“Commander, it’s the emergency broadcasting system! The object is coming in at insanely high speeds! This is not a drill!”
“Great Scott! What shall we do? To the emergency chamber!”
The Emergency Response team quickly began the descent into the emergency chamber in order to figure out the solution. The fate of the world as we know it was in their hands.
“Tell me what we know!” commanded the Commander.
“A large meteor is on a crash course with earth and is moving at incredibly high speeds!” claimed Steve, who was monitoring the emergency systems.
“What will happen if it hits earth?”
“Most likely immediate death for almost the entire population, the rest will die slowly in the wasteland that is left over.” “Do we have any ideas on how to stop it? Explode it? Change its course? Anything?!” “Not at the moment, but we have our best minds for towards a quick solution.” “How long until impact?” “It is impossible to tell due to the high speeds, all we can figure out as of now is the distance, but that is rapidly shrinking.” Time continued to drag on as the team through idea after idea out, each seeming more implausible and illogical as the one before. It was beginning to reach a point where a group of scientist were in fact searching for a way to create a divine intervention to save the day, when suddenly Eric, who had been quite through the entire meeting spoke up. “What if we send a spare rover onto the asteroid?” The entire room fell silent. How could a rover stop an asteroid? What kind of idea was that? But Eric then continued. “We shoot the rover at the asteroid and have it land on it. …show more content…
After landing we do a simple length contraction, that gives us the distance to impact from our reference point after the landing. Then we use to rover signal to give us the speed of the asteroid, then calculating it time. After that we do a time dilation to determine the time we have left in our reference frame. After that we can determine its location and how long we will have to create a missile to destroy it, however I suggest creating a generic missile framework now.”
This initially stupid idea now seemed like the divine intervention the world would need. Immediately the scientist began to work. Soon a rover was retrieved and prep for launch. In the essence of time the group decided to fire the rover at .8c towards the asteroid, an unprecedented speed, but none the less required.
The rover was then launched and the crew began to wait. Soon the system announced that impact had been made. After checking the vitals of the rover it was discovered that the rover had traveled 600,000,000 meters in its reference frame. Now the scientists began the mind boggling math equations that made them question life itself. After much math work the group was split between the impact happening 360,000,000 meters away or 1,000,000,000 meters away, a very important difference. Then again Eric spoke up with his explanation. “I believe we can all agree that we first must find 1-(v2c2) and I also believe that the consensus is that the answer to that is .6. Am I correct?” Everyone nodded. “Ok now here is the difference, half of us have multiplied 600,000,000 meter, the distance the rover traveled in its reference frame, by .6, getting 360,000,000 meters, while the other have have divided it by .6, getting 1,000,000,000 meters. Is that also true?” Another wave of nods. “The correct answer is those saying 1,000,000,000 meters. This is because the initial equation is L=L01-(v2c2) and normally we would plug in 600,000,000 meters for L0, however for this time we don’t. Usually we plug in for L0because that is the distance from our point of view, however that is not the distance we have. The distance we have is the distance the rover clocked on its odometer, and since it was moving faster it will have a different distance than the distance for our reference frame. That is what L is. Since we know L, that is where 600,000,000 meters