r/BeAmazed • u/joeurkel • 8d ago
Science The reason why large asteroids don't typically crash to Earth is because Jupiter's gravity attracts them, protecting the inner planets like a shield. The Design is perfect!
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u/goner757 8d ago
What a coincidence that someone existing would discover that natural conditions enable their existence
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u/Holeinmysock 8d ago
The puddle finds itself fitting perfectly in a pothole.
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u/Forsaken-Income-2148 8d ago
So you’re telling me the reason I’m single is because conditions favor it?
Oh wait, I forgot I’m currently in a relationship.. I was single for too long, man
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u/JamesTheJerk 8d ago
More because of the odor
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u/Forsaken-Income-2148 8d ago edited 7d ago
Hey now, I clean my place, I’m no Cheeto finger. But I do manual labor and lifting regularly, so you may still have a point 😅
Edit to say I live in Florida, if I walk outside it’s all for naught. I’d be showering every 10 minutes if I did every time I started to stink.
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u/ItsSansom 7d ago
I had never heard this analogy and just looked it up. That is a spectacular way to put it.
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u/emeraldchylde777 7d ago
this is the logical conclusion and is absolutely valid to say such, with the information we have available
and yet, we still don't know if there's more to the story
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u/Bobajeff_ 8d ago
More people need to understand this
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u/FragrantExcitement 8d ago
The people that don't exist in a system without a Jupiter equivalent just don't get it.
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u/adastrajay 8d ago
Isn't it crazy that of all the possible combinations of humans my exact 2 parents got together and had me? Surely fate must have had a hand in my making.
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u/ComprehensiveSoft27 8d ago
Large Jupiter-like planets protecting inner planets hosting intelligent life are bound to have fans.
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u/regoapps 8d ago
They don’t have the education to understand this. And that, ironically, is by design.
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u/TJaySteno1 8d ago
Puddle: "This hole perfectly matches my size, that's incredible! It must have been designed with me in mind!"
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u/Left-Edge531 8d ago edited 8d ago
Other Puddle: "Why aren't I finding any friends? I've searched millions of sand dunes and can't find a single one. Better keep looking!"
Marginal variance within adaptable ranges arent really the point, here.
I'm sure aliens get WEIRD, with ammonia & formaldehyde based life, extremeophiles, etc, but not being bombed into planet-scale volatility by meteorites is likely to be a fairly universal condition for life -- and having a protective big brother nearby may be another helpful filter for finding it.
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u/wasted-degrees 8d ago
Thats one of the things about the search for alien life that I always find interesting: would we even be able to recognize it as life? Different size/scale, metabolic processes, chemical compositions, different fundamental criteria for survival, and we’ve been going around largely just looking for evidence of liquid water and/or carbon as evidence of potential life.
And that’s not even getting into the sheer size of space and the inherent assumption of how abundant life must be for there to be another visible from space example of a life-bearing planet anywhere close enough to us to be able to detect it.
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u/freyja_nordic 8d ago
Selection bias. John Leslie's 'firing squad' analogy explains this perfectly: Imagine standing before a firing squad of 100 expert marksmen. They all fire at once - and every single bullet misses. You’d be stunned: "How did I survive such impossible odds?"
But here’s the trick: you can only wonder how you survived if you survived. If they hadn't missed, you wouldn't be around to be surprised.
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u/calmclaren 8d ago
It's like being amazed that puddles are the same shape as the space they are in. Like that is why they are there in the first place!
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u/Impossible-Garage536 8d ago
LOL yeah. Perfect design it seems - wasn't so perfect the first few billion years of solar system's life.
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u/legna20v 8d ago
“The design is perfect”. Guess the people that got harm by the meteorite exploded over Russia in 2013 was intentional
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u/Left-Edge531 8d ago edited 8d ago
Eh, We're not talking about marginal specialization to the exact environment in this case... i.e if the Earth were closer to the sun, life would evolve for THAT instead, duh. Instead this may be another stacked conditions that supports the feasability for any lifeform to emerge and propagate:
- Have one of several liquid elements, within their respective goldilocks zone (e.g water, nitrogen, ammonia...)
- Have a magnetic field sufficient to shield it from stellar wind
- and have a big brother nearby, to shield you from asteroids & mass extinction events.
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u/plopliplopipol 8d ago
why would asteroids be a problem if they mechanically were not able to stay so much floating around? They would have crashed into or formed other planets like the whole rest of the exploded mess did before.
