4 ms·
By the time you see it, it will be too late to respond.
by letstryagain 11y ago
By the time you see it, it will be too late to respond.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y agoWhy? Sure, there's time dilation effects, but they are largely cancelled out. We have less notice for a given distance, but we also can see it coming from farther away.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago.99c means that you have 1/100th as much time to respond relative to the detection distance. Let's say you spot the impactors an entire light-year away. The light will only reach you less than 4 days before impact. Can you put together an effective response plan in 4 days? If instead you spotted them out in the oort cloud (say, 1000 AU away) you would have less than 2 hours to respond.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y agoRight, but that is compensated by the fact that that same time compression also applies to any energy released by the impactor. It'd be putting out >3.5*10^7 watts / m^2 at 0.99c, from our perspective. And a single sand grain hitting it would release 27GJ. Not to mention... How on earth are you managing to keep something together when its being bombarded by hydrogen / helium at 0.99c?