In season 5 of the Expanse tragedy strikes the Earth in the form of an asteroid. How accurate does the expanse get asteroid strikes, and is there anything we can learn from this grim but hopeful future? #season5 #expanse # asteroid
@@RyanRidden Oh for sure! And also just 'cause I didn't mention this in my comment, your video is very high quality and well edited. Keep up the great work!
@@RyanRidden it was a shame the show didn't last. At least there was a movie to tie up loose ends. Oh, and do you happen to watch any of the videos by Isaac Arthur?
We see one asteroid break up as it nears the sun, so I think Marco sent the stealth asteroids on a trajectory around the sun so they would approach from it's direction, making them even harder to spot. We often discover near-Earth asteroids after they've passed close to us as they were approaching from the direction of the sun. I love the Expanse and asteroids!
thats an old fighter pilot trick, from as far back as WW1. When the sun is behind you, the target is blinded when looking in your direction, giving you a chance to get close.
@@quiett6191 The technique was used long before that. Persians used to shoot thousands of arrows at once in a trajectory, where their flight path blocked the view of the Sun. Making them very hard to detect by spartan technology of that era.
30,000 KPH is much closer to what I'd expect in MPH. I wonder if they read something somewhere then missed, or forgot to convert, the units? If I did my math right 30,000 MPH is a little over 13.4 km/s which is on the low end of possible impact velocities.
I remember reading somewhere that during calculations they used imperial, this is mainly seen when they deal with distances and how quickly they seem to get places
Or MAYBE, and I’m just spitballing here... Avasarala and the Admiral know that if it’s happening, it’s man-made, so perhaps the speeds aren’t supposed to be representation natural speeds. Because, you know, THEY’RE NOT.
@@jakethet3206 if those speeds were made up then the physicist would be damn confused because certain things cause certain reactions. You could fake them but there would be little to no reason to do so when you are actively trying to get help on what the hell is going on out there
Im rewatching for the third time, im at the end of season 2 ATM. I pick up new details every time I watch and while im not a scientist the factual accuracy makes me super happy
It is specifically mentioned in the show by Ashford that Marco selected solid iron asteroids for his attack. One problem in trying to assess the impact damage is there really were no scenes where some familiar object was shown alongside one of the asteroids to allow us to estimate its size. We maybe saw a ship near one, but didn't know the size of the ship. It's pretty clear that they weren't gigantic, but my best guesstimate would be anywhere from 250 yards in average diameter to maybe 1000 yards. The books depict the immediate damage from the attack as having been far more extensive and severe than what we've been shown so far on the TV series, primarily, IIRC, the fires caused by molten ejecta from the impact craters. I've been trying to figure out exactly how it happened that so many of the attack asteroids missed Terra entirely. We can launch probes that travel for years and arrive exactly where intended. Maybe Marco and his scientists never had a precise measure of the mass of these irregularly shaped objects, or, possibly, they lacked any attitude jets to make in course adjustments for any inaccuracies in the initial calculations. Or maybe the vector of the ships that launched them on their journey to a desired collision point were off a teeny-tiny fraction. Overall, the smaller scale of the immediate damages caused by Marco's attack may have been dictated by cgi budget considerations. Less damage meant the show could just film at a lot of normal, undamaged locales. Did any of you find it upsetting that the Philadelphia impact levelled the portion of the concrete and steel supermax prison that had stood above ground, but did no discernible damage to the surrounding forests?
It's not a huge point, and not worth debating at length. The show has just been so incredibly logically consistent for 4.5 seasons that a breach in logic stands out like a large zit on the tip of a supermodel's nose. I'd agree that the land beside the prison was depicted as devastated, but the show also told us that, IIRC, the supermax prison extended seven stories above ground, and was built with concrete and steel. Yet we see Amos and Melissa hiking through undisturbed pine forests within one day's walk from the prison. That area should have looked like the forests that took the brunt of the Mt. St. Helens eruption the day after the explosion. Maybe they should have inserted a scene where Amos and Melissa were discovered by a helicopter looking for survivors and evacuated by air to a location outside the devastated zone. Maybe they filmed one , then cut it from the final edit.
Great points! Like you say, boosting irregular asteroids into intersection orbits would be a challenge for anyone. It's made even harder when you consider that outgassing from the Sun heating up the asteroid would change the orbit along the way. As well as flattened tree you might also expect to have some pretty sever forest fires break out. Finding and filming in a burnt snowy forest would probably be too hard logistically, so I've got no problem with it.
In the book's the Earth Fleet is pinned down for quite a while at Earth against further asteroids coming in. I get the impression in the show that there are additional asteroids on the way. I also saw a flat in forest and presume that the forest that we see later in the show are quite far away from the impact site. And the show The Asteroids appeared to be fairly small. I believe in one seeing you can distinguish human beings covering them the stealth material. My impression was they were under 100 m in size.
I'm no astrophysicist, but your 250yrd guesstimate even seems too big considering the ATLAS telescope system classed impactors in the 100m+ size range to be of the "country killer" variety and how the UNN was still very much active after multiple attacks. However, in feet it seems more reasonable considering the damage we see in the show, at least up to about ~250ft much beyond that and you're already in the country killer weight class.
Did you notice that he was watching the kinetic fireball "plume" or mushroom cloud as it rose, before the shockwave reached out to the fisherman? I Don't want to go out on a limb and state that a meteor impact of that size and speed would create an impact fireball exactly like a nuclear explosion, I will state that it would get hot enough to be half as close...maybe
@@dragonsword7370 Intense heat is exactly how this kinetic energy would be released, and the temperatures would not differ by any significant way. Hot enough to vaporize is sufficient whether it's 2400 C or 5000 or whatever.
