Macroscopic Objects at Relativistic Speed

[cjackson]

How much energy would be required to accelerate something the size of the space station to the same speed as protons colliding at the LHC?

 

[Orodruin]

Have you tried making the computation?

 

[cjackson]

Frankly, I don't know how.

 

[Orodruin]

Do you know how to compute kinetic (or total) energy in relativity?

How would the ratio of the proton and ISS energies look in classical mechanics?

 

[cjackson]

I have no idea.

 

[Orodruin]

What is your physics background? Without knowing more about where you are at and where you need to go, it is difficult to help you. Of course, we could simply give you the final result, but that is not the kind of spirit we are trying to foster, which is to help people think for themselves rather than to simply provide answers.

 

[cjackson]

I have no physics background.

 

[Vanadium 50]

If you have no physics background, it would help to know what kind of answer you are looking for. If we told you "ten zillion ergs", would that be meaningful?

 

[cjackson]

How much greater would the energy requirement be than what humanity has ever generated up to this point? Something like that.

 

[Orodruin]

It would require roughly 80% of all of the energy produced by the Sun in one second. The Sun produces roughly 10¹⁴ times the world electricity production. With current energy production rate, it would take of the order of a million years to generate this amount of energy.

 

[ZapperZ]

How much greater would the energy requirement be than what humanity has ever generated up to this point? Something like that.

Wouldn't you rather learn a little bit about special relativity, the foundation of this knowledge, rather than having this piece of useless information? I bet that you won't even get to use this information on Jeopardy!

Zz.