system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If your spaceship was travelling near speed of light, would hitting a piece of space dust make it explode?
gpt
Depends on how close to the speed of light.

The way to approach it is to assume that the spaceship is at rest, and then take the space dust as traveling close to the speed of light.

Let's say this space dust has a mass of 1 microgram (10^-6 gram). If you are traveling at 99% of the speed of light, then the space dust would contain 5.5x10^8 J of energy. In contrast, a 25 g bullet traveling at 1000 m/s has 1.25x10^4 J of energy. So that space dust would be like 10 000 bullets hitting the space ship.