space girl comic
i really need to stop trying to explain complex relativity concepts in like two panels. i can barely fit the text.
interestingly the guy who speculated about the existence of vulcan wasn’t just any random astronmer. it was urbain le verrier, who used the exact same method to predict the existence of neptune based on the orbit of uranus in 1846. so statistically speaking when he said “there might be a planet here”, until then he was right 100% of the time.
fun fact: if you lie around in your room all day, you’ve technically moved further than someone who ran a marathon from east to west in the same time, relative to the centre of the earth.
unfortunately, fitness apps don’t seem to understand this for some strange reason.
look at me, actually drawing launch towers properly for once.
plugging some quick numbers into wolfram alpha, the energy required to propel a 100 metric tonne ship to 99% the speed of light is roughly 5.472×10^22 joules. this is equivalent to 1/9th the energy of the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, or 225,000x the energy of the tsar bomba, the largest nuclear bomb in history. and that’s not even to mention the energy required to stop, come back, and stop again.
which is to say, sedna’s being a little optimistic in her dream here.