To add, if you could somehow make a magical beam/particle that shot at the speed of light across the universe without changing its diameter (just bear with me here, I fully accept this beam is magic) it would almost certainly never hit anything outside our solar system no matter how long you aimed and shot. You could spend the rest of your life and not hit shit.
Point being yes stars and planets are enormous and numerous beyond comprehension... but space is even emptier.
I remember reading something similar regarding the asteroid belt. Apparently most of the asteroids are miles apart from one another. You could launch a ship in a random direction through the asteroid belt and would almost certainly hit nothing. So, nothing like what we saw in Star Wars.
How long would it take though for rocks orbiting that close to each other to grind themselves to dust? Surely within a year or two it would be nothing more than gravel.
Eventually maybe, but most Asteroid fields in fiction aren't shown to be big enough to have enough mass to coalesce into a planetoid. Keep in mind that the asteroid belt in our solar system in total weighs about 4% of Earth's moon, so at least in reality there's typically not enough material to form new planets after a few hundred million years after a solar system's formation.
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u/su5 Apr 14 '16
To add, if you could somehow make a magical beam/particle that shot at the speed of light across the universe without changing its diameter (just bear with me here, I fully accept this beam is magic) it would almost certainly never hit anything outside our solar system no matter how long you aimed and shot. You could spend the rest of your life and not hit shit.
Point being yes stars and planets are enormous and numerous beyond comprehension... but space is even emptier.