It’s common on the beaches of Hawaii to see a crowd of surfers taking advantage of a powerful wave to accelerate themselves to high speed. Could extraterrestrial civilizations try to do something similar by “surfing” on the flash of light from an exploding star?
A light sail weighing less than half a gram per square meter can reach the speed of light even if it’s a hundred times farther away from a supernova than the Earth is from the sun. This is because a typical supernova has a luminosity equivalent to a billion suns shining for a month.
Image: https://hubblesite.org/image/3885/category/35-supernova-remnants
