A Wikipedia primer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle
As a guy whose favorite genre of fiction is science fiction, and I've read a large number of books and have seen most of the sci-fi TV shows and films ever made, I got to thinking one day - what would occur if we were actually able to accomplish space travel at relativistic speeds? Meaning, space travel at significant fractions of the speed of light.
In the books I've read, I eventually came across one in which relativistic kill vehicles are used as weapons in warfare. Quite interesting stuff.
It sparked curiosity in me - if we were able to accelerate a space vehicle to relativistic speeds, and it were to impact an object, say, the Earth, what kind of destruction would it do?
I took two figures - the first being a mass equal to that of the space shuttle (~2 million kg), and picked a speed, in this case, 50% of the speed of light (~150,000,000 meters per second), and plugged it into a kinetic energy calculator (http://www.1728.org/energy.htm).
The result I came up with was 5.3776e+6 megatons (TNT equivalent).
Or, converted from scientific notation to regular decimal, 5,377,600 megatons.
By comparison, the Chicxulub Impact Event that occurred 65 million years ago is estimated to have had an impact equivalent to 130 million megatons. A 48.5 million kg mass traveling at 50% C, if the calculations are to hold true, would impact with the same energy. Obviously, greater masses traveling at these speeds, the magnitude of the impact would scale with mass.
If we were to develop this technology that enabled us to travel at relativistic speeds - it seems likely it would result in our own extinction. A world-ender - all that may be left of the Earth is an asteroid belt circling the Sun at 93 million miles. Perhaps within months, or years/decades at the most. An impact might come about via pilot error, malfunction, or even a hijacking and intentional targeting of the planet - the end result would be just the same.
Perhaps the final and ultimate occurrence of Murphy's Law - anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. I can't imagine something not going wrong if we were to have this technology at our disposal.
Which leaves me wondering - have these factors at all been taken into consideration by scientists and engineers who theorize about these technologies, and wish to develop space travel at these sorts of speeds?
It also left me wondering - maybe this is the answer to the Fermi Paradox? That the reason we've never been contacted is that every civilization that may have ever developed this technology, soon went extinct by their own hand shortly thereafter?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle
As a guy whose favorite genre of fiction is science fiction, and I've read a large number of books and have seen most of the sci-fi TV shows and films ever made, I got to thinking one day - what would occur if we were actually able to accomplish space travel at relativistic speeds? Meaning, space travel at significant fractions of the speed of light.
In the books I've read, I eventually came across one in which relativistic kill vehicles are used as weapons in warfare. Quite interesting stuff.
It sparked curiosity in me - if we were able to accelerate a space vehicle to relativistic speeds, and it were to impact an object, say, the Earth, what kind of destruction would it do?
I took two figures - the first being a mass equal to that of the space shuttle (~2 million kg), and picked a speed, in this case, 50% of the speed of light (~150,000,000 meters per second), and plugged it into a kinetic energy calculator (http://www.1728.org/energy.htm).
The result I came up with was 5.3776e+6 megatons (TNT equivalent).
Or, converted from scientific notation to regular decimal, 5,377,600 megatons.
By comparison, the Chicxulub Impact Event that occurred 65 million years ago is estimated to have had an impact equivalent to 130 million megatons. A 48.5 million kg mass traveling at 50% C, if the calculations are to hold true, would impact with the same energy. Obviously, greater masses traveling at these speeds, the magnitude of the impact would scale with mass.
If we were to develop this technology that enabled us to travel at relativistic speeds - it seems likely it would result in our own extinction. A world-ender - all that may be left of the Earth is an asteroid belt circling the Sun at 93 million miles. Perhaps within months, or years/decades at the most. An impact might come about via pilot error, malfunction, or even a hijacking and intentional targeting of the planet - the end result would be just the same.
Perhaps the final and ultimate occurrence of Murphy's Law - anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. I can't imagine something not going wrong if we were to have this technology at our disposal.
Which leaves me wondering - have these factors at all been taken into consideration by scientists and engineers who theorize about these technologies, and wish to develop space travel at these sorts of speeds?
It also left me wondering - maybe this is the answer to the Fermi Paradox? That the reason we've never been contacted is that every civilization that may have ever developed this technology, soon went extinct by their own hand shortly thereafter?
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