[HN Gopher] A Tunguska size burst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, Bron...
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A Tunguska size burst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, Bronze Age city in
Jordan Valley
Author : olvy0
Score : 573 points
Date : 2021-09-21 08:40 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| mongol wrote:
| Reminds me of an old David Letterman joke when it was about
| similar news about an old asteroid. "Bob Dole: Oh was that what I
| heard?!". Seems like it would have been in the 90s...
| taurath wrote:
| Is it possible the burst was even larger, perhaps so far as to be
| a cause precipitating the Bronze Age collapse?
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
|
| Lots of close by civilizations had a rapid decline during the
| same timeframe.
| tim333 wrote:
| Sounds like it may have been a fair bit worse than Tunguska. I
| don't remember any shocked quartz or diamond like carbon from
| that one.
| mcphage wrote:
| The late Bronze age collapse was around 500 years later.
| asdff wrote:
| It's been thought that this impact marred the fertility of
| the land for the next few centuries in this area. That would
| certainly be enough to distrupt the social order of a former
| agrarian regional economy as the survivors increase in
| population and are forced to raid farther and farther out
| with each larger generation due to their local land being
| barren.
| q1w2 wrote:
| The timelines do not match. OP's event took place in 1650BCE,
| while the Bronze Age collapse was 450 years later, in 1200BCE.
|
| Those dates are separated significantly beyond their margins of
| error.
| taurath wrote:
| Sorry I must have misread the paper I thought it said
| 1200BCE! Don't HN late at night kids
| asdff wrote:
| I've read that this impact was thought to kick up water vapor
| from the dead sea and salt the surface of the earth in this
| area enough that agriculture would be nonviable for hundreds
| of years in the region. That's enough of an impetus to throw
| the social order out of whack with a whole sector of the
| economy eliminated, a pretty important one at that. I
| wouldn't be surprised if the survivors in this region had to
| resort to raiding further and further out for resources,
| eventually being known as these fabled "sea peoples" if their
| land was barren in this way over these same centuries.
| himinlomax wrote:
| I think it's pretty clear now that the collapse was caused by
| mass migrations, but we don't know the root cause of those
| migrations. I don't see how a localized event such as this
| could have caused them.
| moogly wrote:
| One theory: a triple-whammy of drought, famine and
| earthquakes:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImnqYT9C0Ws
|
| > Eric Cline, Professor of Classics and Anthropology at
| George Washington University, discusses the factors that
| caused the Bronze Age to come to an end.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| There is also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4
| by Eric Cline, an (alternative) accompaniment to his book
| "1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed".
|
| - I do recommend the book, but for most folks the YouTube
| lecture is probably enough detail :)
| mkotowski wrote:
| If I remember correctly, currently it is thought that the
| collapse was caused by many negative events happening almost at
| the same time. One of those are so-called Sea Peoples
| (seriously [0]). A single impact could explain a collapse of a
| city or a country, but not the fall of the whole region.
|
| Extra Credits once did a series of videos describing various
| weak points that could lead to the Late Bronze Age collapse:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMP328eU5Q
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples
| tim333 wrote:
| It seems the impacts can chuck a lot of dust in the air,
| changing weather patterns for quite a while.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Sea Peoples (seriously [0]).
|
| There are worse names. Like the Beaker Folk. A thousand years
| of presumably history and culture, and you get named after a
| cup.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Honestly most names are like that. Sea peoples sounds dumb
| but The Thalassoi or the Marenians sound badass. Conversely
| Italians are Young Cattle Peoples, the French are Javelin
| Peoples, and the English are Peoples from Hook Land. There
| are some exceptions though - the Spanish are Men of the
| Ultimate West, the Japanese are Rising Sun Peoples, and
| Israelis are the God Fighters.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| However, a single impact could well cause a trade,
| agricultural or refugee crisis, or radically upset the
| balance of power in the region, which could have then
| triggered other crises as a domino effect.
| j_d_b wrote:
| *maybe
| [deleted]
| kemiller wrote:
| Tsk. Someone didn't make the right burnt offering.
| andyxor wrote:
| apparently adding this reference to Wikipedia article on Tel El
| Hammam is repeatedly reverted by some wikipedia "power user"
| aaron695 wrote:
| This is a fictional story.
|
| It should not be on Wikipedia other than perhaps people belief
| systems about magic meteors blowing up magic towns all stated
| as fact.
|
| How Wikipedia deals with this is problematic.
