means to build space stations in its asteroid and cometary belts. And if you want a planet's environment to stay livable, that greatly constrains how aggressively you can mine it, so that's really more a drawback for a mining operation than a benefit.
Also, the idea that naturally occurring alien ecosystems would be habitable for humans is problematical in ways Trek tends to ignore. If a planet's biosphere is based on the same biochemistry, amino acids, and DNA as Earthly life (due to panspermia or alien seeding or whatever), then colonists would be susceptible to its diseases -- in short, if we can eat the life there, then the life there can eat us. Alternatively, if the biochemistry is incompatible with ours, then the food couldn't sustain us and might poison us. And if you can tackle those practical problems, then you run into the ethical problems that come with colonizing an alien biosphere and exploiting or destroying its native species to make it more livable for humans.
Really, the only safe and ethical means for human settlement of space is either to terraform lifeless worlds to Earthlike conditions or to build artificial habitats. And as I said, you can use a system's asteroidal matter to create megastructures with thousands of times as much habitable surface area than you could ever get from whatever naturally occurring habitable planets it might have.
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