Blind Spots
Blind Spots
I suppose you've heard by now that we had a large asteroid pass by fairly close to us (about 1.5x the distance between us and the Moon) with no warning. It wasn't even spotted until four days after it passed us. Press coverage was the usual silliness.
What interests me about this is the whole idea of an astronomical blind-spot. One of the problems a science fiction writer faces these days is that most readers understand that it'd be very hard for anything large to approach Earth from outside the solar system without us seeing it days, weeks or months ahead of time. One has to either have amazing accelleration capabilities, some kind of warp or hyperspace capability that can operate close to a massive object, a cloaking capability, blah blah blah.
It's all been done, and it's not a trouble to just repeat an old formula, but what if you want to write something that doesn't depend on any of those things?
Well, this asteroid pass provides another tool for the sci-fi writer's toolbox. It may even have been employed in the past, but I don't recall reading it anywhere. A large object, entering our system on the far side of the sun, and approaching the Earth from the direction of the sun, should be able to get right up to us without being seen. This is what the asteroid did.
This is nothing to build a story around, but it's a nice scientifically real trick to throw in during the course of an interplanetary war, for instance.
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I suppose you've heard by now that we had a large asteroid pass by fairly close to us (about 1.5x the distance between us and the Moon) with no warning. It wasn't even spotted until four days after it passed us. Press coverage was the usual silliness.
What interests me about this is the whole idea of an astronomical blind-spot. One of the problems a science fiction writer faces these days is that most readers understand that it'd be very hard for anything large to approach Earth from outside the solar system without us seeing it days, weeks or months ahead of time. One has to either have amazing accelleration capabilities, some kind of warp or hyperspace capability that can operate close to a massive object, a cloaking capability, blah blah blah.
It's all been done, and it's not a trouble to just repeat an old formula, but what if you want to write something that doesn't depend on any of those things?
Well, this asteroid pass provides another tool for the sci-fi writer's toolbox. It may even have been employed in the past, but I don't recall reading it anywhere. A large object, entering our system on the far side of the sun, and approaching the Earth from the direction of the sun, should be able to get right up to us without being seen. This is what the asteroid did.
This is nothing to build a story around, but it's a nice scientifically real trick to throw in during the course of an interplanetary war, for instance.
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