[meteorite-list] Crackpot impact theory

From: Sterling K. Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat Sep 24 22:22:03 2005
Message-ID: <433609A8.7EED0C47_at_bhil.com>

Congratulations, Darren!

    You are the road to discovering the Ultimate
Weapon! It isn't the Death Star from Star Wars,
or the X-Ray Laser, or the Hydrogen Bomb, no,
no, no, no...

    It's the Hyper Kinetic Gun!

    A one ton slug of iron accelerated in a rail gun
to 1% of the speed of light toward a planet would
strike with the kinetic energy of a 1,000,000 ton
object traveling at the "mere" cosmic velocity of
30 km/sec.

    At 10% of the speed of light, it would have the
the kinetic energy of a 100,000,000 ton object!

    Since you could accelerate an iron slug at 10,000
gee's, the rail gun wouldn't have to be more than a
few kilometers long (in free fall vacuum). You'd need
some dam big condensers, though...


Sterling
-------------------------------------------------
Darren Garrison wrote:

> On Sat, 24 Sep 2005 20:27:27 -0400, "Pete Pete" <rsvp321_at_hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >While critical thinking and skepticism are healthy in science, so is a
> >certain amount of objectivity.
>
> <snip>
>
> >scrutiny (see current issue of "Astronomy"), I think I'll wait for a more
> >detailed paper before judging Mr Firestone's conclusions.
>
> There is such a thing as having your mind so open that your brain falls out your ear. I am NOT
> willing to entertain the possibility that
>
> Let's look at the numbers as given by the article and assume for the moment that the article isn't
> orders of magnitude incorrect on any of the figures. The supernova was supposed to be 250
> light-years away and happen 41,000 years ago. The multiple-kilometer comet was supposed to have hit
> North America 13,000 years ago. So that means that this multiple-kilometer comet, which coalesced
> while speeding outward from the supernova from dust and gas, traveled 250 light years in 28,800
> years. Which is 0.00868 light years per year, so thus 0.00868 of the speed of light. Around
> 300,000 kilometers per second times 0.00868 is about 2600 kilometers per second. Anyone care to
> calculate the amount of kinetic energy in a 10 kilometer object hittingng the Earth's atmosphere at
> 2600 kilometers per second? Or even a 1 kilometer object at 260 kilometers per second?
>
> A ten kilometer "comet" traveling at 2600 kilometers per second strking the Earth's atmosphere
> 13,000 years ago would be somewhat more noticable than a few grains of metal left in the soil. Such
> things as, oh, I donno, the atmosphere stripping away, the oceans of the world boiling and the
> continents melting, for example. Even if the story were off by orders of magnitude on any of the
> figures, it would still be crackpottery.
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Received on Sat 24 Sep 2005 10:21:28 PM PDT