Headscratchers / Astra Lost in Space

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Why wormhole technology weren't used to stop the asteroid?

• It just seems... strange, that while possessing the wormhole technology, capable of transporting the bulk of Earth population 5000 light years away, Humanity was unable to dealt with rather mundane asteroid. Despite having years to prepare for impact. Why don't just use wormholes to transport big enough fusion bombs into the asteroid (come on, US contemplated 5-gigaton bomb in late 1950s), or place mass-drivers on it surface & push it away, or something?
  IMHO, but setting required something more dangerous that asteroid - for example, a gamma-ray burst coming toward Solar System.
  • We have to remember that the asteroid in question was HUGE, easily 300 kilometers across. It was big enough to threaten all life on Earth, and the biggest wormholes made were the size of of skyscrapers. Even if they combined all of them together, at best the super wormhole would've eaten half of the asteroid while the other crashed into Earth. And don't forget that when the existence of the asteroid, wormholes, and Astra was revealed, the entire world was sent into all out war over who'd get to go. Not only that, merging the wormholes together probably would've caused a blackhole, which is arguably worse than an asteroid.
  • Plus the "tons of fusion bombs" option would've either done nothing or broken the asteroid into thousands of pieces to strike all over the planet. And the mass-driver thing would've work - if they knew the exact mass of the asteroid and how much power it would take to sift it off course. For reference, the force needed to move an object out of the sun's orbit (which the asteroid was likely in) by 1% is about 1000 times less than the objects mass. The Earth, for example, weighs about 66 sextillion tons, and the force needed to push it would be 6.6 quintillion tons. And that's only moving it by 1%! Without any way to know for sure the asteroid's mass, I doubt they would be able to make enough mass drivers powerful enough to move it in time.
  • Also all the wormholes at the time were stationary, meaning they wouldn't be able to plant or build anything on the asteroid since it was likely moving thousands of kilometers per second.
    • Stationary? You do realize that Earth is zooming through space at app. 448,000 mph (720,000 km/h), right? While simultaneously spinning.
• When you really start to think about it, the idea that the wormhole technology would only be used for galactic transportation seems a bit sketchy to begin with. I mean, are you telling me that someone designed and produced this technology and never thought it could be used for war? Because logically that's the first thing that anyone would use it for, as evidence by how it was used on earth for countless conflicts and assassinations. And this was all just after it was widely distributed to every government in the world. How can no one have the forethought that this might happen? But then I remembered the original conspiracy, the World Government rewrote history. And then I began to think; was the real goal for rewriting history really for peace or control? When I started to think about it the more it started to make sense; the wormhole technology is the Apple of Discord. It was intentionally distributed to cause world-wide chaos, to cull the population and to stifle any form of opposition for the new world order.
  • It's pretty common among human history for people to develop new technologies before realizing how dangerous they can potentially be, or people figuring out how to exploit peaceful technologies to convert them into weapons. For example, nobody had initially thought nuclear energy could be harness to destroy entire cities, or a more modern example, how commercial drones can be turned into cheap remote weapons.
    • Yes; but we're talking about a weapon that can transport an army, or nuke, in a country's capital and wipe out every single pillar of government in a matter of minutes. Something that powerful can not have been so widely distributed without someone thinking, "Hmm,... I wonder if I can teleport into the White House and kill The President?" Unless that was the point all along.
    • By the way just to clarify; people did know how destructive things like nuclear power or drones could be, it's just that people didn't know how to harness nuclear energy as a weapon back then and law makers have been trying to restrict the usage of drones for that very reason.

Why gravity control wasn't used to stop the asteroid?

• Humanity apparently had mastery of gravity control well before Earth was destroyed - after all, the pre-disaster Astra has Artificial Gravity, and the tech is even advanced enough to be portable within a pair of shoes less than a century later. However it is that artificial gravity works, it's apparently efficient enough that a small ship can generate 1G of artificial gravity using nothing but small fusion reactors - why not use that tech to divert the asteroid with larger, more powerful gravity generators?
  • because the energy required to do so would be immense and that’s only if the meteor stayed intact! Many asteroids and meteors tend to fragment as they draw closer towards the sun as their own gravity is in a tug-of-war with that of the sun’s. The bigger questions that should be asked is that if they already had the resources to build skyscraper sized wormholes and artificial gravity generators then why didn’t they use the 2nd to build space colonies to help increase the number of evacuees? More over why didn’t they try to mine the asteroid until its threat level was reduced or small enough to be redirected.
    • In regards to the increase in evacuees they likely did manage (in fact, IIRC there is mention in the anime that pretty much every surviving human was successfully transported to Astra. Remember that there'd been a significant war, and that roughly half the world population was already dead in it. As for mining the asteroid coming in ... they only had nine years before it would impact. The asteroid is specifically called out as 300 KM across. We're talking about a mass of multiple quadrillions of tons. Modern day total mining per year worldwide is an estimated 18 billion tons. Assuming an asteroid of 300 KM across, and figuring the other dimensions average down (nothing gets described with a measurement that is less that its greatest dimension), and calcing the density at .8 tons / cubic meter (very unlikely to be the case, ice is .9 tons per cubic meter and the rest of the asteroid is unlikely to be just ice, so every bit of rock and metal would drive up the numbers) we get a rough number of about seven quadrillion tons ( 7,000,000,000,000,000 tons). Present day mining tops out somewhere around twenty billion tons per year. If they needed to drop the mass of the asteroid by only 10% in order to redirect it, it would take over 40,000 years to move that much mass. Could they use the wormholes as matter eaters instead of mining gear to get it to the point of harmlessness? Potentially, but it's still the work of literal millenia if not hundreds of thousands of years and they only have nine years before it hits.

Was the crash that killed Funi's adopted family actually an accident?

• While it isn't actually clear how long Funicia lived with Quitterie before the trip, we do know that the plan was already in motion when Funi arrived at the orphanage. Considering the lengths and hoops it took to get all of them in the same team, I can't help but think the accident was staged in order for Funi to be "nearby" when it came time for camp.
  • Second that as the new law would mean Funi being revealed as a clone the conspirators would want her back but Funi’s parents clearly resisted it and the conspirators were short of time.
  • I think we can read it as an almost certain fact that the accident was no more chance than the death of Seira. After all, Funi was insomniac her first night at the orphanage when she overheard that she was already slated for placement with a new family.

Who wants to Body Surf forever?

• Have the "parents" considered that bodysurfing to become immortal wouldn't really do them much good since they'd remain stuck with their skill and achievements, which would eventually get surpassed by other people?

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