> On Jul 17, 2015, at 12:47 PM, Grimmund <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 1:41 PM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> On the fourth tentacle . . . near-c rocks are beginning to look attractive .
>> . .
>
> PD meson guns.  Pump enough energy into the rock, and it breaks up
> into gravel.  :)

Near-C gravel, which does pretty much the same amount of damage to your target as the original solid does. This is kind of like having a magic anti-bullet that turns an incoming 7.56 round to buckshot :-/

We had a long discussion of this sort of thing back when we were graced with not one, but two movies in a short time about saving the earth from an oncoming asteroid or comet. Busting it up isn’t sufficient to save us; because whether it’s one large mass or a billion smaller ones, they dump the same amount of energy into the planet when they hit.

A near-c rock is going to have a gargantuan amount of inertial mass that will be well-nigh impossible to deflect. Even turning the damned thing into high-speed plasma won’t help you much….you just get a planet-sized plasma cannon hit.

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs