My original plan for today was to write a blog post about something different, but I haven't gotten my sleep the last few days and my mind started wandering. That's never a good thing...
Anyhow, I had this thought about the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter: Would it be possible to use the asteroids to build a planet?
I would like to mention that I have no real education in these matters so these are just my thoughts. Also as I said I haven't been sleeping enough lately so my mind works in mysterious ways at the moment.
If we had rockets strong enough to slow down the orbits of the asteroids to make them collide with each other at low speed differences*, could that make them stick together and form a larger planet? If it's possible to make them collide at low speed differences the individual gravity of each asteroid would join together to make a single point of gravity over time I guess. If that time is 100 years or 100 000 years, or even more, is not the point. If we can pile on asteroids on Ceres to make it larger than the Moon, that would be awesome.
We might also have to take into account that to actually hit one asteroid with another asteroid it's probably similar to shooting the head of a thumbtack from a mile away...
Then there's Jupiter. The massive gravity from Jupiter might rip the asteroids away from each other before they have a chance to join forces. Even after it could too I guess.
Maybe someone with real knowledge about these things will tell me it's impossible, but hey if we don't dream we don't progress. Maybe someday in the future we have the kind of energy that's needed to boost rockets like that.
*If two cars collide head on the damage is greater than if one car rear-ends the other car when both cars are traveling at about the same speed.
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