|
| It seems like a valid source. No one has had time to put out
| comment it's false.
|
| Could you use to to screw up the astronomy section how contrary
| to all the decades of modelling they are wrong as well?
| golergka wrote:
| Doesn't that sound really similar to a certain story from certain
| religious sources, where events supposedly took place exactly in
| that region?...
|
| Edit: looks like it does:
|
| > There is an ongoing debate as to whether Tall el-Hammam could
| be the biblical city of Sodom (Silvia2 and references therein),
| but this issue is beyond the scope of this investigation.
| Questions about the potential existence, age, and location of
| Sodom are not directly related to the fundamental question
| addressed in this investigation as to what processes produced
| high-temperature materials at Tall el-Hammam during the MBA.
| Nevertheless, we consider whether oral traditions about the
| destruction of this urban city by a cosmic object might be the
| source of the written version of Sodom in Genesis. We also
| consider whether the details recounted in Genesis are a
| reasonable match for the known details of a cosmic impact event.
| _Microft wrote:
| The authors wrote that this is "possibly the earliest site with
| an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis)." This refers
| to the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
| stargazer-3 wrote:
| A more interesting bit of the paper:
|
| > It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe, such
| as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic object, may
| have generated an oral tradition that, after being passed down
| through many generations, became the source of the written
| story of biblical Sodom in Genesis. The description in Genesis
| of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is
| consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic
| airburst, e.g., (i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came
| down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv)
| a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed;
| and (vi) area crops were destroyed.
| smoyer wrote:
| It doesn't however explain how Lot's wife was turned into a
| pillar of salt.
|
| The Genesis story also includes a rain of burning sulphur
| which could have been identified by smell by the ancients.
| Sulphur isn't mentioned in the article but I'd be interested
| in knowing whether it was found in quantities above the
| normal background level.
| kuschku wrote:
| Considering the impact threw up a massive amount of salt,
| which in turn coated the surrounding landscape and is still
| measurable today, the "pillar of salt" might just be a
| description for "so much salt fell from the sky that she
| was covered in it".
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Genesis chapter 19 verse 26 simply says "But his wife
| looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of
| salt.", which maybe indicates someone being in such a
| state of shock that they just refused to move on, as the
| salt covered them.
|
| I'm not a psychologist, but I could imagine such an event
| causing what we would now call PTSD, and maybe triggering
| catatonia or similar symptoms.
| smoyer wrote:
| That's an explanation I hadn't considered and the dead
| sea certainly shows how the area has collected salt.
| p_l wrote:
| The abandonment of the region for approx. 600 years is
| judged as caused by hypersalinity preventing growing of
| crops till natural leaching lowered salt content of the
| soil.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, see the Trojan War. It's somewhat plausible that
| such a thing happened, but there probably wasn't a wooden
| horse, and no-one got turned into a pig. Things get
| embellished, and weaving in the mystical was pretty
| standard.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I mean, it would be _astonishing_ if all the details
| matched after hundreds to thousands of years of oral
| tradition. Embellishment and exaggeration were not unknown
| devices to Bronze Age storytellers, and neither was
| changing details to suit your agenda. And that's besides
| the unintended "broken telephone" effect.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's oral history; I can imagine they added Lot and other
| characters to turn it into a more exciting story with a
| lesson to be learned in there. I mean the story of Sodom
| and Gomorrah is best known for showing what happens with
| sinners. Likewise that of Noah, likewise that of the tower
| of Babel.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > For most excavated squares, the newly exposed MB II
| surface from each day's archeological excavation produced
| an obvious white salt crust overnight as humidity leached
| salt to the surface.
|
| ...
|
| > we speculate that an impact into or an airburst above
| high-salinity surface sediments (26% of land in the
| southern Jordan Valley at > 1.3% salinity) and/or above the
| Dead Sea (with ~ 34 wt.% salt content) may have distributed
| hypersaline water across the lower Jordan Valley. If so,
| this influx of salt may have substantially increased the
| salinity of surface sediments within the city and in the
| surrounding fields. Any survivors of the blast would have
| been unable to grow crops and therefore likely to have been
| forced to abandon the area. After ~ 600 years, the high
| salt concentrations were sufficiently leached out of the
| salt-contaminated soil to allow the return of agriculture.
| ordu wrote:
| Somehow asteroid added to the descripition of the destruction
| of Sodom in Genesis makes Genesis much more real. Not just
| old wives stories, but -- wow, -- "kill infidels with an
| asteroid", it demands reverence.