I think the fish jumping was just a coincidence, the show wasn't trying to connect the fish jumping to the asteroid impacts, it just conveniently placed that man in a place where he could be the first casualty
Funny, I took the fish jumping to be them reacting to the shock wave. Does sound not travel faster in the water? Then again, I believe it's even faster through the ground.
@@MikeAben the asteroid was moving so fast that it passed through the entire atmosphere in less than a second. There's no shockwave to feel when the rock is still in vacuum
@@dapeach06 I'm thinking the shock wave from the impact. I could easily be remembering the scene wrong but if the fish were jumping before the fireball was seen, then I'll just shut up now. Edited to add: Yup, just watched the scene. I remembered it wrong.
Check out the, now very old, scifi novel: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Heinlein. I expect that the writers borrowed a great deal from it to make the Expanse so believable.
I have read every book Heinlein ever wrote. Big Heinlein fan. Reading the Expanse is, for me, like reading Heinlein fan-fiction. I read the books to one of my spouses, and we have this game. We make a fuss and point out every time the authors make a direct, or partial, recreation of a line from a Heinlein novel or short story. We know these lines like some people can quote Monty Python. We find an average of three to four direct references per chapter. Could be a phrase, could be a word only Heinlein ever used (or invented!), could be an entire sentence. The Expanse is basically a love-letter to Robert A. Heinlein, and that is wonderful!
Check out, as well, 'Heavy Time' and 'Hellburner' (omnibus 'Devil to the Belt') by C J Cherryh. Written well before The Expanse, it also tackles 'the belt', belters, Earth, Mars, and all the tensions and political rivalries that happen as humanity expands outward.
@@Kazemahou Totally agree. I squeaked aloud when they did a flip-and-burn (skew flip) and again when they touched helmets to speak without radio. "Have Space-Suit Will Travel," "Starship Troopers," and "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" all over the place. "Belters," though...that's Larry Niven.
@@rj2552 There's that part in season one where she is lying on the roof with her grandson talking about shooting stars and dinosaurs. she says "no one can throw rocks that big", forewhadowing or what!?!?!
A note on destroying asteroids is if the debris even in as dust still hits the earth they're still quite the threat; All that kinetic energy will will dissipate in the air via friction heating it to hundreds of degree Celsius. Its okay with small ones as the heat will be circulated high up and dissipate, though the largest would turn the earths atmosphere into an oven till the sea absorbs enough heat and it radiates into space. Sometimes it may be better to let it hit intact.
One thing that they don't seem to be playing up that much in the show is that in the books they accelerated the rocks for quite a while before letting them go and head toward Earth, so they were almost certainly going much much faster than 17 km per second, so all of the estimates by those people on the show are extremely low
I really need to read the books, it sounds like they go into a lot more detail! Since kinetic energy depends on velocity squared, underestimating the velocity can really lead to a massive underestimate in impact energy. So not something you want to get wrong!
I think that might have actually helped the story out in a way. Not a lot of people in the UN really knew there were rocks on the way, and anyone that suspected it probably had very little data to work with; Chrissie included. It might have unintentionally made the rocks even more devastating than expected. And in the chaos and confusion of the aftermath, it's probably gonna be a while before we see the real parameters, damage reports, and death tolls in the show.
@@abbofun9022 well first they would have to deorbit the asteroids so they would head sunward towards Earth. But then, in order to create the level of devastation in the books, they would have to be massively accelerated, well beyond 17kms. Or they may not have been natural asteroids in the books at all. Amos speculates that they could have been large blocks of tungsten, super accelerated
@@RyanRidden In the books, the asteroids are a lot more devastating, because they moved so fast. They ramped that down, a bit, for the show. That's a pattern with the TV series. In the books, a million people, mostly Belters, lived on Eros. in the TV series, they dropped that number to 100,000. I'm not sure why they did that. Maybe to make the scale of the tragedies more comprehensible? Of course, they may have just decided to revamp things, a bit, based on a better scientific understanding of things. I do know the notion of spinning up asteroids and putting habitats on the inside of them was kind of a thing in popular science, 10-15 years ago, when they started writing the books. You can't really blame a writer for using the popular science of the day, even if it turns out (as it did) that the idea wouldn't work. (Asteroids don't have the structural integrity to survive being spun up fast enough to produce useful gravity, for people walking around inside them. They would just fly apart. Better to dig wide shafts into them, and then build O'Neill cynlinder habitats inside those. That way, the bulk of the asteroid shields the habitats, and the resources are readily available to the residents.)
I thought asteroids that enter the atmosphere are by definition a meteor? So linguistically speaking its impossible to hit the Earth with an asteroid... meteors on the other hand... :)
You're certainly right! After getting annoyed at the kind of pointless language barrier with meteor, meteoroid and meteorite, I defaulted to calling them all asteroids!
Actually, An asteroid are large, very large rocks in space. ... (Meteoroids) are small rocks in space. ... Once a meteor(oid) enters the Earth's atmosphere, it then becomes a (meteor) .... An (asteroid) enters the Earth's atmosphere still a very very large Rock and maintains the title of asteroid.
When discussing asteroid energy, the guy in the show said "impact velocity." could he have been talking about velocity at ground level after having been slowed by the atmosphere?