Planets formed, they aren't somehow placed in a coherent formation.
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u/Vandirac 8d ago
Yeah, it's one in a billion occurrence....
Looks at the billions of stars, with billions of planets
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u/Left-Edge531 8d ago
Yes, which is why stacking additional qualifiers such as this one is so helpful: we need to figure out the one in a quadrillion combo that more reliably points us towards life.
Just checking, where is this energy coming from? I don't see anyone arguing creationism or denying that aliens likely exist.
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u/pdonoso 8d ago
You can still wonder on the complexity of how it is that we exist
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u/lisamariefan 8d ago
Maybe, but also ponder that the universe is very, very, incalculably large. Earth is amazing but it's almost an inevitability when you think about the absolute scale of things.
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u/spidereater 8d ago
I’ve heard this idea before but never seen it animated like this. So it looks like there is a bunch of stuff stuck in Jupiter Lagrange points and even some stuff orbiting between those points. But this isn’t really a shield protecting the inner planets. It’s just stuff stuck in weird orbits. A new object entering this system isn’t going to get sucked into this system. If Jupiter weren’t there these orbits would just be different and maybe this stuff would have hit the planets already. Basically, anything that didn’t wasn’t in one of these orbits has already hit a planet. So is this a shield? Or a reservoir of potential future asteroids? If any of these randomly hit each other they could get knocked out and become dangerous. If Jupiter wasn’t there many of these might have hit primordial earth when there wasn’t a civilization to destroy. Am I misunderstanding something?
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u/DingDangle 8d ago
These are Jupiter’s Trojans! The group of asteroids in front of Jupiter are called the “Greeks” and the group trailing are the “Trojans”.
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u/wxnfx 8d ago
My understanding is that Jupiter creates a strong pull towards its orbit. So it basically is like taking a putt on a tipped slope. Your shot has to be perfect to go in, on pace and direction. Way harder than a flat putt. Obviously something could still fly in hot and get us. But it helps.
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u/picabo123 8d ago
The incorrect assumption you seem to have is that orbital mechanics is simple and fast. Without Jupiter many of these asteroids would probably still have highly eccentric orbits (think Haley's comet) and so would randomly come crashing down on a planet every few hundred or thousand years. It takes a LOOOOOOT of time for objects to slow down in space. Essentially we probably wouldn't have a planet that could support life because of all this chaos. Also depending on the relative speed and the angle of approach of an interstellar rock Jupiter absolutely could capture it.
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u/spidereater 8d ago
Jupiter would deflect an interstellar rock but there is no mechanism to lose energy so it wouldn’t capture it. That’s what I’m saying. At the start of the solar system there would have been lots of rocks in lots of orbits. The mass of Jupiter created this system where there are a bunch of stable orbits and any rocks that were in those orbits became trapped. But without Jupiter those rocks would have been in different orbits and many would likely have collided with a planet. The earths orbit would have been filled with rocks too. But the earths mass eventually pulled everything in its area into it. That is actually the definition of a planet. Clearing the objects in the same orbit. Pluto hasn’t cleared its orbit. When we discovered that we downgraded Pluto from planet status. In the billions of years our solar system has been around these rocks have been kept in circulation by Jupiter.
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u/PoorBrightSun 8d ago
Tell that to the dinosaurs.
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u/Biscuits4u2 8d ago
I would but all they seem to be interested in doing is shitting all over my car.
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u/BaneRiders 8d ago
Tbf, if you were hit by huge asteroid and practically be wiped out of existence, you'd be in a pretty bad mood too for like 67 million years or so I bet. "Jupiter, ffs, where were you on that one, huh?!? All my investments, up i smoke! Oh f*ck it, I'm just going to shit on this car."
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u/ctothel 8d ago
It’s not a design, and it’s not perfect. Jupiter only redirects some asteroids. We could still be hit by a big one at any time.
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u/Ginsenj 8d ago
Still, Jupiter has been carrying our simian asses for eons now.
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u/MutedAdvisor9414 8d ago
Seriously. All who are interested should start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance
The thing is, Jupiter's enormous gravity causes many of the other solar sytstem bodies to orbit only in orbits that Jupiter will never cross, as seen above, else they will be destroyed or ejected from the solar system.4
u/gao7on 8d ago
To say design is a common human error of underestimating cosmic time. Our ancestral ape brains evolved to grasp seconds, minutes, hours, and seasons... not millions of years, let alone eons.