| detritus wrote:
| As interesting for me are the myths of great floods across
| multiple cultures that can trace their history to sea level
| rises - particularly affecting the Persian Gulf, shifting
| populations ever northward to ancient Mesopotamia.
|
| I find oral tradition fascinating and wonder how modern
| technology (eg. books onwards) has affected it.
| Bayart wrote:
| Hasn't the sea level "lowered" in the Persian Gulf ?
| Silting made the sea significantly further away from the
| Sumerian heartland nowadays than it was back then.
|
| I've always thought the flood narrative archetype had to
| do with uncontrolled river floods, predating early state
| building and large irrigation projects. It's certainly
| that way in China.
| dotancohen wrote:
| One of the oldest writings still preserved contains the
| musings of an old man, on the proliferation of writing,
| complaining that the young will now no longer have to
| memorize their lessons because it can be now written down
| and read. If memory serves it is Egyptian.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _The project is under the aegis of the School of Archaeology,
| Veritas International University_ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/Veritas_International_Universi...], _Santa Ana, CA, and the
| College of Archaeology, Trinity Southwest University_
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Southwest_University],
| _Albuquerque, NM, under the auspices of the Department of
| Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan._ "
|
| Veritas International University (VIU) is an accredited non-
| profit Christian university located in Santa Ana, California.
| Founded in 2008, the university began as a seminary before
| transitioning to a university with the addition of
| undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in late 2017.
|
| Trinity Southwest University (TSU) is an unaccredited
| evangelical Christian institution of higher education with a
| campus in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Principally a theological
| school that encompasses both the Bible college and theological
| seminary concepts of Christian education, it offers on-campus
| and distance education programs and degrees in Biblical
| Studies, Theological Studies, Archaeology & Biblical History,
| Biblical Counseling, Biblical Representational Research, and
| University Studies.
|
| The researchers in question are specifically looking for Sodom
| (and believe they have found it at Tall el Hammam).
| drewwwwww wrote:
| the authors list as sponsoring institutions two quite small
| christian seminaries/universities - i don't mean to impugn
| their fieldwork, but only mention it so as we may consider
| there to be some motivated reasoning in connecting it to events
| described in the Bible.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Many of the stories from the ancient world probably have a
| basis in fact. All the old civilizations in the area have a
| story about a massive flood, for example, like the story of
| Noah. Other biblical events have been linked to vulcano
| eruptions, comets, and other natural phenomena as well. The
| Bible was written as much a a holy text as it was a history
| book for its people. Some parts of it were made up or
| exaggerated (like the whole "slaves in Egypt" thing) but
| others were attributions of divine interaction by people who
| couldn't possibly understand the forces of nature they
| observed.
|
| I think it stands to reason that at some point a city in the
| Levant was destroyed violently. A comet exploding and taking
| out a city seems like a very plausible reason for how such a
| event may be attributed to holy intervention. You can discuss
| whether or not it was some divine being sending a comet
| towards a particularly bad city or not, but I'd definitely
| tell stories about divine punishment if I saw the remains of
| a destroyed city like this. Even today, I think you'd find
| plenty of people who'd claim that whatever the people in
| those city were doing was bad enough to upset the divine
| powers enough to bomb them from space.
| ocschwar wrote:
| It's almost a universal for people who live around the
| ruins of an older society to attribute that society's
| downfall to some kind of sin.
|
| The Navajos have a Soddom and Ghomorra tradition about the
| Anasazi.
|
| THe Welsh had such traditions about the downfall of Roman
| Britain.
|
| The Greeks accused the Minoans of hubris (hence the legend
| of Atlantis.)
|
| The Jews accused themselves of sin again, and again, and
| again, every time an outside force came to their borders.
| Both exiles are attributed to corruption and sin.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Can you link me to any information you know about the
| Navajo thing? I'm pretty well versed in the area, but I'm
| not aware of anything like that. It's also worth noting
| that "Anasazi" is considered a bit offensive by modern
| puebloans. Ancestral puebloans is preferred by
| archeologists, but that could be interpreted as a
| political stance depending on who you are.
| floatrock wrote:
| > Even today, I think you'd find plenty of people who'd
| claim that whatever the people in those city were doing was
| bad enough to upset the divine powers enough to bomb them
| from space.
|
| See New Orleans and Katrina.
|
| The more things change, the more things stay the same.
| Bayart wrote:
| The Bible is a major force behind archaeology in the Levant.
