Peregrine wrote:
No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurements_of_neutrino_speed for a particle traveling at nearly the speed of light but releasing very little energy with a collision. Also, the farthest parts of the universe are expanding away from us at faster than the speed of light, so the energy released by the collision (which can travel no faster than the speed of light) will never arrive. Finally, the inverse square law very quickly reduces the energy released from a hypothetical collision, even if none of it is absorbed by intervening objects, so it would require unimaginably vast amounts of energy to even be detectable across the universe.

But really, it's a pretty stupid thing to worry about in the first place. The speed limit here is not an engineering limit (like breaking the sound barrier was) where the only question is whether or not we're clever enough to build a device to do it, it's an absolute limit. The energy required to reach 0.9999999999 ... 999999999999c is on the level of "convert the entire mass of the observable universe into energy to accelerate an object to that speed" at which point, well, you've destroyed the entire universe already so who cares about the theoretical problem. Then there's also the fact that the level of collision energy required to destroy your accelerated object and end the experiment is considerably less than the level of collision energy required to destroy the entire universe, so it won't survive to reach those speeds even if you had access to near-infinite energy supplies.

TL;DR: The reason scientists are treating this possibility with no concern is that it won't ever happen, period. Scientists don't live in fear of bad scifi movie plots.

 Pouncey wrote:
Though frankly we wouldn't actually HAVE to go the speed of light to theoretically cause that much destruction, simply adding enough 9s to the .9c would theoretically be sufficient.