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hardervalue t1_isk9w74 wrote

>Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.

>
> - Douglas Adams

The average distance between large asteroids in the asteroid belt is far greater than the distance from Earth to the Moon. In many cases it's larger than the distance between Earth and Mars.

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cjameshuff t1_islkae4 wrote

Even that's understating it a bit. You could put 5 other objects in Earth's orbit around the sun, as far from their neighbors (including Earth) as they are from the sun.

And asteroid sizes roughly follow a power law, with many, many more small asteroids than large ones. The sixth most massive asteroid has only 2% of the mass of the 5 most massive asteroids, which together hold over 60% of the mass of the entire belt. You could put 60% of the belt's mass in Earth's orbit without any of it getting closer to Earth than to any of the other objects or the sun itself.

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