| Not only for religious reasons, but also because the prospect
| of correlating material culture and written documents is
| always exciting.
| amacbride wrote:
| To this point, the Wikipedia article on Veritas International
| University notes their doctrinal stance as follows: "Veritas
| International University has an evangelical doctrinal
| statement that emphasizes 'three legs' of biblical authority:
| inspiration, infallibility, and biblical inerrancy."
|
| I admire the rigor of the archaeology and physical/chemical
| analysis of the site, but think it's important to note the
| above when evaluating the conclusions.
| robinei wrote:
| Though if the evidence presented for this event is
| persuasive, then all they achieve by making the connection
| is to speculate on a natural cause for a biblical
| "miracle". I mean it can strengthen a view of the Bible as
| source of historical information, but not as the word of
| God.
|
| If this event happened, I would expect it to leave long
| lasting trace in oral tradition.
| mcguire wrote:
| One would have thought it would leave a written
| tradition---"The year a city in the Levant got blowed up"
| in one of the year lists or something.
|
| Tunguska was apparently visible for 500 miles (800km);
| for a similar event north of the Dead Sea, that would be
| nearly to the Euphrates valley, central Anatolia, and
| most of the Nile Valley.
| Keysh wrote:
| The paper in question is by people from a variety of
| institutions (none of them being Veritas International
| University). Early in the paper there is this comment:
|
| "After eleven seasons of excavations, the site excavators
| [i.e., the folks affiliated with Veritas International
| University] independently concluded that evidence pointed
| to a possible cosmic impact. They contacted our outside
| group of experts from multiple impact-related and other
| disciplines to investigate potential formation mechanisms
| for the unusual suite of high-temperature evidence, which
| required explanation."
| p_l wrote:
| Interestingly, the "biblical connections" side of the paper
| would actually make certain issues with biblical inerrancy.
|
| Namely, the article notes that the most probable locations
| for Sodoma _and Jericho_ are two cities that show evidence
| for the air burst theory. Meaning story of Lot and the Fall
| of Jericho would have to happen on the same day, which
| kinda doesn 't work with bible being infallible and
| inerrant.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| From Tall el-Hammam's wiki:
|
| > Starting with the publication of his book Discovering the
| city of Sodom in 2013 and after fifteen years of excavations
| of the upper and lower tall, Collins has been arguing that
| Tall el-Hammam is the site of the biblical city of Sodom. A
| 2018 conference paper identified a likely Tunguska-like
| airburst event near the Dead Sea ca. 1700 BCE, which
| destroyed a region including Tall el-Hammam[18]. According to
| professor Eugene H. Merrill, himself a Biblical inerrantist,
| the identification of Tall al-Hammam with Sodom would require
| an unacceptable restructuring of his early biblical
| chronology.
|
| Seems worth noting that there's not a consensus in the
| inerrantist camp.
| nabla9 wrote:
| The publication is Scientific Reports, so there is no high
| quality peer review. Papers are "not assessed based on their
| perceived importance, significance or impact."
| beardyw wrote:
| Not sure how this would strengthen the biblical story. This
| makes it an accidental destruction by a purely physical
| phenomenon, not an act of God based on the behaviour of the
| residents.
| [deleted]
| Severian wrote:
| Here is the website to model a bolide impact as referenced in the
| paper for those that didn't catch it.
|
| https://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEarth/ImpactEffectsMap/
| 57844743385 wrote:
| I expected there to be suggestions this city was nuked by ancient
| aliens.
| santialbo wrote:
| In a way, there are. It's theorized to be the ancient city of
| Sodom which was nuked by an "alien".
| ancode wrote:
| A creator alien who loves us and knows every detail of your
| life and is a total prude
| q1w2 wrote:
| In fairness, the odds of an asteroid hitting so close to a
| major city is so small, that an intentional alien attack should
| not be entirely ruled out.
|
| A berserker in far solar orbit could conceivably stunt human
| development every couple thousand years with an asteroid, while
| a more effective extermination ship is being dispatched.
| Razengan wrote:
| Time machine failures, I like to imagine.
| _nub3 wrote:
| All wrong. As everybody should know by now it has been the
| former residents of Atlantis who disabled them in order to
| remain the only superior nation on the planet's face. That was
| shortly before a inner political force succeeded and they
| started space travel and submerged their old city.
| smoyer wrote:
| Curiously, the sea people are associated with the collapse of
| the bronze age but there's still no real indication of who
| these mariners were.
