US Politics
Donald Johnson on July 7, 2017
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David Brin
This is off my usual topic when ranting about the New York Times, but I found it funny seeing how the NYT goes about retracting a dumb mistake. It probably isn’t fair to generalize from this, but it is tempting. Not Middle East material, but I wanted to share.
I enjoyed the above article in last Sunday’s Times Magazine quite a bit– “A new initiative to beam messages into space may be our best shot yet at learning whether we’re alone in the universe. There’s just one problem: What if we’re not?” Author Steven Johnson pointed out that those who receive the message might seek “the destruction of all life on earth.”
But unfortunately Johnson quoted a science fiction writer, David Brin, who claimed that in 50 years we would be able to launch a few kilograms at half the speed of light (maybe so) and (here is the mistake) the energy would make the impact that killed the dinosaurs look small.
This is a mistake a bright high school kid with an interest in physics could have caught. The energy of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is usually estimated to be in the 100 million
megaton range. The energy of ” several” kilograms going at half the speed of light is roughly 16 to 17 megatons if we take several to mean 5.
Continue
Donald Johnson on July 7, 2017
Adjust Font Size
David Brin
This is off my usual topic when ranting about the New York Times, but I found it funny seeing how the NYT goes about retracting a dumb mistake. It probably isn’t fair to generalize from this, but it is tempting. Not Middle East material, but I wanted to share.
I enjoyed the above article in last Sunday’s Times Magazine quite a bit– “A new initiative to beam messages into space may be our best shot yet at learning whether we’re alone in the universe. There’s just one problem: What if we’re not?” Author Steven Johnson pointed out that those who receive the message might seek “the destruction of all life on earth.”
But unfortunately Johnson quoted a science fiction writer, David Brin, who claimed that in 50 years we would be able to launch a few kilograms at half the speed of light (maybe so) and (here is the mistake) the energy would make the impact that killed the dinosaurs look small.
This is a mistake a bright high school kid with an interest in physics could have caught. The energy of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is usually estimated to be in the 100 million
megaton range. The energy of ” several” kilograms going at half the speed of light is roughly 16 to 17 megatons if we take several to mean 5.
Continue
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