They would hardly be slowed down that much by our atmosphere. Depending on the angle of descent, an asteroid might take 10 seconds to impact after the first contact with the atmosphere about 150/200 km up. And the atmosphere is really dense only in the last 20 km or so, which it would traverse in less than 2 seconds.
@@Lucas12v Remember, the guy they're talking to thinks this is some confusingly pointless hypothetical question and he has had literally no time to prepare or think about it. I wouldn't expect precise or accurate numbers in that situation.
Yes. The Expanse is a fantastic show. The fish jumping could have been coincidental or they were sensing the unusual disturbance as the meteor hits the atmosphere. Certainly nothing psychic. Not only did the clouds evaporate but the mans face began burn.
Certain or all types of fish probably sense a disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field kind of like birds do so this could be scientifically accurate.
Ryan is there any chance that the fish could sense the metallic asteroid moving through the earth's magnetic field? I enjoyed your video by the way and subscribed for your take on the expanse.
Great question and thanks for subscribing! Quite a few fish species can detect the Earth's magnetic field so its something worth considering. In general it looks like metallic asteroids don't have a very strong or ordered magnetic field. Any magnetism would likely be the result iron atoms aligning from smaller asteroid impacts over time, just like how you can make an iron bar magnetic by hitting it hard enough. Even if an asteroid doesn't have much of a magnetic field, simply moving a large chunk of iron through a magnetic field will cause some changes, but they would be really small changes. Based on the magnitudes of these fields, I think it would be very unlikely that the magnetic field change would be detectable to fish. Another point to consider is the speed at which the asteroid is moving. At say an average velocity of 17 km/s it would pass through the bulk of our atmosphere (troposphere) in less than a second, so not much time for anything to react at all. As far as scientific inaccuracies go, this is really insignificant. The fish served a fantastic tool to crank up anticipation for the impact! If there are any other points in the Expanse that you would like to see an astrophysicists take on, let me know!
In his remark about the speed being too slow, I think he is comparing Marco's asteroids to objects coming from the outer solar system, not the asteroid belt. If you took a Kuiper belt object with an orbital velocity of about 4.2 km/sec and deflected its orbit to be eccentric without affecting its velocity, so it was headed toward the inner solar system, its maximum speed would be about roughly 38 km/sec at its closest distance from the sun depending on how close it actually gets without hitting it. That's because it's constantly picking up speed as it falls toward the inner solar system. As it crosses Earth's orbit it's not nearly going that fast. Assuming that Marco is getting his asteroids from the asteroid belt (and he doesn't have unlimited power to change their velocity), wouldn't these asteroids be traveling slower than objects coming from the outer solar system since they don't have as much time to pick up speed? Remember, you don't have to accelerate these rocks very much, just enough to change their vector. Gravity and orbital mechanics will do the rest.
Is the typical 17km/s on impact with atmosphere or with the ground? If it's with atmosphere, then the 8 km/s number makes sense for impact with the ground, especially considering the scientist is approximating the destructive potential of the impact. There's little destructive impact from just hitting the atmosphere, and only the velocity on final impact matters for how much destruction it would really cause.
One small detail I noticed, they say that the asteroids are "nickel-iron slag rocks". I figure the "slag" part means the asteroids are artificial and a byproduct of some industrial process, making them virtually a dense iron-nickel chunk ?
There did seem to something off with the impact size based on the info we were presented. Since the kinetic energy of impact depends on the square of the velocity, it could be possible to make big impacts if those asteroids were going very fast. It might also be interesting to do a back calculation to work out the impact velocity based off the impact and asteroid sizes we see in the show.
@@RyanRidden we did see that a ship was burning at high g before releasing the rock, but the show seems to be playing up the gravity assist trajectories more than engine-assisted acceleration, which is a change from the books.
During such an attack you would want high speed with a near to vertical atmospheric entry as possible to minimise atmospheric abrasion. 150,000kph plus to reduce the effect of climbing out of the Sun's gravity, faster equalling more kenetic energy. The stealth tech would not matter by then, having been burned off. The blast size would come from seismographs and satellite recordings. Result would be a fairly quick accurate estimation of yield in the multi-megaton range.
Well the scientist didn't really have all the facts. In the books it's said pretty clearly that Inaros had them accelerates to high speed even by epstein drive standards.
I read the book series years ago and the stealth asteroid attack still haunts my dreams. At least 2 billions of people killed in the initial blasts and billions more from disease, starvation and human predation afterward. The horror is almost beyond what one can contemplate.