| 57844743385 wrote:
| Errrr... yes. Ok. I'll back gently out of the room and leave
| now, keeping my eyes on you the whole time.
| pantulis wrote:
| Just remember you can't escape from the Illuminati.
| [deleted]
| Moosdijk wrote:
| "Meteors are space objects that have contacted Earth's atmosphere
| and are beginning to incinerate, creating a visible vapor trail.
| Sometimes these are referred to as shooting stars, but if they
| are exceptionally bright they are called bolides or fireballs.
| Airbursts are violent explosions that occur when mid-sized
| meteors streak through the atmosphere, disaggregating as they
| begin to burn up."[1]
|
| [1]https://www.earthdate.org/node/153
| raducu wrote:
| So, two early cities were destroyed by meteorites in the Bronze
| age, when there were very few cities world wide.
|
| And that's it, as cities kept poping out everywhere, this never
| happened again.
| nkoren wrote:
| Here's another one, 1490 in China:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1490_Ch%27ing-yang_event
|
| And of course if the 2013 Chelyabinsk bolide had been just a
| bit larger, then the city would no longer exist. (Larger size =
| lower airburst, so even a modest increase in megatonnage can
| result in substantially more energy transferred to the ground).
|
| And there are other recent city-killer-size impacts that are
| well-known but fortunately didn't have cities underneath them,
| such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campo_del_Cielo
| sva_ wrote:
| > And of course if the 2013 Chelyabinsk bolide had been just
| a bit larger, then the city would no longer exist.
|
| Looked it up, from Wikipedia:
|
| > The power of the explosion was about 500 kilotons of TNT
| (about 1.8 PJ), which is 20-30 times more energy than was
| released from the atomic bomb detonated in Hiroshima. The
| city managed to avoid large casualties and destruction due to
| the high altitude of the explosion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk#2013_meteor
| gatronicus wrote:
| The speed of detonation also matters, a meteorite
| detonation is surely slower than a nuclear bomb which
| releases the energy in milliseconds.
| yongjik wrote:
| On a tangential note, I find it wild that we have so little
| record of such an extraordinary event that happened as recent
| as 1490 (when China was prospering under a unified empire):
| sounds like historians were writing "It was reported that
| stones rained down from the sky, killing ten thousand, in an
| obscure town in Gansu province. Anyway, back to the court..."
| rsynnott wrote:
| There was also the Tunguska incident (no city) and a recent
| near miss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
|
| And this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sulawesi_superbolide
|
| They happen every now and again; of course normally they're not
| close enough to a city to be a big problem, but over ten
| millennia...
|
| And, I mean, what's the alternative explanation? Bronze Age
| nuclear war? You'd have a hell of a time making an ICBM out of
| bronze :)
| dboreham wrote:
| It would look magnificent in the May day parade though.
| q1w2 wrote:
| It does seem strange that the impact was so close to a city.
| Statistically, this would infer that many many of these impacts
| have happened all over the place, and there's not much evidence
| of that.
|
| Another fun theory is that there's an alien berserker in far
| solar orbit that is periodically sending asteroids to Earth to
| stunt human development while a more powerful device is
| dispatched to exterminate us. This would imply that additional
| "events" are immanent. ...food for thought.
| meowface wrote:
| I think such an alien adversary would have been more than
| capable of wiping out humans long ago if they already had the
| capabilities to direct asteroids toward us. (And also travel
| the very vast distance to get to us.)
|
| I could maybe believe it if they were throwing them for fun /
| to study how we react. Which might go in line with the
| theories that many "UFOlogists" espouse: that sightings are
| sporadic and rare because aliens are basically pranksters
| trolling us all. (For the record, I find this pretty
| contrived, and I believe the far more likely explanation is
| that there haven't ever been any visitations.)
| apetrov wrote:
| sounds like a scenario of Starship troopers rather than a
| food for thought.
| q1w2 wrote:
| If you assume that berserkers are difficult to produce and
| disperse throughout the galaxy, then you might conclude
| that they have limited capabilities.
|
| Perhaps after detecting intelligent life and reporting it,
| perhaps it attached itself to the largest convenient
| asteroid/comet, and altered it's orbit just so to stunt
| human development just enough to allow for a more complete
| extermination ship to be dispatched.
|
| Like a galactic immune system - suicide berserkers designed
| to signal the human infection, and then suicide themselves
| to slow the disease evolution.
|
| The galaxy is many billions of years old. I would not rule
| out the development of such a system.
