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I was calculating the damage of weaponized high speed rail and wolfram alpha told me "infinity joules" and was confused where I messed up the math.

it turns out by "high speed" you don't usually mean "light speed", which would indeed give you infinity joules.

Sir Isaac Newton may be the deadliest son of a bitch in space, but if you hit LA with a train going lightspeed, Einstein will tell Newton to step aside and let the big boys play.

I was joking on Tumblr that two things I think the US should do are:
1. Revive the Superconducting Supercollider project (canceled in 1993)
2. Build a ton of high speed rail.

So why not combine the two? With a Superconducting Supercollider Train you could cut the travel time between New York & LA down from 6.5 hours to 13 milliseconds!

with the minor downside that if the brakes fail you'll hit LA with more kinetic energy than a supernova, instantly destroying the earth, then the rest of the solar system and any inhabitable worlds within 53 parsecs.

This, by the way (looking up some formulas on Atomic Rockets and a few google searches on the mass of trains and speed of the Large Hadron Collider) is more math than was done on the Hyperloop at any point

multiple people have pointed out that even if the breaks work, they'd have to dissipate 10^46 joules of kinetic energy, which is a LOT of heat to dump into the area.

@foone good news! you won't need brakes, because the hypersonic bow shock in front of the train that is carrying on nuclear fusion of air molecules will definitely slow the train all on its own

Dana Fried

@foone

(it will also destroy the train almost instantly, but the net momentum of the debris will definitely decrease over time)

@tess yeah it'd very quickly stop being a "train" and become an "expanding plasma cloud"

@foone @tess I've already bought tickets for the first NY-LA trip on this train, but you make it sound dangerous.

@tsturm @foone @tess I mean, I don’t think being on the train is any more dangerous than being anywhere else on the planet.

@tess @foone How much time are we talking about here?

Because I have a feeling that for the first 53 parsecs (172 years) worth of it the momentum of debris is rather well conserved.