NASA recently published an infographic (see below) which continues their relentless efforts to undermine hard-working science fiction authors.
With no regard at all for writers speculating about astronomical calamities, scientists have documented all known larger space rocks, considerably reducing the odds that the Earth could find itself presented with an imminent extinction-level impact. There may be rocks out there that we haven’t documented…but we’re now capable of spotting impactors well before impact. And it’s been proven that surprisingly modest methods may be sufficient to divert those scary space rocks.
Will no one think of all the poor SF authors who are now deprived of a successful stock plot?
But authors are ingenious! Here are five works in which calamitous asteroid and comet impacts occur despite the best efforts of scientists to spoil the game.
An obvious solution is to set one’s story sufficiently far in the past that modern observations cannot play a role.1 Mary Robinette Kowal selected March 3rd, 1952 as the date on which the characters of her 2018 The Calculating Stars survived a Chicxulub-scale asteroid impact. Because the rock impacts Earth decades before the start of comprehensive work to document such asteroids, the impact comes as a terrible—and, for millions of people, final—shock.
I have a friend who decades ago was obsessed with the odd causality of Choose Your Own Adventure stories. A specific example that comes to mind is one in which whether or not a volcano erupted appeared to be determined by whether one turned left or right at a crossroads. The Calculating Stars’ history diverges from ours well before the meteor strike, when Dewey wins his Presidential victory. The cause and effect sequence is somewhat unclear to me, but it’s clearly very good for us all that Truman won in the history that we know.
Another reasonable alternative is to present humanity with an impactor so huge that knowing about it beforehand is virtually useless. Human civilization in Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter’s 2000 The Light of Other Days is well aware that vast rock dubbed Wormwood is slated to smash into the Earth five centuries hence. However, lacking any reasonable means by which to divert a supermassive body like Wormwood, they leave the issue to the future to solve and focus on more immediate challenges like ending privacy forever.
Wormwood having been spotted so early, it touches on an issue relevant to sublight interstellar probes: given the likelihood of technological progress, does it make more sense to defer certain projects on the assumption that better machines will accomplish the task faster, even taking into account the delay to develop them, or would one be squandering previous time? Wormwood is a fine example of one of those two alternatives.
Another plot twist: smaller rocks, regional impacts. Regional catastrophes matter a heck of a lot to the people living in those regions. Given the right international circumstances, a merely local catastrophe could have global consequences. The antimatter rock that impacts the US in H. Beam Piper’s 1959 “The Answer” only annihilates Auburn, New York. However, because the event superficially resembles a nuclear attack, it triggers World War Three.
Human conflict being the constant that it is, authors might reasonably turn to deliberate human orchestration to deliver to Earth the impactor doom nature seems unlikely to provide. In Elizabeth Bear’s 2004 Scardown, China delivers a high-energy impact for which the victims’ space defenses prove woefully inadequate. This regional calamity depopulates large areas around the Great Lakes, whether US or Canadian. Of particular concern to me, as a Canadian living in Canada’s urban corridor: more Canadians were taken out than one might expect given Canada’s overall population density. On the plus side, Alberta and British Columbia were doubtless happy to get a larger share of Parliament seats.
Finally, just because we know doom is barreling towards us and just because we have the technological means to prevent it does not mean we will muster the political will to do so. The 2021 movie Don’t Look Up comes to mind. Astronomers Kate Dibiasky and Randall Mindy provide humanity with six months warning of a calamitous impact…six months that political and business leaders proceed to squander for selfish reasons.
I’d assert that the film’s premise is deeply implausible—who would be dumb enough not to use the tools at hand to save their own lives?—except that audiences found doom-by-shortsightedness entirely plausible. Online commenters came up with so many inspirational real-world examples that people heatedly disagreed as to which one in particular inspired the film. Cue the inevitable laugh-crying GIF (or possibly that sculpture of politicians debating climate change).
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Of course, these are just the first five plot hacks that came to mind. No doubt there are others.2 If you can think of any particularly enticing possibility, please mention them in the comments, which are, as ever, below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]“The Last Day of the Dinosaurs” (a TV documentary) would be a fine example of a devastating unexpected impact, but I cannot mention it because it is not SF.
