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If they are so much as inconvenienced by our probes, they are not a greater power but bumbling roboticists like us.
by lolc 2y ago
If they are so much as inconvenienced by our probes, they are not a greater power but bumbling roboticists like us.
- withinboredom 2y ago1 gram at an appreciable amount of c is about as much energy as a nuke. Getting hit by a swarm of these while on a Sunday drive would fuck you up, no matter how powerful you are. The real reason there isn’t a moon colony? Person gets fired and loses their shit, starts tossing 1-2 km sized rocks down the gravity well and … we all die. Throwing shit in space is a sure fire way to piss off any species.
- kadoban 2y agoIt would take an insane amount of energy to throw that rock.
- withinboredom 2y agoBut you only need one. Maybe two for good measure
- kadoban 2y agoSame with a nuke or an engineered pathogen. Throwing rocks from the Moon is less practical though, people would see you setting up the universe's biggest launch pad or railgun for years. It would be the least stealthy, most telegraphed apocalypse possible.
- withinboredom 2y agoIt only takes a 50-meter (radius) rock to destroy a city, a 240-meter rock to destroy an entire region, and a 4 km rock to destroy the planet. So, I guess it depends on what you want to accomplish, whether they see it coming or not.
- kadoban 2y ago"Only". Those are huge! Especially when you consider the city you have to build around them to launch the damn things.
- withinboredom 2y agoThe required delta-v isn't all that much from the moon, and it's more about the mass and speed than the actual shape of the rock.
- withinboredom 2y agoTo throw a 100 meter rock that would wipe out NY city (and then some), we could do that with modern technology... assuming the rocket never had to slow down.