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

On 2025-02-22, Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> 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                          naddy@mips.inka.de