Thanks for pointing out that the sun should be shown as white. Nearly every film and show gets this wrong. I had hoped the Expanse would do better though :)
One brilliant hard science moment was the shattering of the asteroid passing nesr the sun. Considering the black apearance of the stealth tech, and fact that the reflection of electromagnetic radiation is generally highly undersirable for hiding something, the asteroid may have been heating an an unsustainable rate. It may have shattered due to extremely rapid surface heating, with the surface simply expanding so much faster than the rate of heat conduction to the center that it essentially catastrophically failed. Weak areas from previous collisions could provide fault lines for cracks to rapidly propagate once a certain point, leading to a shattering effect. If the iron-nickel has silicate contaminants, you will get differential rates of expansion in the two materials, leading to the same effect. You can combine these with water, ammonia, or other ices turning gaseous as suggested by the video. The velocity he is using for the asteroids is way too low for an attack. If you are deliberately slingshotting asteroids around the sun, there is no reason to not maximize the delta-v of the asteroid. You might only accelerate it to the upper range of natural objects, but you could also argue that going faster may make them harder to detect since they aren't looking for them coming in at that velocity. Since they were going to take credit for the sttack, and there were too many asteroids for this to not be deliberate, after the first two or three there is no reason not to have the last five asteroids coming in all together, with some at the highest practical velocity. How high? In the next 60 days, the JPL site for Near Earth bjectz shows oe object that would have an impact velocity of 34 kps and a size of between .77 and 1.7 km - object231937 (2001 FO32). Since it's e=mv(squared), at four times the assumed velocity from the episode - from 8 to 32 kps gives you four times the velocity, or 16 times the energy,yielding 16-64 megatons. The upper edge of that is Tsar-Bomba sized, the highest yield thermonuclear device ever detonated. At these yields you start to see damage at the level they are showing in the special effects, with some decent sized tsunamis. You will also get a fair degree of fallout. The largest fragment of Schumaker-Levy hit Jupiter with an estimated 6,000 megaton impact, but that was in the kilometers size and I remember around 60 kps. cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ Gravity assist has been used to change satellite velocities by up to around 30 kps I believe, so this is well within our ability to create even now. It maybe a little more difficult since the asteroid will not be able to use a the Oberth effect, i.e. accelerating at it's closest approach to the Sun. What we really need is the mass of the ship plus asteroid, and the length of burn and thrust produced by the engines being used. That energy can be redirected into another relative velocity at impact. Think of the difference between a car at 40mph rear-ending another car going 30 mph. Now think of the same collision, head-on. Slingshotting around the sun let's you cheat and change the direction of the asteroid for no energy cost too the asteroid. Timing is all important here, so you probably will only have one optimized asteroid collision, with the others having less ideal solutions if you are trying to deliver them together. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist. Or, Moe simply - asteroid impact very bad...
I’ve enjoyed the expanse. It look well researched and realistic in a way many sci fi shows don’t. The fish were escaping from a predator. It’s common to see shoals of fish leaping out of the water if there is something under there trying to eat them.
Mackerel would sense low frequencies emitted by compression of the atmosphere :) Although they do naturally run in schools and get chased by bigger fish.
One minor quibble: meteoroids do not burn up mainly due to "friction" but due to heating caused by the intense compression of the air out ahead of the incoming object as it slams into the atmosphere at high speed. The compression induces extreme heating of that atmospheric gas, and that is what does most of the job of burning up smaller meteoroids before they reach the ground.
I'm not even certain the fish were real. The guy was playing an augmented reality fishing game with virtual fishing gear. The fish might be just as virtual as the fishing gear. Remember, Earth's biosphere is kinda screwed at this point and they're trying to repair it, so fish stocks may not exactly be plentiful.
I binge watched all 5 seasons of The Expanse in March. It's going to feel weird to be on a weekly schedule and not be able to watch two or more episodes a night.
There is something that is quite innacurate scientifically in the Expanse show: the HOLOGRAMS. Just like in other movies and series, Expanse holograms are able to be projected... in clean air, around the characters.
Great ending! Just to clear a few things up, the rocks are 30m diameter. And we have witnessed the damage and the MILLIONS killed by the initial disaster of three rocks. But from reading certain pieces of info from the book, I understand several BILLION are yet to die. How many rocks drop in the book then?
Just watched a rather bad scifi called "The Beyond" I did like the aliens cloudy defence system to protect the earth from a planetary disaster with air pollution, worked better that the usual garb
Since this video came out we've had the DART mission which actually changed the orbital period of an asteroid orbiting another asteroid. So in future it might not actually take much to save Earth. Just a nudge.
I disagree with some of the main premises of the show. Mining wouldn't be the only thing they do in the belt. They would build the foundries and manufacturing facilities out there because zero G means material handling is far easier. Finished products made in the belt would make them incredibly rich even if the mining companies themselves took all the mining profits. Companies could buy the raw materials that were mined without the transportation costs, make parts and assemble finished products. There is also a lot of water ice out in the asteroids. The majority of the asteroids are icy. They would literally have an unlimited supplies of water, hydrogen and oxygen.
When an asteroid (or any other physical body for that matter) enters earth athomosphere it IS NOT friction that generates the heat, as you said in the video. The heat is being generated by compression of the air in front of object thats entering the athmosphere. Sorry for my wonky english, I'm not a native speaker. I just thought being a physcist you should probably know that.
@@RyanRidden no, there is no friction between gas particles at all, it is not even defined. Friction is defined in a macroscopic sense, but it does not play a role here. (edit: you probably call the molecular "bouncing action" friction so you are right, but that is just really confusing, you should be more pedantic) Compression generates heat because of simple physics: if you compress gas, you push it with a force and the volume becomes smaller. But if displacement times force is energy. You put work into the gas, which means you give it energy. But it is confined, so the the energy heats it up. Microscopically you can imagine gas made up from perfectly elastic balls bouncing around (only noble gases are balls, but close enough). If you push the wall of the container inside, every ball bounces off faster from the wall than if came to the wall. Basically it is like you are hitting back the balls. But the balls are perfectly elastic, so they keep accelerating as you push back the wall. Temperature is kinetic energy = how fast the balls are going, so if you push the walls inside to lower the volume, you are heating the system up. Air friction is _not_ defined in this view at all. If you want to define it you need to average out the velocities of the very fast air molecules, so you get wind. You can understand air friction (drag, viscosity) as changing the average velocity of many air molecules (like wind), giving kinetic energy to the air molecules in an ordered macroscopic way. (This is only possible if your speed is much lower than the speed of the air molecules, so you can ignore the microscopic behavior.)