| meowface wrote:
| The fact that the galaxy is billions of years old is one
| part of what would lead me to think that such an immune
| system would destroy the entire planet, or at least kill
| all life on it, with the very first projectile/attack.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > ...food for thought.
|
| Is it though? Isn't food for thought something you're
| supposed to think about? I'm not going to spend much time
| pondering a petulant alien overlord scenario, especially
| considering that humanity would probably qualify for a rock
| or two from such a being as of late and none have been
| forthcoming.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Not really. People at this time lived with a much lower
| population density. Our modern cities that can house millions
| of people within a few square miles are only possible because
| of advanced infrastructure for transporting water, food, and
| waste, and only desirable because of our industrial society
| where all these people can work in close proximity.
|
| In ancient times, people were much more limited by the
| distribution of resources, so rather than one big city,
| they'd have lots of smaller settlements. Note that most
| ancient "cities" would be small towns by modern standards -
| Jerusalem for example had a population of around 5000
| inhabitants around 1000 BCE. Pretty much every place where
| there could be such a settlement, there would be.
|
| Thus in that period, if you picked a random spot on earth,
| the odds that there would be a (by the standards of the day)
| dense population center in close proximity would be much
| higher than today.
| erdewit wrote:
| Could it have been ancient aliens ?!!!?....
| himinlomax wrote:
| Keep in mind the bronze age lasted a long time, over 2000
| years.
| [deleted]
| tokai wrote:
| That's stochastic events for ya.
| kuschku wrote:
| Neolithic and Bronze Age settlements existed for tens of
| millenia, while modern cities only existed for 21/2 millenia.
|
| Between Abu Hereya (10'800 BC) and Tall el-Hammam (1'650 BC)
| there was a 9'000 year gap.
|
| Of course you're going to get more cosmic events if you wait a
| longer time.
|
| EDIT: The article discusses the potential impact at Tall el-
| Hammam in 1'650 BC, which also covered Jericho. A second impact
| at Abu Hereya in 10'800 BC is only mentioned, but not discussed
| in detail.
| raducu wrote:
| Does that mean there were two airbursts and not just one in
| the same place 9000 years apart?
|
| Not disputing that, but my interpretation would be that there
| was just one airburst that covered both cities.
| kuschku wrote:
| Jericho and Tall el-Hammam were destroyed in the same
| airburst, in the same place (~22km distance, ~same time).
|
| Abu Hereya (several hundred kilometers away, 9000 years
| earlier) was also discussed in the article, and is a
| separate impact.
| yosito wrote:
| Jericho? Isn't that the city with the biblical story of
| God knocking down the walls from the inside out? I wonder
| if there's a connection.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| The more obvious connection is with Sodom & Gomorra being
| destroyed by divine wrath. Evidence of high temperatures
| and increased salinity..
| [deleted]
| dr_zoidberg wrote:
| The linked study mentions the possibility of Tall el-
| Hammam being Sodom, but they specifically say thats a
| whole line of study in itself and they won't go into
| details in the paper.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Yes, they did avoid derailing the study very nicely.
| 13of40 wrote:
| Having driven through Sodom, which is situated on the
| dead end of the dead sea, next to the apocalyptic salt
| factory they have there, it boggles my mind that you
| would be able to measure "increased salinity". What I'm
| saying is the dirt itself is half salt.
| dhosek wrote:
| "Apocalyptic salt factory" in Sodom creates an image in
| my mind of a factory whose salt comes from the pillars of
| salt left behind by all the people leaving Sodom but
| stopping to look back.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That's what you'd expect after an "increased salinity"
| event.
| javajosh wrote:
| This is reverse survivorship bias. There were probably
| bolides a'plenty, it's just they took down some trees, killed
| some animals, and interrupted a villagers sleep. There would
| be no record of such an event.
| gatronicus wrote:
| We should be able to find the impact geological records and
| build a probability model.
| javajosh wrote:
| Did even Tunguska have a geological impact? And also,
| since 75% of the Earth is covered in water, it stands to
| reason that 75% of bolides exploded over an ocean, with
| literally no impact we could meaningfully measure.
|
| My point is that human cities are "bolide sensors" and
| unevenly distributed in time and space, so the
| "measurements" are necessarily fewer than what occurs in
| nature.
| staplung wrote:
| Best definition of a city ever: "bolide sensor". Love it
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Yes, there is geological evidence that the Tunguska event
| was a bolide explosion.
| jacquesm wrote:
| trees flattened in a radial pattern might show up in the
| geological record somehow.
