Trigger Happy
of aim) at that high speed, he will have moved a pathetic total of four inches sideways in the time it takes your laser beam to travel from your guns to his hull. So unless he is very small, he is still very blown up. Eat dust, little green man.
But perhaps our alien has very, very quick reactions. Maybe he can spot your lasers firing, and immediately engage some sort of warp drive to get him the hell out of there in time. No, again. Because he cannot see your lasers coming until some light from your firing guns has traveled to his eyes. Unfortunately, your lasers arrive at precisely the same time. As soon as he sees you fire, he’s dead.14 And thanks to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, one of whose principles is that light appears to travel at a constant speed regardless of the speed and direction of travel of any observer, the alien is still fried the moment he sees you fire even if he is running away in the opposite direction as close to the speed of light as his little fusion engines can manage.
That’s not all. Most of the time the lasers in this epic space battle should be completely invisible. The
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14 This example is modified from one given in Lawrence M. Krauss’s, The Physics of Star Trek, p. 165.
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