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  • Re: "Red Lightning (A Thunder and Lightning Novel)" by John Varley

    From Christian Weisgerber@21:1/5 to Lynn McGuire on Sun Feb 23 00:04:18 2025
    On 2025-02-22, Lynn McGuire <[email protected]> wrote:

    The book starts off with a space ship hitting the Earth at 0.999999 of
    light speed in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida. Millions dead
    with the 300 foot tsunami that washed over Florida and Caribbean.

    They seem to come off rather lightly. In _The Killing Star_,
    relativistic bombardment causes a gamma flash that sterilizes the
    hemisphere. (More projectiles are coming.) As in, there are dead
    whales on the beach and they don't rot, because there are no more
    living bacteria.

    I wonder which is the more realistic scenario.

    IIRC, the _Hostile Takeover_ trilogy also featured a big-ass railgun
    in orbit around the planet Bakunin to shoot projectiles at relativistic
    speed, however plausible that is, and they weren't so much about
    making holes in the ground but creating a plasma tunnel and a
    resulting X-ray flash to sterilize any pesky nanomachines.

    There seems to be a school of thought out there that hitting a
    planetary atmosphere with a relativistic missile will make Chicxulub
    look like a mere unpleasantness. How realistic that is, I don't
    know.

    --
    Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul S Person@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Sun Feb 23 08:23:12 2025
    On Sat, 22 Feb 2025 20:30:51 -0600, Lynn McGuire
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 2/22/2025 6:04 PM, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
    On 2025-02-22, Lynn McGuire <[email protected]> wrote:

    The book starts off with a space ship hitting the Earth at 0.999999 of
    light speed in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida. Millions dead
    with the 300 foot tsunami that washed over Florida and Caribbean.

    They seem to come off rather lightly. In _The Killing Star_,
    relativistic bombardment causes a gamma flash that sterilizes the
    hemisphere. (More projectiles are coming.) As in, there are dead
    whales on the beach and they don't rot, because there are no more
    living bacteria.

    I wonder which is the more realistic scenario.

    IIRC, the _Hostile Takeover_ trilogy also featured a big-ass railgun
    in orbit around the planet Bakunin to shoot projectiles at relativistic
    speed, however plausible that is, and they weren't so much about
    making holes in the ground but creating a plasma tunnel and a
    resulting X-ray flash to sterilize any pesky nanomachines.

    There seems to be a school of thought out there that hitting a
    planetary atmosphere with a relativistic missile will make Chicxulub
    look like a mere unpleasantness. How realistic that is, I don't
    know.

    Robert Oppenheimer was seriously worried that the first nuclear
    explosion was going to set Earth's atmosphere on fire. Luckily, he was >wrong.

    Fusion bomb, IIRC -- the kind that turns hydrogen into helium with
    explosive effects.

    And the atmosphere /does/ have a lot of hydrogen in it.

    But, yes, he was wrong.
    --
    "Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
    Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
    Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)