| gota wrote:
| Unlikely after several years, let alone several
| thousands, right?
| bell-cot wrote:
| It would require coordinated excavation over how many
| square miles, to spot the radial pattern? (Assuming, as
| gota points out, that the fallen trees were somehow
| preserved.)
|
| Then there's bolides over desert, savanna, tundra, ice
| sheets, etc.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Impacts of this size don't leave enough evidence for you
| to know where to look, especially after 1000's of years
| of man caused and natural erosion.
|
| An air burst impact that's large enough to take out a
| city won't leave a major impact crater. And back in the
| day it might even be the case of the perceived cause
| contributing more to the decline of a city or even an
| empire than the physical damage.
|
| If a meteor hit blows up your town when you have no
| ability to comprehend what just happened other than
| god/gods are angry you gonna move to a less cursed place.
|
| It can also cause social impacts such as the toppling of
| a given religious or leadership class because they
| angered the gods.
| koheripbal wrote:
| OP's analysis demonstrates that it's very possible to
| detect theses events 1000s of years later, if you examine
| areas near the explosion.
| gota wrote:
| Yes, but they are testing the area _because_ we know a
| settlement there was destroyed. We 'd have to test random
| uninhabited (or at least currently uninhabited) areas for
| which there are no indications of anything special to get
| a better picture
|
| And not even that guarantees a complete picture - what if
| a tsunami event erases or conceals the record of
| something like this? Volcanic activity? Desertification?
|
| My point is that we can't reason about the rarity or
| uniqueness of these events as a main factor for accepting
| or refuting the hypothesis
| pvg wrote:
| We don't really have evidence of settlements lasting tens of
| millennia. Plus, there weren't that many people about. The
| estimates of human population just 10k BCE are about that of
| LA County - 10 million-ish.
| kuschku wrote:
| Not individual settlements, but roughly the same areas stay
| populated over the whole timeframe. And while there were
| less humans around, they were still distributed over the
| whole world.
| pvg wrote:
| A simple counter-example to both 'same areas stay
| populated' and 'humans were all over the world' is human
| migration to the Americas which started, let's say 20kya,
| at the very low end of your 'tens of millennia' scale.
| rini17 wrote:
| Even if that were true, what is your point? Where did these
| 10m people live if not in settlements?
| pvg wrote:
| They didn't live in permanent settlements, no, never mind
| ones that lasted tens of thousands of years. That is my
| point.
| rini17 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_continuously
| _in... lists several cities already established (with
| walls) around 3000 BC. Why they would not be inhabitated
| millenia before? Just because we don't have written
| records?
| pvg wrote:
| Mostly because they hadn't invented agriculture, a less-
| than-10k-years-old development.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| Agriculture isn't the only way to sustain moderately-
| sized populations, it's just the most efficient in the
| short term. Semi-passive cultivation is arguably more
| sustainable because you don't encounter the issues of
| deforestation, soil depletion, and centralization of
| resources.
|
| Nomadism doesn't preclude semi-permanent settlements,
| especially as migratory patterns retrace sites.
| danans wrote:
| > Agriculture isn't the only way to sustain moderately-
| sized populations, it's just the most efficient in the
| short term. Semi-passive cultivation is arguably more
| sustainable
|
| There is a theory by Jared Diamond [1] of how pre-
| Agricultural Jomon people of Japan were able to invent
| pottery 18K years ago: the wild-food rich environment of
| Japan, being moist, temperate, and surrounded by ocean -
| allowed them to have very settled lives while other
| hunter gatherers had to constantly move.
|
| Outside of rate examples like this, there is little
| evidence that non agricultural societies reached even
| moderate populations.
|
| 1. https://erenow.net/common/gunsgermssteel/23.php
| pvg wrote:
| Completely agree with you that agriculture is not
| required to form non-permanent settlements that didn't
| last tens of thousands of years.
| kuschku wrote:
| No one said it had to be a single, year-round,
| uninterrupted settlement. A seasonal, interrupted,
| settlement would be no different to an asteroid.
| nl wrote:
| Semi permanent sites did exist in this timeframe. But
| they were much smaller in terms of population and rarely
| (if ever) walled cities like those which existed around
| 4000 BCE.
| kuschku wrote:
| The city of Abu Herey was destroyed 10'800 BC, almost
| three millenia before the timeframe you just stated for
| the first cities.
