By my back-of-the -envelope math it is 4,500,000,000 joules. The Hiroshima bomb is listed at approximately 10,000,000,000,000 joules. I bet xkcd is far more accurate, though.
How did you calculate that? The question didn’t even mention a specific speed, just “near the speed of light”.
The kinetic energy for a grain of sand near the speed of light is somewhere between “quite a lot” and “literally infinity” (which is, in a sense, the reason you can’t actually reach light speed without a way to supply infinite energy).
By my back-of-the -envelope math it is 4,500,000,000 joules. The Hiroshima bomb is listed at approximately 10,000,000,000,000 joules. I bet xkcd is far more accurate, though.
Did you assume the sand as having no velocity relative to the object going C?
How did you calculate that? The question didn’t even mention a specific speed, just “near the speed of light”.
The kinetic energy for a grain of sand near the speed of light is somewhere between “quite a lot” and “literally infinity” (which is, in a sense, the reason you can’t actually reach light speed without a way to supply infinite energy).
Ke=1/2 M V^2 Not relativistic. So wildly low. But certainly a low bound. My point being that nuclear bomb grade energy is certainly in the ballpark.