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

On 2/23/2025 11:23 AM, Paul S Person wrote:

On Sat, 22 Feb 2025 20:30:51 -0600, Lynn McGuire
<lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
 

On 2/22/2025 6:04 PM, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

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.

>
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.

No, it was the Trinity fission test:
from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)#Personnel
"Enrico Fermi offered to take wagers among the top physicists and military present on whether the atmosphere would ignite, and if so whether it would destroy just the state or incinerate the entire planet.    [93][94] This last result had been previously calculated by Bethe to be    almost impossible,[95][96][e] although for a while it had caused some of    the scientists some anxiety. Bainbridge was furious with Fermi for    frightening the guards, some of whom asked to be relieved;[98] his own    biggest fear was that nothing at all would happen, in which case he    would have to return to the tower to investigate.[99]  "
pt