"Nobody ever asked this question" is so rarely actually true. It's usually more like, "people have been asking this question for centuries, and we had a decent idea of what the answer is, but we only just now have the data/understanding/technology/circumstances/math/computational power to be able to answer it definitively." See: Philolaus > Copernicus > Galileo, or Fermat > Wiles, etc.

When it really is true, it's usually because, like, a kid asked a question about The Hulk punching the ISS out of the sky or something similarly bananas. Cute when it's a kid, less so when it's an elderly man trying to use it as evidence that he's qualified to have the nuclear launch codes.