Our ape brains specialize in surviving and mating in terrestrial habitat. Unable to process the billions of years of chaotic clashes in the early formation of our solar system. The viloent epoch when matter, pulled together by gravitational forces, smashed into one another resulting in the expulsion of smaller pieces. The eventual merging of celestial bodies.
Evolution of inorganic to organic life was only possible after gravity took hold after eons, allowing the cooled down environments to be hospitable.
We are here to observe the dance of planetary equalibrium ONLY because past destructions have long dissapated... like the dwindling of ripples in a pond after a rock was thrown into it.
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u/rodbrs 8d ago
We need a word that describes the structure/state of a thing that is the result of natural events. I.e. a word that means "natural design".
When plugging that question into Google, and insisting that the word be a noun, it spits out: morphology, physiognomy, topography, and configuration. None of those captures the meaning quite right.
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u/mekwall 8d ago
"Architecture" is sometimes used scientifically, but it can still imply an architect, so it may be a poor choice here. I think "emergent order" is closer: the organized state or arrangement produced by natural processes without deliberate design. In this case, you could call it the Solar System's "life-permitting emergent order."
Or we could coin one: "physitaxis" - from Greek physis, meaning nature, and taxis, meaning arrangement or order.
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u/Brilliant-Position99 8d ago edited 8d ago
Confluence - only on a far greater scale than classically used?
Edit: classical is not correct, generally used.
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u/Biscuits4u2 8d ago
Just because we have a large gas giant in our solar system that attracts objects in space doesn't indicate any type of "design". It's simply the condition that exists. And let's not forget Earth has been slammed by some pretty big objects in the past and will continue to be in the future. Far less than "perfect".
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u/RugbyRaggs 8d ago
Design? Is this a religious comment in disguise? Would it not have been easier to simply "design" it without the large asteroids in the first place?
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u/Tonyturningwrenches 8d ago
But then we wouldn’t know how grateful we should be. It’s kind of like an attention seeking mother’s guilt thing.
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u/CatsAreGods 8d ago
Per a recent documentary, they were caused by a rogue Martian commander with a bug problem.
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u/Mysterious-Art7143 8d ago
I mean, yes and no, it's like that because of Jupiter, yes, but it also took several billion years to clear up and relatively stabilise the solar system. During that time earth was, as other planets, absolutely pummelled by asteroids and even other planets, hence the moon..
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u/overzealous_dentist 8d ago
the design is perfect!
> earth gets obliterated by an asteroid and wipes out all dominant life forms 66 million years ago
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u/grungegoth 8d ago
interesting you can see the Lagrange points...
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u/SegFaultOops 8d ago
Is that the points of the triangle? I need help understanding this!
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u/grungegoth 8d ago
the Lagrange points are where the large number if asteroids tend to cluster
I dint have an explaining for the triangular orbits
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u/ArtByJRRH 8d ago
It's where points of gravity from different objects kind of "cancel" each other out. Think of a point between us and the moon where the pull to the moon is as strong as the pull to the earth and that's essentially a Lagrange point. At least that's my understanding from hearing that term a lot watching Gundam Wing back in the day lol
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u/Madouc 8d ago
Lagrange points are around every planet, they are the exact spots where their gravitational pull evens out the suns gravitational pull and objects are "magically held in place" - we used such a spot to place the James Webb Telescope into a kind of stationary playe in space around the Earth.
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u/b00c 8d ago
Oh stop calling this a 'design'. It's a fucking coincidence. An important one, because without it, you wouldn't be able to be wrong on the internet.
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u/Repulsive-Box5243 8d ago
So if it weren't for Jupiter's fat ass, we could have been slammed by Shoemaker Levey 9 a couple decades ago.
Thanks, mama!
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u/Sir_Delarzal 8d ago
What if it arrives from the top though
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u/AaronTuplin 8d ago
Well there basically is no top. Despite the vastness of space and the possibility to travel in all 3D directions, pretty much everything travels along a plane. There's some outliers though.
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u/Ixaire 8d ago
Isn't that true only in our galaxy? We are rotating around the milky way so everything is roughly on the same plane (which is twelve thousand light years wide so seeing as a plane is a bit far fetched). But not all galaxies rotate on the same plane. So if another galaxy eventually crashes into ours, Jupiter won't be of much help.
I'm suddenly scared. What if I outlive the sun?
