Hitting Earth with a Grain of Sand Going 99.9% the Speed of Light

hey everyone today we're going to be seeing what would happen if the earth were to get hit by a grain of sand going at near the speed of light what would happen to the earth so the reason that I say at near light speeds is because a grain of sand which has mass can never actually reach the speed of light in fact anything that has a rest mass can't reach the speed of light that's because the faster you make something move the more energy you give it and the more energy you give it that means it has more mass because mass is related to energy so that means the harder and harder we try to push something to get to the speed of light the more energy we need to push it to get even closer to the speed of light so because we don't have an infinite amount of energy usually what we do is we say that something is moving at a certain percentage of the speed of light like 99.9 percent the speed of light so now let's see what would happen if we had a grain of sand going 99.9 percent the speed of light now something going that fast is definitely classified as something having a hypervelocity so basically what that means is when you have collisions at hyper velocities it doesn't even matter whether it's a solid or a liquid they all just act the same basically everything just gets obliterated and turn to a vapor for example this image is the result of a lab test between a small sphere of aluminum traveling at 6.8 km/s and a block of aluminum that's 18 centimeters thick so basically just going around 6.8 kilometres per second you get this energy flash of plasma generated and then extremely high temperatures and everything's vaporized so this is a picture of the moment of impact when a hypervelocity projectile hits something you can see the plasma generated it's awesome now what's crazy about this is 6.8 kilometres per second is extremely fast you can see the damage it does to a huge block of aluminum from a little tiny ball but 6.8 kilometres per second is nothing compared to 99.9% of the speed of light so the speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second and that was an impact of just 6.8 kilometers per second so you can imagine the damage that would be done when you just increase the speed at near the speed of light so now we kind of have some expectations for what we might see if the earth were to be hit by a grain of sand going 99.9 percent the speed of light okay first let's get our earth here let's slow down our time because we're gonna be moving extremely fast okay so I'm going to set the launch velocity to 99.9% the speed of light okay so this is my grain of sand so I'm gonna say my grain of sand is about ten milligrams okay I'm gonna push play and see what happens three two one turn up the time okay here we go one millisecond is passing per second [Music] whoa so you can see that there's a crater right here so it looks like a small explosion happen but not really much damage so why didn't it just completely obliterate the whole earth well the reason is because a grain of sand going that speed does have a lot of energy but let's calculate how much energy it actually has now it was going 99.9% the speed of light so that means that it's Lorentz factor was twenty-two point five so that means that I need to calculate whatever its kinetic energy was I multiply it by twenty two point five because it was going at relativistic speeds and if you do that you calculate that you get around twenty tera joules of energy that's about how much energy is in the fuel of a jet airliner so basically imagine a plane exploding in the sky and that's how much energy this grain of sand would have when it hit the sky but what's interesting about a collision like this is it actually wouldn't be as bad as even an explosion in the sky like that because as the grain of sand hits the particles of air as it's moving along it's going to have relativistic collisions that it's going to generate a lot of radiation so what that means is this wouldn't be a point explosion it would basically be spread out through space and so all of the energy wouldn't be exploding in one spot but it would be spread out as it moves down through the layers of the air so most likely there would be a boom in the sky but probably not any effect to people even on the ground below it so even though we see a tiny crater form here this simulation actually was overkill for that it wouldn't even form a crater hitting the earth but that was a tiny grain of sand let's see if we just increase our mass a little bit more let's hit it with a bowling ball now going 99.9 percent the speed of light okay now our bowling ball weighs seven kilograms as opposed to 10 milligrams okay let's see what this does to the earth three two one turn up our time a little okay that had a little bit bigger crater so even then not much happen with even a bowling ball-sized going 99.9% the speed of light hitting earth so let's increase our mass a little bit more so now how about instead of a bowling ball we hit the earth with a Pyramid of Giza going 99.9 percent the speed of light and let's see what happens okay so our pyramid weighs six billion five hundred million kilograms and it's going 99.9% the speed of light now let's see what happens okay three two one let's increase our time a little bit okay it's flying towards Earth here at 99.9 percent the speed of light zoom out a little bit [Music] hitting just above Florida whoa look at it just vaporizing everything oh man just took out all of the United States hey the explosions the shape of a pyramid look at that just obliterated this side of the earth so you can see the fireball moving across the atmosphere around the earth so this just vaporised all of North America and moving into South America so most likely that would kill everybody on earth but we didn't really see any planetary change from this scale so let's continue to increase our mass and see what happens so why don't we add now Halley's Comet going 99.9% the speed of light okay here we got Halley's Comet let's see what happens when it hits Earth going 99.9 percent the speed of light okay three two one there we go [Music] whoa oh man it just completely vaporized everything here Oh see how much it changed so I heated the earth now to 485 degrees Celsius but the earth is still there I think we can do better than this let's increase a little bit more so let's hit it now with a planetoid called Sedna it's around five hundred twenty kilometers in radius three two one [Music] [Music] Oh [Laughter] [Music] and there goes the earth just completely vaporized so this is basically like a supernova explosion now earth and the planetoid Sedna are just completely vaporized now nothing left you just have this expanding gas cloud now nothing [Music] that literally just vaporized earth and it's gone and thanks for watching another episode of the action lab I hope you enjoyed it if you did remember to subscribe if you haven't yet and hit the bell so that you can be notified and know in my latest videos out and thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 2,009,575

Rating: 4.7569828 out of 5

Keywords: speed of light, universe sandbox, graystillplays, what if, physics, realistic physics, the action lab, asteroid, universe sandbox 2 gameplay, universe sandbox 2, action lab, asteroid impact, simulation games, universe sandbox gameplay, vacuum chamber, venus fly trap, neutron star, science experiment, blackest black, black hole

Id: DwgMjr-Qu1Y

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 31 2019