What would happen if you
somehow had space-bending abilities
and decided to test them out
by placing the Earth
between the two asteroid belts
in our Solar System?
Well, the short answer is
you might be asking
for a little dose of planetary extinction.
Our Solar System has two asteroid belts.
Closest to us is the Main Asteroid Belt.
Located between Mars and Jupiter,
its asteroids are
primarily made of rock and stone.
It's estimated
that 16 of them have a diameter
greater than 240 km (150 mi).
The largest object in the belt
is the dwarf planet Ceres.
More on how this factors into the big picture later.
All the way in the back,
beyond Neptune, lies the Kuiper Belt.
A region filled with icy leftovers
from the early days of the Solar System,
some with a diameter of 100 km (62 mi) or more.
Among them lives another dwarf planet.
Maybe you've heard of it, Pluto.
So what would Earth's fate be surrounded
by not one,
but two asteroid belts?
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Your brain will fall in love with Wondrium. But those asteroid belts? Yeah, maybe not so much.
To understand the scale of this scenario,
you first need to know what an astronomical unit is.
Well, one astronomical unit, or AU,
is the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
The Kuiper Belt is 25 AU wide.
Compared that to the Main Asteroid Belt,
which is only one AU,
seems pretty sparse.
OK, let’s say you left their sizes as is
and transported them next to Earth.
The inner edge of the Kuiper Belt
would be between Mars and us.
The Main Asteroid Belt's outer edge
would be situated between Earth and Venus.
The Main Asteroid Belt,
although the smaller of the two,
would still extend itself over the Sun.
Venus and Mercury
would now orbit
among its millions of rocky bodies.
The Kuiper Belt, on the other side,
would go even further.
You'd find it draping itself
over Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus.
Only Neptune would be left outside of the party,
though not by much.
Now, how would this new arrangement look on a starry night?
Well, quite unexciting, I'm afraid.
Well, think of it this way.
Pluto, the dwarf planet inside the Kuiper Belt,
would now orbit at about three AU from us.
Just shy of our current distance from Jupiter.
Jupiter is an enormous gas planet,
but is no more than a bright star to the naked eye.
So what can you expect to see of Pluto,
which is only two-thirds the diameter of our Moon?
Yeah, a whole lot of nothing, really.
By this point,
you’re realizing
that you used your powers irresponsibly.
After all,
it would be crazy to travel to other planets
within our Solar System
now that they are surrounded
by millions upon millions of scattered objects.
So would you be stuck on Earth forever?
Well, no.
There might be millions,
even billions of rocks floating too close to our planet now.
But, luckily for you,
asteroid belts aren't that dense.
The average distance between objects inside a belt
is about one million km (600,000 mi).
So you'd still be able to fulfill your dream
of going to Mars one day.
That is, unless you squeezed the asteroid belts really tight.
The entire Main Asteroid Belt
would now fit between Earth and Venus,
and the Kuiper Belt between Earth and Mars.
Sure, we aren’t strangers to flying through junk.
In 2021 alone there were about 23,000 pieces of debris
larger than a softball orbiting Earth.
Only now we wouldn't be surrounded
by pieces left behind by broken satellites.
We'd have to deal with substantially larger chunks
of all-natural material.
The Kuiper Belt alone has hundreds of thousands of objects
at least 100 km (60 mi) wide.
Think about it.
Hundreds of thousands of asteroids,
each at least 10 times bigger than
the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
And in the Main Asteroid Belt,
we’d be facing over a million rocks larger than 1 km (0.6 mi),
on top of millions of other small ones.
So, yeah, there space travel
would be suspended indefinitely.
Maybe we could at least use all those asteroids
for something helpful.
Like iron and nickel mining, right?
Well, not so fast.
You'd be pretty busy dealing with asteroids
bombarding Earth from all directions.
Yeah, you heard that right.
The gravitational pull from our planet
could attract objects from both of the surrounding belts.
At the lower end of this mass destruction scale,
you'd have smaller asteroids
capable of destroying an entire metropolis
with the same amount of force as a nuclear bomb.
And remember Ceres?
The dwarf planet inside the Main Asteroid Belt?
Yeah, well, it’s almost 100 times larger
than the asteroid that led to the mass extintion
of the dinosaurs.
One tiny cataclysmic bump into Earth
and whoops, there goes our planet,
along with all life as we know it.
So don't play with the Solar System.
Unless you plan on giving humanity a new home
and not wiping us all out in the process.
You could try and terraform Mars.
But that’s a story for another WHAT IF.