[2]An obvious alternative for which I am certain examples will come to mind once I hit send and it is too late to add them is for the impactor to approach Earth at extraordinarily high speed from a direction where observation is lacking or difficult. An interstellar object that skimmed past the Sun might be hard to spot before it hit us.
ISTR that Jack McDevitt’s Moonfall (written 1998, set next year in 2024!) involved a super-fast comet smacking the moon, rather than the earth. Breaks the moon up. Hijinks ensue as the VPOTUS, visiting the moonbase, makes a rash promise.
Enough bits of the moon hit the earth that this will cause serious problems if they’re not stopped.
Unlike Seveneves, this takes place over a busy few days, rather than multiple thousands of years.
Heh. I have a book review planned for the summer, inspired by noticing that the book’s opening scene is set June 6, 2023, which used to be in the distant future and now somehow isn’t.
You forgot the one where the rock is actively aimed at the planet!
I immediately thought of Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, in which the alien invaders direct a massive meteorite to hit the Earth in order to quell the humans’ rebellion. Very good portrayal of aliens completely misunderstanding human nature. Also they just happen to look like elephants… A lot of death and destruction, so it was a difficult read, but an interesting one.
I also seem to recall a story where that was done as part of terraforming a planet, but I can’t remember for sure.
I suppose Bronson Alpha is an extreme example of objects too large to divert.
Thought of another dodge: small, dense, dark objects like small [1] primordial black holes formed in the Big Bang. Good news: they could just zip through Earth without slowing down appreciably. Bad news: the effects near entry and exit could be dramatic. Well, bad news for most people. Good news for SF authors.
1: But large enough Hawking radiation wouldn’t make them visible on the approach.
@3. Of course, there’s also The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Stephenson’s Seveneves isn’t technically an asteroid, but an unkown agent hits the moon and causes it to break apart.
No one knows if it was on purose or an accident.
The backstory of Ken MacLeod’s Engines of Light trilogy includes that the Chicxulub impact wasn’t an accident, the impactor was aimed at Earth in order to wipe out a dinosaur civilization that had fatally angered the powerful Oort cloud civilization by making what it saw as too much noise in radio frequencies.
Deflecting one comet that size might be doable, but there are a lot of large comets out there.
At the start of Rendezvous with Rama, an asteroid hits northern Italy, devastating a wide area. Earth sets up a system to detect asteroids. The said system discovers the eponymous Rama.
Nemesis Games (the fifth volume in The Expanse) has the human orchestration variant where Belter terrorists coat asteroids with stealth materials to slip past detection and aim them at Earth.
I used to make jokes about Bear wiping out Toronto but they got unfunny when I revisited the books thanks to their recent publication in audio.
The Peshawar Lancers by Steve Stirling has a comet break up and hit Earth’s northern hemisphere in 1878. Astronomers saw the comet coming but the completely non-existent Victorian space program was unable to stop it.
Perhaps the easiest way to prevent us from noticing an incoming rock is for civilization to collapse first.
@12: And a nihilistic cult is attempting to cut off any chance of a future Anglo-Indian space program stopping the next one, which they know to be on the way within the span of time in which an effective space program could come to exist.
One way to justify huge rocks smashing into Earth is to note that Earth has been very, very bad.
I’m not sure that the NASA table shows that hard-working SF authors are out of luck.
Officially, 95% of the 900 kilometre-scale objects have been identified. That leaves 45 of them floating around out there, as yet unidentified.
Sure, estimated impact frequency is once in 700,000 years, and if we assume that frequency covers all 900 objects, the frequency of unknown impacts would be once in 14,000,000 years.
But what if today is our lucky day?
One hesitates to bring up Lucifer’s Hammer (oh, why not?), but in that case it was a large body in the Oort cloud perturbing large snowballs on an occasional basis (I suppose that’s the Nemesis theory, really). One of them starts falling inward quite some time ago, and only becomes visible — well, when the book starts. And by then it’s too late. Why isn’t this still plausible? We know next to nothing about that region, seems to me.
