A man jumps from mars to earth in 5 seconds.

[bob1thousand]

long story short in my story they toss the main villain into space. he floats there for a few minutes contemplating nihilism and hit into Mars. the second he arrives he kicks off the planet, destroying it and sending him back to earth in 5 seconds.
how fast would he be and how much of an impact would he create?

 

[pmmg]

Well...assuming the planets were somewhat close to their closest point, light can get from Earth to Mars in 3 mins. You did not say where he started, but if he was coming from Mars to Earth in 5 mins, he would be going about 60% of the speed of light. Unless there was some type of improbability drive involved, in which case...he could be everywhere pretty fast.

 

[bob1thousand]

Well...assuming the planets were somewhat close to their closest point, light can get from Earth to Mars in 3 mins. You did not say where he started, but if he was coming from Mars to Earth in 5 mins, he would be going about 60% of the speed of light. Unless there was some type of improbability drive involved, in which case...he could be everywhere pretty fast.

he started at earth. got sent to mars and kicked off, returning in 5 seconds

 

[pmmg]

If he went from Earth to Mars, and then from Mars to Earth in 5 minutes, he is moving at 1.2x the speed of light with the same assumptions. You had said he floated for a few minutes, so...how many is a few? Also...its unlikely Mars and Earth will be at their closest points to each other. If this was to happen today, it would take 5 mins for light to get from Earth to Mars, so he would need to move at 2x the speed of light.

 

[bob1thousand]

I'm not sure how long he was floating but that wasn't the important part. he pushed off of mars and returned to earth in five seconds

 

[skip.knox]

If it's five seconds, then the laws of physics do not apply, so you are free to make up whatever sort of impact or non-impact you like. If you want actual physics, it's going to be longer and the guy is dead.

 

[pmmg]

Oops. I see now i was talking minutes and not seconds. I must work for NASA. Multiply all of that by 60.

 

[Prince of Spires]

As skip.knox mentions, this is simply not possible according to the rules of physics as we know them today. The reason is that the fastest speed anything can go is the speed of light in a vacuum, which is 300.000 km/s. Mars is between 55 million km and 400 million km away from earth, which means that this villain has to travel between 37 and 267 times faster than is physically possible. Which makes it impossible to predict what the consequences are.

To elaborate a bit. As you travel faster your weight increases due to relativistic effects. This goes exponentially in such a way that as you near the speed of light it goes to infinity. Which means that in order to go faster you will need more and more energy for a small increase in speed, until you need infinite amounts of energy to increase a fraction in speed. As a side note, a weird thing happening here is that if he travels fast enough then for the villain it could be that only 5 seconds pass while for someone on earth he takes a lot longer to travel the distance. It's what happens in relativity and high speeds.

So I'll assume that it's 5 seconds for the villain and a lot longer for everyone one earth and just go with he goes with 99.1% of the speed of light. I'll also assume the villain weighs 100kg. In that case he will hit the earth with an impact of about 1 billion megatons. For comparisson, the largest nuclear blast ever was 50 megatones, so this is 20 million times stronger. Or, for another comparrison, the meteor impact which killed the dinosaurs is estimated at 0.3 billion megatons. In other words, his impact is about 3 times stronger than that which killed the dinosaurs. Anything within a few thousand km is dead within a second. Within a few 10.000 km dies in minutes and the rest of earth probably dies in the next day in the firestorms, tsunamies, earthquakes and so on that follow the impact.

Unless that's what you want, you either need to increase the time to a lot longer (just a guess, but 10 minutes or more at the minimum) or you need some technology which skips this. Improbability drive will do the trick, as will anything warp drive related or wormholes or whatever. Or make the villain hit the Moon instead of Mars