So, how many nickles does the "at least one planet in the solar system was blown up during a war with its neighbor and became the asteroid belt" trope have?
Because, that episode of snw just sounded like the backstory in Starfinder right? (also my One Piece theory??? surely that's worth a penny?)
To answer your tag, yes, this was an element of science fiction decades ago like the Gentle Giants of Ganymede novels from James P. Hogan. But this trope as well as the ancient civilization on Mars stories went the way of the dinosaurs (full pun intended) decades ago as scientists determined that there had never been a 5th planet and that Mars lost its atmosphere and water around 4 billion years ago. Even ignoring the scientific inaccuracy in reviving these very old story lines, I personally felt that these elements killed any dramatic tension in the plot as things came to a head as the outcome was so very obvious. Don't get me wrong. I like SNW, but I felt this story tried to do too much and fell flat at least for me.
To have had the Enterprise involved in the Chicxulub impact, I would've had the Enterprise getting the iridium from an asteroid that's about to pass within a few thousand kilometers of Earth. They send a team to Earth on a shuttle to get dna samples as you can get a very wide variety of dna from air and water samples. Also, they'll have a chance to record the closest known flyby of an asteroid passing the Earth. But things go wrong. The shuttle crashes. The mining of the iridium releases a huge pocket of volatile gases that alters the path of asteroid and the projected impact site makes them realize that they're responsible for the Chicxulub impact. There's a daring rescue with the story climax being the rescue shuttle taking off just ahead of the ground shock waves reaching the landing team but the shuttle has to deal with all of issues with the impact debris that was thrown into space but is now falling back into the atmosphere creating the heat pulse that will kill all the dinosaurs.