Sorry to correct you, but the asteroids also interact with magnetic field. Some fish orient themslves with magnetic field, thus large scale disturbances caused by a magnetic metal asteroid in magnetic field can tip them off of imminnent danger. Then there is also atmospheric pressure, some schools of fish are actually pretty sensitive to that kind of stuff.
Agree. That show did good on name recognition alone, even though the name is the only thing it had in common with the original show. Sure, it was entertaining but not as good as the expanse. Of course, expanse is NOT a family-friendly show by any means! Lost in space only good for older kids, say 10+. It was a bit scary for my 7 year old son, particularly the robot fight scenes.
@@Gibson99 what I loved about expanse is that it treaded towards some form of reality without being downright far fetched. Like the political conflict is something that might happen in a star colonized system, to how combat would be in space and how space travel would generally be depicted all the while keeping the physics in check.
@@AAlfredjoseph totally agree. The only "out there" element is the rings and the protomolecule. Well, and Epstein drive... But as Arthur c. Clarke put it, any sufficient advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. 👍
Death toll is incredibly low in the show; in the books, its correctly stated at billions, even if the rocks aren't that large, mainly due to it causing the finely tuned mechanisms of water, power, and food delivery/treatment to essentially collapse across huge chunks of the planet, to the point that if my memory is correct, by the time of the Laconian stuff like 30 years later, the death toll was something like 4-6 billion, which would fit with a massively populated planets ability to feed and water its people suddenly losing that ability.
Mass-casualties combined with the ensuing diaspora, caused the population of earth to drop from 30 to 10 billion over the course of the "Starving years" which lasted roughly a decade.
Honestly if I were in the expanse, I'd strap one of the fantastically efficient drives to a big heavy object, set it to point towards the enemy planet, and let it burn until the tank empties. You could get a several thousand ton ship to a few hundred km/s, which would devastate earth far worse than an asteroid moving at a few tens of km/s.
They can easily detect that and vaporize it with a rail gun or missile long before it would come anywhere near the target planet. The colossal energy expended by the Epstein drive’s drive plume is unmissable.
Redirecting such smaller asteroid fragments at random locations in space like the battleships guarding the ring gate is indeed scientifically inaccurate at so many levels.
Could it be that the velocity is "only" 30,000 KPH because the asteroids were artificially deviated from their normal orbit, thus slowing them down to bring them into a collision course with Earth?
No, the asteroids would have to be going at least at the earth's escape velocity, since that is the speed the earth's gravity adds to any asteroid it encounters.
If a huge meteor hits earth and luckily not right on our heads, we would: 1) see the "flash" (visible light, fastest) 2) get burnt from the heat wave, if close enough (irradiated heat, as fast as light but I guess affected by the dampening effect of air density, water droplets in the atmosphere etc) 3) feel the earth shaking (sound speed, slower) 4) be thrown away from the blast (actual shockwave, much slower) 5) experience a tsunami (secondary/tertiary effect) ^ items 3, 4, 5 actually happened in season 4. So, in a distance the fish might even "hear" and react to the infrasonic impact before it reaches us, yes - but the editing made it seem that they would react to the sound pressure of the impact BEFORE one would actually see it, wich does not make much sense. But hey guys, it adds to that bit of suspense/drama that makes for a great story, right? :)
Yeah I notice that fish thing too....I was like wtf ..... thank you for these videos I’m definitely liking your style.....totally subscribing looking forward to more Expanse videos.... keep me coming Doc ; )
We have (test) detonated many nukes in the 1-4 megaton range and even one as large as 50 MT. They do not cause Tsunamis, Earthquakes, and climate change. The asteroid blast in Expanse is substantially larger than the 1-4 megaton range they state. I would guesstimate that the blast shown is on the order of 1000x larger.
Here are my interrogations while watching : - At the end of season 4, Inaros takes 2 asteroids from a group of 5. It felt like they were clumped together, more than they should. Am I right ? What's the usual distance distribution between asteroids ? - In the media reports with shots of impacts seen from satellites, we see a shockwave going very fast. I though it was too fast but I really have no idea of the shockwave speed.
The asteroids they used are small, we see one of the asteroids attached to a belter tug, making it about 15 meters. The range given that we see of the others is 10 to 30 meters and the speed - at best - they can be pushed is 30,000 kph. Asteroids under 20 meters rarely hit the surface because they burn up. One shot of the incoming asteroid shows a heat shield like effect that is presumably tied into the stealth meshing over the surface. Asteroids any larger risk detection by conventional means, even with stealth technology. These asteroids should have been producing less that 1 megaton blasts and some on the order of only .25 mt. A direct hit on a city is going to obliterate it, but just striking some where on the planet is not going to do enough to cause anything but local devastation and nothing climatological. Many say well, the speed was much higher. Well, it can't be. If it is much higher than 30,000 kpn, it is going to over-pressure in the atmosphere and explode, something like the theory of Tunguska. It is not exactly accurate but you can dive into a body of water from a low height because you have a low speed, at several hundred miles an hour your body is tomato paste on striking the surface of the water. The Earth's atmosphere is more dense compared to space, than water is to air. The entire asteroid attack fails as science. Makes for exciting tv, but it is all wrong. To do what what was effected here, you need a 2,000 meter asteroid moving at 20,000 to 30,000 kph and made mostly of solid material. Solid asteroids are extremely rare, most are gravel and or ice. There are no chunks of tungsten floating around. Not even solid Iron or Nickle, although a few asteroids seem to have small cores of a few meters.
