Have you ever imagined, what would happen if a turkey flew straight from space to Earth at the speed of light? Will the Earth be severely damaged by a 5-6kg chicken possessing the ability to move super fast, or remain unscathed as if nothing happened?
To answer this very interesting question, we first need to take a closer look at the speed of light. Accordingly, light moves at a speed of nearly 300,000 kilometers per second (about 1 billion kilometers per hour). This means, if a turkey could travel at the speed of light, it could go around the Earth 7.5 times in just one second. Meanwhile, it also takes just over a second to reach the Moon, and about 8 minutes to reach the Sun.
What if a roast turkey – a familiar Western Thanksgiving dish – crashed into Earth?
Notably, the turkey itself also possesses an extremely terrible “destructive” ability if it moves at the highest speed achievable in the universe. According to Einstein’s famous equation E = mc² (where E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light), mass and energy are directly proportional to each other by the constant c. Energy can be converted to mass and vice versa. In other words, the faster an object moves, the greater its mass.
For example, if the turkey was traveling at 10% of the speed of light, its mass would be only 0.5% more than normal. But if it were to travel at 90% of the speed of light, its mass would double. Notably, when the chicken’s movement speed reaches the speed of light, its mass (and energy) will become infinite. Even so, this is considered impossible, as no normal object can travel at or faster than the speed of light.
However, even when traveling at 99.99% of the speed of light, the damage the turkey does to the Earth is immense , thanks to the tremendous amount of energy it generates. Specifically, when it plunges into Earth’s atmosphere, it will create a series of continuous explosions 40,000 times more powerful than the meteorite explosion that occurred over the city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, which caused 1000 people were injured.
This is just one of the many damage a turkey does when it hits Earth at the speed of light. To know more about the terrible power the turkey can have on our planet, please watch the video made by the famous scientific Youtube channel WHAT IF below.