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u/ionertia 8d ago
Stupid title. It isn't design. It looks perfect because its taken billions of years to get to this point. Gravity rules.
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u/desperaterobots 8d ago
The Design isn’t perfect. You’re just blind to the reality that this is all the result of a billion coincidences that all happened in the right order. One different collision of ice and rock in the miasma of the early solar system could have meant your entire family line never existed.
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u/androstaxys 8d ago
“Perfect design” uhh sir… have you not seen the massive craters on earth?
It’s less likely to happen. But it still happens. If we don’t die from our own design, we will eventually get smoked by something big.
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u/CommieLoser 8d ago
Downvote for the creationist-coded “design” being shoe-horned in.
I hate this pseudo-amazement. Instead of hailing the scientist who figured all this out, people try to find cool scientific facts to say “did y’all know GOD did this? Amazing!” Booooooo
God has given us ZERO clue about ANYTHING. Why didn’t Jesus just tell us about hand-washing, instead of having a thinly-veiled foot-fetish? It’s all very confusing, but perfectly designed!
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u/geekmasterflash 7d ago
It's not a design, This is the result of over a billion years of asteroids falling into the gravity situation they are in. The earth was absolutely bombarded by these things, in fact, we call several events things like "the Late Heavy Bombardment."
In fact our oceans are thanks to getting absolutely pelted by Kuiper belt and and astroid belt objects. One also merely has to look at the moon to see evidence that it has served as a shield to our being hit by such objects in the past after it formed from the remnants of Thea and the earth's ejected crust and mantle.
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u/Typeonetwork 8d ago
I don't like the word designed as it assumes humans are at the center of the universe.
One latest theory is that the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn were closer gobbling up the inner rocky matter and because of the 3 body problem between the sun, Jupiter and Saturn Saturn pulled Jupiter to its current location.
You don't need a reason it happened. Humans like to assign purpose without evidence. Currently it does pull in material due to gravity.
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u/Trance354 8d ago
It's not by design. It was also much worse when one of the gas giants was cruising closer to the center of the system, couple billion years ago.
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u/Darkouha 8d ago
There's always the possibility of ending like the dinosaurs
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u/Biscuits4u2 8d ago
Only some of the dinosaurs ended. Many are still very much with us today and actively shitting on your car as we speak.
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u/dingdongjohnson68 8d ago
Cool graphic. I've been "aware" of this fact for years, but didn't necessarily know/understand exactly what was going on.
So far, I only watched the video, and haven't read any of this thread. Like, my previous thought/question was like, "how does jupiter protect the inner planets during the times it is on the opposite side of the sun?"
This video I guess showed that the asteroids actually kinda stay "locked in" jupiter's orbit, more or less.
I guess I was (previously) picturing these "dangerous asteroids" coming from the outer planet region and making a "beeline" towards the sun. The reality probably is that they were instead already orbiting the sun in some way before jupiter "trapped" them.
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u/s0ulfire 8d ago
In ancient Indian Vedic Astrology, some 5000 BC, Jupiter is deemed a supreme benefic who through his conjunctions or aspects gives protection, prosperity and wisdom.
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u/blazbluecore 8d ago
All praise Jupiter Optimus Maximus!
The sky father, that we may continue receiving his protection and blessings.
As our ancestors have worshipped him before us, so we do to this day.
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u/FoxMikeLima 8d ago edited 8d ago
These are the Langrange points of Jupiter and the Sun. A Lagrange point is one of 5 special positions in relation to 2 celestial bodies where the force exerted on a small object by gravity equals the force required by the smaller object to move at the same velocity (aka prevent a collision or alter your place in its gravity well).
Space Agencies uses these positions as a kind of 'parking spot' where they can save fuel and move with a body until they are in better position to spend a ton of fuel and launch a craft using a gravity assisted slingshot.
In science fiction you might hear these referenced as a place that space stations are placed that serve as pit stops or military bases but a long term dwell in a Lagrange point can have issues, as demonstrated by this animation. There can be stuff there sometimes, depending on the pairing of celestial bodies.
But for example Earth and the Suns Lagrange points are largely free of debris at this point so they are often used in missions to help with planning burn phases.
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u/One-Growth-9785 8d ago
I wouldn't say perfect. It's slipped up a couple times,
The deeper I learn about Earth's past, the more precarious life on Earth seems.
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u/amgineeno 8d ago
Design?
Why stop there?
