Yepper.

This was actually the core of one of my questions that actually stumped a professor back in college. We were trying to write a simulation of a ship traveling through space.

As usual, I got way too deep into it that I probably missed the entire point of building up fundamental simulation writing skills but stumbled onto much more fundamental problems/tradeoffs, like the tradeoff between detection/classification/reaction/dispatch/execution times and not ending up splattered across space by plowing into a semi-truck sized rock nobody saw in the space between stars at relativistic speeds.

Because once you're at those soeeds relative to anything else, anything else is a huge problem by definition. Looking at our current technology, we can carve up time into multiples of billionths of seconds for 1 action on one datum, but that chain of decisions that leads to resolving the difference between first hand experience at high energy particle accelerator physics and safely avoiding said first hand experience requires time for:

>Sensing equipment to generate an image/digital rendering of space ahead of you. Fundamental constraints exist on resolution and sensitivity here

>Tranlation to a digital line format, and transmission to a system capable of consuming that representation and classifying threats

>Propagating that list of threats to a system capable of quickly formulating a response (Second marshalling\transmission/unmarshalling cycle)

>Getting that list of responses resolved to courses of action translated to instructions dispatched (marshalled/transmitted/unmarshalled), then dealing with the physical latency of the various effector systems

All of this signal prop happening on a vessel yeeting itself along through space so quickly it can get to the next system (say Proxima Centauri) in say a decade, which means even with speed of light signal propagation, your vessel is going healthy fractions of a light-second per second, and you kinda needed this done yesterday.

All of this clockwork potentially ruined by the possibility of an errant chunk of rock, sand or hydrogen just minding it's own business while a bunch of apes spend countless generations of focused effort to end up ruining it's day, and hopefully, surviving. The Apes, that is. The rock'll have a new story for the post Universal debrief.

This was how science kinda ruined my life. Because even hydrogen hitting is ionizing at these speeds. Fleet Of Worlds plays with the idea a bit using handwavium inertialess drives to accelerate a gravitational rosette of worlds on the way out of the Galaxy, with their occupants terrified at the mere thought anyone may be charting their trajectory, and laying something in the way that could result in the sterilization of their species due to the relative speeds involved.

Mind you, at that point, I was barely out of my first programming course. I don't even remember if I actually completed that assignment with a coded deliverable. I just remember several hours in deep discussion with my professor over how to model things like detection thresholds and things like that.

Might have converged on "Just ignore it", but the more I think about it, the more I smile, because it really was a very good question that at the time I had no idea of how good it actually was.