Stephen Hawking - Possible future space travel

[Quixote1818]

11. That is a good point

I wonder if because the ship would be so big and have so much force any small rocks would simply disintegrate? I know the space station has a Whipple shield. On Wikipidia is says this: A whipple shield is a type of hypervelocity impact shield used to protect manned and unmanned spacecraft from collisions with micrometeoroids and orbital debris whose velocities generally range between 3 and 18 kilometres per second. However, at near light speed those kinds of impacts would be perhaps millions of times more powerful. Maybe they could have a laser constantly beaming ahead blowing everything up?