The Asteroid Belt

This is piece is not intended as either fiction or well researched fact. Instead, it is just musings and ramblings. I’m trying to maintain the habit of writing regularly.

I’ve just finished re-reading Iain M Banks’ “Surface Detail”. One of the locations he uses in the story is the “Tsungarial Disk”, a group of several million dormant space factories orbiting around a gas giant planet.  It got me thinking about the locations for simple low-tech science fiction: the asteroid belt, the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter all make potentially interesting locations.

I’m going to concentrate on the Asteroid Belt for this piece.

The asteroid belt has lots of characteristics which make it a really good location for drama.

First of all, “asteroid mining” gives any protagonists a reason to be there. There is plenty written about it on the internet. That means that there are plenty of facts which I can use if I choose.

The asteroid belt is a long way away. According to Wikipedia the main belt is between 2.2 and 3.2 Astronomical Units (= orbit of Earth) from the Sun. It is a very dispersed body of things. (Assuming closest possible approach) That would mean that messages would take a minimum of 9 or 10 minutes to reach the Earth. That would make conversation impossible. Instead you would have to send messages and wait for replies.

The asteroid belt is (apparently) very dispersed. I had imagined it to be like a shoal of rocks. I was wrong. Most of the time you can drift through it without any real risk of bumping into anything. Collisions do happen, but they are rare.

One of the issues to think about would be what source of energy to use. The light of the sun would be very diffuse from that distance. Harvesting solar energy would be possible but it might not be practical. That would seem to indicate that I’d have to consider nuclear power of some sort, and/or using something found on the asteroids themselves for a source of energy.

There we are: ration written!

 (28th December 2016 – 315 words)