What if the asteroids were going say, 1,000 km/sec? At that speed, they would punch through the atmosphere so fast they might not have time to break apart and explode. The time from hitting the atmosphere to the ground would be fractions of a second. Ships in the Expanse have 1,000's of KM/S of Delta V. The Roci for example has around 6,000. Marco's ship could have held on to the rock until it got super fast and then let it go. I don't know how to do the math on this, but its just my 2cents.
@@rolypoly4920 It doesn't work that way. It is a matter of density. This is like saying if you throw oatmeal fast enough it will blast through a foot of solid steel. The speeds generated in the Expanse are impressive on the human scale but you need to move things on a planetary scale to have a planetary impact. The Earth moves at 30,000 meters per second and the fastest asteroid in the system is clocked at 75,000 meters on average - asteroids go faster the closer they get to the sun and slow down the further they are from it. Ships in the Expanse have plot-driven speed abilities. What we see on screen, read in the books or hear being said by the characters seldom matches. We have to base all of this on the limitations of the humans inside a craft under thrust. Only Earthers can handle the 9.8 ms thrust without a cocktail. Martians about a third of that and Belters only a fraction of what a Martian can handle. Supposedly Martian Marines practice in 1G so they should be able to handle it better. Thrust here is not maximum speed. It is the delta-v of the ship - thrust. In the Expanse the ships are flippers. The boost have of the trip, flip and back-boost to the destination keeping the ship under a form of delta-v. An asteroid coming to a target is not going to do that. It is going to boost all the way to the target. But, as we saw with the set up, they boosted only at the beginning because a thermal bloom from constant boosting would make the stealth layering useless as the bloom would be seen a long way off. So the asteroids only boosted and then coasted into their targets. At most, they had enough speed to catch Earth from behind theoretically, but we see them on intercept courses, meaning their speed was probably less than Earth's orbital speed of 30,000 ms. At that speed, you would need a solid hunk of iron or nickle a km wide to do anything and these asteroids were just 10 to 30 meters wide and not solid iron.
@@cadengrace5466 Very good points and for all we know, he could have just bumped them in a direction and let gravity do the rest... But all I'm saying is that ships in the expanse have been shown go faster than any natural object in our solar system could be going. The Nauvoo was going around 19,000 Km/sec when it "missed" Eros. That is around 6.5% of light speed I believe. That is a ship that is 2.5 km long. So even though they might not have shown it, the tech of their universe would allow for them to throw a rock that size into anything. We don't know what the average speed a belter ship cruises at is, but if his ship was pushing the rock at 1/3G for lets say 24 hours, that would sound like a reasonable burn since Belter ships accelerate around 1/3 G. I don't think anyone would notice if he burned like that since there are thousands of ships doing the same. Now assuming the asteroids, which came from the Belt have an initial orbital speed of around 18 km/sec, which is the orbital speed of Ceres which is also in that basic area, then at the end of his burn, he will have accelerated the rocks to around 570-ish km/sec. That is already north of 2 million km/hr. 3m/sec/sec x 186,000sec + 18,000 from its initial velocity = 576,000 m/sec or 2,073,600 km/hr. I don't think the atmosphere could stop it if it was going anywhere at even a fraction of that speed. This is just some random math I did in 5 mins, let me know if I miscalculated something or messed units up and got an incorrect answer. I haven't read the book so I don't know if they mention how fast the rocks come in to clear it up for us, or if the visual given on the show wasn't quite what the books say, I'm just decently sure that the rocks were coming in at more than 30,000 km/hr and that any issues with them possibly exploding early would be counteracted by the magical Martian stealth composites that can, on a ship, somehow hide the heat from a fusion reactor that should be burning hotter than the core of the sun and hotter than anything the rocks would experience during entry. Also this is the most important and pressing point of my response! (lol): If you got oatmeal going at a decent percent of light speed, it would totally go through the steel plate, or vaporize the plate, whichever. Speed matters more than mass for impact. KE= 1/2M x V^2 Good discussion! Thanks for the response :D
@@rolypoly4920 There is a fly in the soup. It is going to sound crazy, but it is the way gravity works. Have you ever watched a shuttle landing? To de-orbit, the shuttle has to turn around and fire off a retro burn to SLOW down so it will fall towards Earth. An orbit is nothing but a fall when you get down to it, you just keep falling towards the planet where it used to be and missing on each wrap around. To pop an asteroid out of the belt which is orbiting at roughly 30,000 ms around the sun and send it inward toward Earth means it has to slow down. If you change the vector and hit with a 1/3 G delta-v it is going to careen right out of the solar system. We saw on the episode that at least one and it was reported that three did in dialog, asteroids were ripped apart by the sun trying to pull off a slingshot course. Asteroids being mostly gravel or ice, often do this in intense gravity wells. So, what we would have to do is SLOW down an asteroid NOT speed it up to make it head toward the sun. If we angle the approach taking into account, masss, material, path and probably many things I am not thinking of. We can put the asteroid in a slingshot around the sun and have it charge back toward Earth. We can make the charge very fast and well beyond what the Epstein drive can manage, which is how NASA gets its probes to the outer planets, running multiple slingshots around the Earth and the Moon before they finally head toward the outer solar system bodies. The problem is we do not know the mass or density of the asteroids used nor the actual path. A lot of stuff we would have to guess on. What we do know is that these rocks had to be slowed down to "fall" into the inner gravity well of the sun. When you start thinking about gravity, things can seem backward.