16 Then I made a grave misjudgment filing my taxes so early this year.
@3: re: intentional use of large impactors for terraforming
In the real world, we have this proposal.
Larry Niven used the idea in a throwaway sentence from Protector. The Brennan-monster hits Mars with an icy comet, which both improves the livability of that planet and also exterminates the native Martians outlined in other Niven stories.
Another work around: ChatGPT floods the internet with enough garbage it becomes impossible to sort out factual predictions from fake ones and a real one gets missed.
Maybe we can stop large rocks from crashing into Earth, but can we stop Earth from crashing into large rocks?
I don’t think SF authors need to look further than the words of former NASA administrator Billy Bob Thornton: “It’s a big-ass sky!”
For me, EE Smith’s use of planets as projectiles using his version of hyper space comes to mind.
But a second thought is mining the asteroid belt and maybe moving an asteroid into close Earth orbit to make it easier to get to all those rare Earth metals and high quality iron. A slight miscalculation and you have a big rock really close to the Earth and slowly falling towards it.
As Dark Matter has not been properly defined or discovered, perhaps start with an impact and then let the characters discover just what Dark Matter really is.
@17 – we would get less warning for long period or interstellar objects on near parabolic or hyperbolic objects, and we don’t have the opportunity to divert them on an earlier pass. or using a long duration mission. I’d think we’d notice a 10km object well out, but a smaller low albedo low proper motion body might get quite close before we saw it. If the long odds of one coming in on a impact trajectory eventuated we’d have to impart a greater among of delta-v, while avoiding converting the body into a shotgun blast.
This is delightful. If you are curious, there is actually a cause and effect for the asteroid via Dewey vs. Truman change in the Lady Astronaut Universe. I have to warn you that this short story contains spoilers and also information that no one in the novels will ever know.
“We Interrupt This Broadcast”
@17: Another thing that Lucifer’s Hammer had going for it was that it wasn’t an asteroid, it was a comet. While it appears (based on a pretty small sample set of observations) that asteroids are solid and can thus be deflected, the same may not be true of comets. There’s a scene in the book where the comet was compared to a hot fudge sundae, which is more elastic. Hitting it with another projectile might not result in the same change in path that hitting an asteroid would have.
@26: During a Physics 101 lecture at MIT in 1974, Professor Philip Morrison treated us to a demonstration on how physical effects scale by modeling an asteroid impact on earth by hurling a cherry into a chocolate pudding pie. Perfect impact crater with center peak, clear ejecta zone with secondary cratering, spoons were handed round and the evidence was consumed. I did NOT get the cherry.
There’s always the authorial “This is what I want my plot to do, so there!” Ken H. Winters, author of The Last Policeman trilogy, says all his scientist friends insisted that his killer asteroid would be spotted much further out than his plot specified. He was urged to use a smaller, less apocalyptic asteroid, but insisted on the figuratively Earth shattering kaboom, and the extremely short time frame for people to react.
@16, @18: It may not address the case, but there come to mind the famous reported remarks of Abraham Davenport at the Connecticut Council in 1780, on “New England’s Dark Day”, when the sky went out.
“The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought.”
They then proceeded to set fishing quotas, or something on those lines.
@0: wrt your footnote 2: would a projectile need to hide behind the Sun if it comes from significantly out of the plane of the ecliptic? My guess is that’s an incredibly-low-probability event, but it’s not clear that we look at the rest of the locality sufficiently often/closely to notice whether something’s coming that wasn’t already in orbit around the Sun.
@26: wasn’t there a (publicity?) button distributed saying “Hot Fudge Sundae falls on Tuesday”? Also: at a recent Boskone, Brother Guy reported that many small asteroids aren’t all that coherent either; IIRC, he characterized their response to a nuke as “Thank you sir, may I please have another.” I don’t know whether the recent experiment (a deliberate collision changing the orbit of the smaller of a close pair of asteroids) has updated this.
There’s also the possibility of an attempted deflection going bad and splitting the dinosaur killer into multiple impacters.