3 ms·
Everything in space is about distance - want to stop an asteroid walloping the Earth? Nudge it when it is a few million [time or distance] unit away, and it wi
by DrBazza 3y ago
Everything in space is about distance - want to stop an asteroid walloping the Earth? Nudge it when it is a few million [time or distance] unit away, and it will miss the earth. You could imagine a future spacecraft might have a leading arrowtip also with a field, many miles in front of it to deflect dust and so on.
- euroderf 3y agoA ship moving at a double-digit percentage of light speed, with an ablative pilot craft ahead of it.
- regularfry 3y agoMoving at significant proportions of c makes a very brief light show of pretty much any ablative solid, unfortunately. It's worth doing the maths on, for instance, how much ice at 4K you would need to dissipate the energy released by running into a 5g pebble at 0.2c. It's... not a small volume.
- donkers 3y agoYour comment made me try this out on wolfram alpha. Kinetic energy of 1 gram with velocity of 0.1 C is 452.78 gigajoules. Energy of the Hiroshima bomb is 6.3x10^13 joules. It would take 139.14 grams of matter at a velocity of 0.1 C to have the kinetic energy equivalent to the energy released by the bomb. So wow, yes, stopping even a small amount of stuff at those speeds is no joke.