Warning: There is sound, and a lot of it!
You just don't hear it in empty space.
This is likely to evolve into the intro; the plan is to show an asteroid descending into the planet as a meteor. What I'm uncertain of (as a screenwriter, too) is whether to open with it during an academic talk about it, given by our hero; or to pan from it to the middle of the action. There's also a possibility of pulling an In Media Res; but that's something I'd come back to later.
Further refinements include replacing that white area with a distribution of dramatized osmium crystals, as seen in another animation; this is very much a rough, but I'm feeling good about it.