3 ms·
Not really. You could have been within a few thousand miles of this collision and survived. In fact, it would be well below your ability to notice if it were
by jessriedel 10y ago
Not really. You could have been within a few thousand miles of this collision and survived. In fact, it would be well below your ability to notice if it were 1 AU away.
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2651 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2651
Needless to say, you would not survive if 1 solar mass of energy were released in any other form (even neutrinos). The key feature is that that tremendous amount of energy results in only a minuscule deformation of spacetime, i.e., spacetime is extremely stiff.
By the way, the distances are way smaller than merely subatomic. The strain sensitivity is 10^-21, which for the ~ 1 km arms of LIGO is a shift of just 10^-8 the width of an atom.
- sampo 10y ago> you would not survive if 1 solar mass of energy were released in any other form (even neutrinos) But it is close! A supernova releases "few times 10^45 J of neutrino energy" [1], so let's say 5. 5e45 J is about 6e28 kg, while solar mass is 2e30 kg. And neutron radiation from a supernova would get fatal when closer than about 2.3 AU [2]. So we have a factor of 30 from the masses and a factor of 5 (1^2 AU vs. 2.3^2 AU) from the distance. So about 1/150 of solar mass released in neutron radiation would be survivable at the distance of 1 AU. [1] http://wayback.archive.org/web/20120313045458/http://www.andrewkaram.com/andy/pdf/HPJ.pdf http://wayback.archive.org/web/20120313045458/http://www.and... [2] https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/
- jessriedel 10y agoYea, I mentioned this because I just read it a couple of days ago :)