I have a Marvel No-Prize answer to explain the 'psychic fish': the asteroid entering the atmosphere locally shocks the air (thus the clouds evaporating) and, I would argue, there would be a sudden, ear-popping pressure change for several kilometers around the projected impact point. Perhaps that change in pressure could be communicated to the liquid environment of the sea, perhaps as an uncomfortable vibration in the water. Additionally, the light from the plasma-shrouded asteroid punching through the atmosphere could have frightened sea life in the same manner that shining a bright search light on the ocean can cause fish to scatter. I even have anecdotal evidence for this latter claim - during a total eclipse I witnessed, one aspect of the experience was especially astonishing to me; the world fell silent. All birdsong stopped. All the barking of dogs ended. The crows, normally cawing loudly at any disturbance fell silent. Every animal became utterly, totally silent for the duration of the totality. Before it, they seemed nervous, scared, and made great noise. Afterwards, they also made great noise, as if reacting to fear. It took them some time to settle down. But... during the totality, the world became silent as a tomb. The animals - all the animals - reacted strongly to the change in light. I think the flickering, dancing glow of an approaching gigantic meteor just might scare the fish for kilometers around - any place that the light would shine. Even if my notion of atmospheric shock being transmitted into the ocean is bollocks, surely a reaction to a sudden change in lighting is reasonable? (Sorry to step on your joke, but I felt compelled to see if I could solve for it at all!)
Enjoy the Expanse, and hearing how scientifically accurate it is makes me like it even more. Have you considered doing a video on how we could actually stop an asteroid impact if one was detected. I know 3 weeks out we'd have no chance, but lets say we detect a country killer sized asteroid coming our way 1 or 2 years out. Could we actually prevent it?
No doubt fish have much better senses and instincts in water compared to us, but I don't think anything would be capable of sensing a rapidly moving asteroid. At best a creature could get maybe a few seconds advanced warning by spotting the fireball as it crosses our atmosphere, but I doubt fish spend much time watching the skies.
@@RyanRidden they don't have to watch the skies. A bright light in the sky would be apparent to someone who is underwater and facing the other direction. Also, the rock hits seconds before man turns to see the explosion
I always hate when people use units like km/hr or mi/hr for outer space. It's not at all useful because it's the wrong order of magnitude and not the natural units for that context. Saying "The asteroid was going 30,000kph" sounds impressive, but did you know that highway speed limits routinely exceed 150,000 furlongs per fortnight? In fact some automobiles can travel at over 200,000 furlongs per fortnight!
As an aerospace engineer I have problems with their point defense and rail gun systems. If you have fusion as a drive (and power source) you have massive amount of power to drive lasers: You don't want to have "ammo" be limited. Railguns may be considerably higher velocity but can't be higher DV than the missiles. The missiles are going to be long, slender shapes but look like trash cans - short, squat things that accelerate at thousands of g's. Engagement range could be 10,000 to 50,000 km... the weapons interactions would be in milliseconds. Passive tracking would be out to 1 light second. And the real flaw is you'd never see your adversary so lousy for television
The Expanse has ruined 99% of all sci-fi movies for me. The JJ Abrams Star Trek (at least the first two) have been my favorite as of... *3 weeks ago,* lol until I binged all 5 season; caught up as of wednesday.
Same here! Just binged all of it in those last couple weeks, and actually just saw S5E9 yesterday, "in schedule" for the season finale. Can imagine it will be quite painful going back to Star Trek...
I don´t know, but the impact explosions seem much larger than the 300 kilotons they mention they calculated, and even more than the 2 megatons they estimate before the impacts. Each one seems to be larger than Tsar Bomba... maybe in the 100 - 200 megatons range. Alas, in the Asteroid Impact Calculators, if you get an Iron Nickel asteroid at 30 km/s and 30-40 meters diameter, you get an earthquake of about 5 at Richter Scale. Certainly not enough to do that damage to the max security prison.
You may criticise Expanse for many gaps, but they have a huge leap compared to other novels: usually, sci-fi takes things such as energy, mass, velocity, inertia as granted. Ships simply fly, stop (sic!) and brake as if they were cars. Expanse really bothers with space mechanics, acceleration and energy management. Yes, Epstein drive is somewhat not possible right now, but its limitations are beautiful - reactive mass required (a lot of it, significant percent of the ship mass!), fuel capsules required (fusion), radiation hazard is real. Relative velocities are reasonable, even counter-torpedo cannons have jet compensators for recoil. It's not a terrible show.
The 30,000kph is not at all “scientifically accurate” in the least. Why? Because the rocks are not naturally making their way to Earth, and Avasarala and the Admiral know that, so why on Earth are YOU talking about the scientifically accurate speed of asteroids that are being man-made to hit Earth (fictionally speaking)?
Because of their Epstein drives and the constant-acceleration transfers they use, most spacecraft are on escape trajectories from the solar system, most of the time. So any debris would likely also be on escape trajectories from the solar system. Moving at many tens to hundreds of km/s, they would certainly not linger for decades.
@@JacekNasiadek even at 1000KM/S (roughly 25 times the escape velocity of the solar system) it would take almost 2 months to travel the distance from the sun to Neptune. but it doesn't just leave it travels the same direction as the ship it used to be. so whatever it's previous destination now has a 10 or 100 or 1000KM/S shower of destruction coming
@@willyreeves319 I agree that any big battle would create a temporary hazard but not a decades-long one, unless it was happening in orbit around something. The Kessler syndrome is such a concern only because the debris is not on an escape trajectory from Earth and even in LEO stays around for much longer than 2 months.