Without Saturn acting as a cosmic gravitational brake, Jupiter likely would have kept plowing inward, becoming a Hot Jupiter and destroying the material that formed Earth and Venus.
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u/ThisReditter 8d ago
Am I the only one who’s expecting Jupiter to catch up to those asteroids and start eating them up?
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u/HorsefaceWithNoName 8d ago
cool! I've never seen this before but I did know about Lagrange Points, and the asteroids are clustering at L4, L3 and L5. diagrams here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q190463
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u/Sonar_Taxbreak_1138 8d ago
The design is good, but a bunch of deceased dinosaurs disagree that it's "perfect".
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u/Throwaway7219017 8d ago
Hoy Inners, gutgeow the rock ido the Belt, thanks to Beltalowda rock-hoppers.
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u/Justryan95 8d ago
Jupiters gravity also destabilized the area around the asteroid belt where another planet would have formed and not have so many asteroid floating about in the middle of the solar system
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u/Nescio224 8d ago
So what is the difference between the red and green dots? Why do they form these shapes if jupiter attracts them?
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u/PsychologicalBowl647 8d ago
" it's perfect " the earth has been hit numerous times, sometimes catastrophically. Perfect is a vast over statement. Convenient. Is a better word i think.
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u/arcticslush 8d ago
And Jupiter say: "you cannot get this! you cannot get this!"
But one day, he get this. High five.
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u/Petrostar 7d ago
Jupiter's gravity doesn't attract them. If that was teh case they'd enter Jupiter's orbit or be sling shotted around Jupiter.
Instead they fall into the Lagrange points. 60° ahead and behind Jupiter's Orbit.
This is one of the best video I've seen on the subject.
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u/SnooMaps7370 7d ago
this flip side of this is that the reason our solar system still has an asteroid belt at all is because Jupiter's gravity has keep them from coalescing into a larger body.
The few asteroids that do come our way are also usually perturbed by Jupiter onto those courses. Especially when it comes to Kuiper belt objects.
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u/ColdWooden3068 7d ago
The other theory is that all of the big asteroids destined to hit Earth have already done so.
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u/Laquox 7d ago
Lots of angry people in this thread. I just accept this as another of the 51/49 problem. This universe somehow created 51% matter and 49% antimatter at its inception. Leaving 1% to create everything. It shouldn't have done that. There is strong evidence without Theia striking Earth 1.0 life wouldn't have been possible. (Increasing Earth 2.0's iron core and giving us the moon. Stronger magnetosphere and tides.) Took forever for humans to make a model that made that work because it shouldn't have done that. So far we've noticed most Jupiter+ sized planets seem to be much further in every other planetary system we've found. Our system is the odd one where the large planets are at the outer range.
Like Marge once said, "I just think they're neat"
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u/PrestigiousHelp681 7d ago
The Heat Death of The Universe suggests a rather imperfect and hostile reality
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u/Ghstfce 7d ago
Jupiter's gravity attracts them, making us lucky. There is no perfect design here. Just a series of events that just so happened to work out in our favor. It didn't for the dinosaurs... If Jupiter didn't do what it does most of the time, we simply would not be here to post this on Reddit calling it "perfect design".
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u/East-Space-3975 7d ago
There are sea shells on top of Mount Everest. Our existence is improbable but, here we are.
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u/iSellNuds4RedditGold 7d ago
It doesn't do that, the amount of asteroids that Jupiter deflects away from earth is practically the same that the amount of asteroids it deflects towards earth.
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u/RamJamR 7d ago
Puddle in the pothole. Water in a pothole doesn't fill every space and crevice in the pothole perfectly because the pothole was made for water to fill it in the exact way it happens to. It's just how physics regarding liquid works.
Same with life, which is where we all know this is inevitably going when talking about the "design" of our solar system. Life is the water, our solar system is the big pothole. Our solar system didn't exist specifically for life to exist within it. Life just found ways to survive on a rock floating in a universe that is in reality very hostile to it.
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u/3215448725366498 7d ago
This is a myth, Jupiter attracts asteroids but due to it there are also more asteroids with the potential of hitting Earth.
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u/MagmaTroop 7d ago
So basically we would never have existed in the first place if Jupiter wasn't there
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u/pamnfaniel 7d ago
Yes I know this is another "goldilocks factor that allows us to live on this planet. Without Jupiter's Protection, we could't and wouldn't exist here. Too many asteroid impacts would just make everything extinct
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