Hello and HOW do I do? I posted this elsewhere but I am not sure which area is the best place for this thread to appear, so I am trying it here.

I am working on a Sci-Fi novel. I have found a human culture on the inside of an ice shelled asteroid (Like Ceres, only smaller). It is like a "natural" rotating space station.

I need to do some reverse engineering now to figure out how the people got there (WITHOUT TIME TRAVEL, without time warp, or worm holes, and NO ancient Space Technology).

I am hoping that I can work up an story from a "mega-volcano," with people and resources sealed inside a chunk of ejecta, that will then rendezvous with the passing asteroid (which actually triggered the tectonic activity).

HOW did the people from 3k BCE get to the Asteroid in the first place and how, in the second place, did they develop and survive until they were discovered in 2050? The asteroid is found to be inhabited by FTs (Former Terrestrials) during Asteroid Resource Collection (a mining operation) which is a phase of a new WASA program called M.O.V.E. (Mars Outpost Viability Endeavor).

I am having a good bit of fun with the "IMAGINEERING" but the engineering is a real struggle and I need help.

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Forming opinions as we speak

Even if a group of humans along with enough resources managed to somehow be ejected off Earth and survive, how do they survive the impact when they collide with your ice shelled asteriod?

The same aliens that built the Pyramids put them there.

Or, they're not humans at all. They are a species of slim molds that formed in that asteroid and they developed intelligence and radio communication. They have been listening in on human culture and they can reform themselves to be like humans.

Or, along those lines, Thera blew off a statue that the slim molds found and imitated.

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Fields of Space

LOGIC, n.
The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

In the Year 2525.

"One small step for (a) man. One giant leap for mankind".

If an astronaut doesn't need good grammar, niether does you.

Host of Seraphim

Sounds like a good mystery for part of the plot to be involved in.
I'd go by either aliens, or ancient tech that got lost. OR that humans are actually neither from Earth nor from the asteroid but another place, and Earth is just another lost colony.

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

I do not think you can escape some sort of alien intervention to create the setting you are after. Any natural "transport" mechanism such as the one you outlined above would be far to violent for humans or any other multi-cellular animal to survive. At best such a mechanism could only convey bacteria to your hollow asteroid.

Then this asteroid would need to provide a viable biosphere which would mean that as well as humans there would need to be a range of other organisms for food as well as O2 production. So I do not think there is anyway to achieve this without some other intelligence and technology. However that does not mean that is has to be a still viable alien species, perhaps it could be a long dead one.

Here is an outline - a long dead but benevolent alien species which has an interest in life in all its forms and seeks to preserve cultivate and spread organic life where it can find it in the universe. Long ago it send out automated probes to gather samples from those planets where viable ecosystems have evolved and then transports them mostly as spores or single frozen cells to other places which have potential as life bearing habitats, where it will "seed" those worlds. We might assume that there were no alien abductions as such - these probes would only need to collect a sample of a few cells from each animal or plant all of which could be done non invasively and probably without the donor being aware of it. Of course such an automated probe could not simply eject a handfull of assorted cells on a new world and then expect a viable human society to develop. There would have to be a process cultivating the cells into viable whole organisms as well as preparing the environment for them to be released into. Therefore there would be a fair bit of engineering involved here, though nothing that should be beyond the capability of an advanced Automated Seeding Probe. People on this forum has suggested before that such automated systems might well be used in the future by humans to spread our own species across inter-stellar distances as such systems can deliver a lot potential organisms with a very small payload mass.

So that is the engineering solution - Now you need to overcome a couple of "plot holes" (A) why should such an advanced species decide to use this technology to spread other forms of life rather than its own. Perhaps they no longer existed in cellular form but still had a sort of nostalgic belief in the value of organic life. (B) How is it that this probe ended up seeding this ice ball asteroid rather than a larger and more suitable planet. Here we would have to introduce some sort of malfunction that the probe itself was incapable of repairing and which while it allowed it to carry out its seeding functions, somehow prevented it from delivering its payload to a more suitable planet, that would suggest some problem with its main propulsion system which it was unable to fix, who knows.

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Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.