@@JacekNasiadek fair enough each battle would create a debris field that would be a hazard within the orbit of Neptune for between 1 and 20 months depending on where and what direction and how fast the ships were traveling. how often do such battles happen in the show? seems like there would be a lot of such fields.
11 kilometers per second is 39,600 kph or 24,606.299 miles per hour for all you Americans. An alternate explanation for the fish is that they were running from something else a predator perhaps, coincidentally right before the asteroid struck.
I was very disappointed that in series creators made asteroid hits much smaller events than in books. In series it was only a couple of million victims, pretty much like consequences of A-bomb in South America a few seasons earlier. In books there were at least 15 BILLION victims, and it was nothing-ever-will-be-the-same type of event
This is probably a very stupid question...BUT... say we find a large metal asteroid (500 tonnes for example) how fast could we accelerate it using known technology like ion drives/solar sail/ gravitational assists? it's for a short story about excavating an extremely deep crater in Hellas Planitia using kinetic impactors, with the goal of allowing atmosphere to pool at the lowest point and create an open air ecosystem.
Three weeks notice give you plenty of time to kiss you ass goodbye. Also, about the fish. Aren't some fish sensitive to things we humans aren't? Magnetic forces or gravity perhaps? I must look that up.
Should we be saying "asteroids striking Earth", or "meteorites striking Earth"? Per Scientific American magazine: 1) Asteroids are rocky objects smaller than planets that are left over from the formation of our solar system. They are located outside of Earth and Earth's atmosphere. 2) A meteor is an asteroid that attempts to land on Earth but is vaporized by the Earth’s atmosphere-you may hear them called "shooting stars." 3) Meteorites are meteors that survive the dive through the Earth’s atmosphere and manage to land on the surface of our planet.
IDK if anyone ever realizes that the main problem to space exploration is just producing enough energy. Everything else we basically got. Obviously, except for FTL, as we do not control gravity yet to create space dilation. More specifically negative matter.
What about that the asteroid, which broke up, was intercepted by venus? Even if it breaks up, the orbit should not change that dramaticly. Or it is an immense coincident.
My only issue is the 1-4 megaton yield estimate. Seems way too low. Especially considering how big the explosions looked from space. I didn't read the books but I read a summary of it. In the books, hundreds of millions die in the explosions (since earth is more densely populated in the future), and after all the after effects, about 15 billion people die. Which makes Marco the largest mass murderer in history. I really wish the showed would stay more consistent with the millions vs billions and would show more of the devastation from the asteroid impacts.
Only thing that irked me is showing the asteroid belt like some cartoon version. In reality if you were to stand on an asteroid in the belt it's most likely you couldn't even see another one with the naked eye. I know, I know, artistic license to portray the belt but I will always espouse the line from "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy": Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
Won’t air or any other matter displaced by the asteroid (already when it is just reaching the edge of the atmosphere)give some life forms, as fish, a few seconds of warning? Fish are incredible: they perceive the world by some extra senses: the lateral line organ is extremely sensitive of motion in water. Also of temperature, acidity and chemical changes, depending of species. If these few fish survivors in the future oceans felt an imminent displacement wave, caused by air caused by the asteroid ☄️ coming in, that would be realistic. The man would see fish trying to get away from a perceived noxious event. Just my thoughts.
I've always wondered by certain nations did not develop a tug system for small asteroids which could be deflected for targeting cities... oops, there went Tehran. Just one of those random events. Darn... Beijing. Moscow. We'll send help.
What's inaccurate is the scale of impact. 4 megatons is a firework. Tsar bomba had 50 MT. The impact shown on the show is fr too great. If they were just to mount one of those engines and give it a max burn, plus use flyby planet or Sun gravity to slingshot it, this would be a dinosaur scenario for the earth. No escape. No defence.
The scientist said, "speed at impact". The asteroid may have had the necessary velocity to penetrate the atmosphere but wouldn't it get slowed down significantly by it? Say enter at 13km/s and impact at 8 km/s?
Well....the initial intention is to destroy Earth.....so even if the asteroid get gravity assists from bigger planets.....the initial intention is to destroy Earth.....😊
In the last two weeks scientists were talking about a 50m that passed between us and the Moon.. I did some digging and discovered that a 50m asteroid would mostly break up in the atmosphere but would destroy every frame built house within 10 miles of where it exploded in the atmosphere. It would also destroy reinforced concrete building within shorter distances.
Nobody seems to notice the elephant in the room. And that is, how would Marco know where the asteroid would go after its breakup around the Sun? That thing is almost unpredictable. After that all the pieces would fly all over the place. Some If they would get one that could get even close to earth would be miracle. And also, how can they expect that the Martian technology would survive the sun approach?
Fish like many animals appear to detect the electromagnetic fields of earth, I don't know if an asteroid would disrupt it enough at that great speed for them to react in time as well. The Expanse IMHO is the best sci fiction in the last ten years, the last season has become unfortunately a crying soap opera, I can't for the life of me see the end of it and the start of a new season, hopefully they will then get on with the program, stop the crying and family drama and keep giving us the great space stories we are so starved for. On another note, change the camera lens or sit back more from it, the way it distorts your head makes it look like a talking bobble head ;-) you also got one new sub partner! cheers from Canada
