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Picture the scene: after months of extraplanetary travel, a Terran no win, no fee lawyer lands his shuttlecraft on the right lump of orbiting rock and serves the Asteroid Emperor with the papers relating to a personal injury claim after an Earth boy is struck by one of his subjects' zero-gravity golf balls. While the space travel part isn't terribly likely, neither is the bit about a teenager being hit by a meteorite, but that's true.
The 14-year-old German schoolboy, according to the Telegraph, saw a "ball of light" hurtle out of the sky toward him, which hit his hand on its way to creating a foot-wide crater in the ground behind him. It turned out to be a pea-sized magnetic rock, which had been travelling at 30,000mph - had it hit him more than a glancing blow, he would have been very likely to have suffered very serious personal injury.
He's now in very select company. There is only one other person known to have survived being struck by an extraterrestrial rock falling on her, a woman in Alabama who was woken from a nap on her couch by a grapefruit-sized rock that - fortunately - bounced off a piece of furniture before hitting her in the hip in 1954. Beyond that, there's a couple of stories of damage done to property, such as cars, that would be less likely to feature on a futuristic personal injury solicitor's to-do list. And that's it, apart from rumours that mysterious plane crashes have had interstellar causes.
But the politician Lembit Opik was teased mercilessly in recent years over his insistence that the Earth needed a warning system for meteorites and asteroids that might collide with the earth; he clearly felt that the risk was serious enough to be looked at. If such a thing had been built, and our German boy had still been hit, would he now have the chance to put together a product liability claim on the basis that the protection system had failed to do what his EU tax payments had paid for?
That's also unlikely. So while exploring these counterfactual situations, I don't want to lose the idea of meteor-riding aliens playing golf in the asteroid belt without due care and attention, and therefore exposing innocent Earthlings to unwarranted danger. Perhaps the course owner needs to undertake a serious risk assessment of his enterprise?
Of course, there are problems to this too - given that it's already difficult dealing with the differing legislation of two countries in a holiday accident, imagine what difficulties interstellar compensation claims would cause. The trial could be held in neutral space between the two jurisdictions - no win, no fee, no gravity.
