The physics of stopping a meteor with one punch
The greatest new anime of 2015 has some incredibly powerful feats. Here’s the physics of the most sensational one.
“Human beings are strong because we have the ability to change ourselves.” -Saitama, One Punch Man
Outer space is full of objects, and they all move relative to one another. If all we had were two masses — a system like the Earth and the Sun, for instance — then we wouldn’t have to worry about a third object coming in and messing things up. But our Solar System is very different from that: we have many massive planets and their Moons, we have an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter full of precariously balanced rocks ranging from pebble-sized up to the size of Texas, and we have a slew of icy worlds beyond Neptune that go all the way up to half the size of the continental United States. And that doesn’t even consider the rogue rocky and icy bodies that come from beyond our Solar System. From a certain point of view, Earth is constantly under attack.
Giant impacts from space are a low-frequency, low-risk but high-destruction threat looming over us. And the…