| pvg wrote:
| Do you mean this site?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_Abu_Hureyra
|
| It's a unique site of possible early long-term hunter-
| gatherer settlement right in the middle of one of the
| regions in which agriculture was first developed. It also
| happens to be one of the first agricultural sites! The
| pre-agricultural populations we're talking about are a
| few hundred people, which feels a little short of a city.
| nl wrote:
| Abu Hureyra 1 was hardly a city - more a collection of
| huts.
|
| And it's one of the earliest examples of the transition
| from nomadic hunter gathers to more permanent
| settlements.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I think most people were nomadic hunter gatherers until
| agriculture was invented, binding them to their fields.
| ascar wrote:
| I would recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens: A
| Brief History of Humankind". It's really enlightening
| about the early days of human kind and even gives a new
| perspective for recent/current developments.
| [deleted]
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > And that's it, as cities kept poping out everywhere, this
| never happened again.
|
| I don't think this claim is supported by the article. There
| have been other cosmic air bursts, like the 1490 Ch'ing-yang
| event, which had a large number of casualties:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1490_Ch%27ing-yang_event
| raducu wrote:
| Yeah, that's a claim I made, out of ignorance.
|
| It seems the chinese were lucky like the russians while the
| Bronze Age folks were not so lucky.
|
| So I guess we should invest more in asteroid defense.
| nkoren wrote:
| We should. I've seen an analysis which concluded that your
| chances of dying in a meteor impact are about the same as
| your chances of dying in a car crash -- eg., really quite
| high. This doesn't sound right, because at as an
| individual, you're obviously far more likely to die in a
| car crash -- it's extremely unlikely that you'll personally
| die from a meteor impact. However in the very rare event
| that you _are_ killed by an impact, then there 's a very
| high probability that anywhere from tens of thousands to
| tens of millions will also be killed by the same event. So
| overall the numbers roughly balance out, and are high
| enough to be worth taking seriously.
|
| Fortunately there are groups that are doing just that:
| https://b612foundation.org/
| vkou wrote:
| The main problem here is that detecting a city-killer
| meteor before it hits you is incredibly difficult, which
| really puts a damper on your ROI.
|
| Meteors large enough to detect are both incredibly rare,
| and are very difficult to deal with, and meteors too
| small to detect will hit you before you see them.
|
| Not to mention that any detection will come with very
| large uncertainty bars. Suppose that you somehow discover
| that a ~500 KT meteor (Like the Chelyabinsk bolide -
| which was only ~20 meters across - good luck figuring out
| an accurate orbit for it) is an impact risk. The
| overwhelming majority of the Earth is covered with water.
| The overwhelming majority of the rest is... Not densely
| populated. And observations put it at a 0.5% chance of
| striking the Earth next year, with zero ability to
| predict which part of the Earth will be struck.
|
| That's the most likely outcome of a detection program.
| Not '100% chance', not '90% chance', but a '0.5% chance
| of a rock that's scary only if you're in its immediate
| path'. Is that worth doing anything about?
| VLM wrote:
| The global reaction to COVID is highly relevant to this
| discussion. As with covid the secondary and tertiary
| effects will be vastly greater than the primary effects.
|
| There is a fascinating logistics and timing feature to
| this whole topic. Aside from global panic'd masses. There
| is a huge logistical difference between sudden and
| unplanned electrical grid shutdown and subsequent black
| start vs a pre-planned five minutes outage (assuming we
| can predict impact to five minutes). Another interesting
| electrical utility issue is the radiological damage from
| a melted-down nuclear power plant varies exponentially
| with time... There's a huge difference in expected damage
| between whacking the coolant pumps a month in advance vs
| a day in advance vs a minute of warning vs no warning at
| all just no coolant flow.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| What's the cost of a nuclear missile (or X chosen
| method?) Whats the cost of NYC turning in a smoldering
| crater * 0.5% (or whatever)?
|
| The cost of all rockets ever launched is a pittance
| compared to NYC real estate
|
| Also there is a project for a space telescooe
| spesifically designed to locate asteroids, its not that
| difficult or even expensive.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_Space_Telescope
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Would even the largest nuke do much to a 50m-wide chunk
| of iron traveling at 20+ km/s?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Earth travels around the Sun at 30 km/s, delay an
| asteroid by 4 minutes and it will miss completely.
|
| If your nuke can slow the asteroid from 20km/s to 19.9
| km/s, then you need to nuke it 6 days before it hits
| earth.
| dr_zoidberg wrote:
| Having nuclear missiles ready at all times, all over the
| world (near populated areas) is a risk on its own... In a
| politically stable world without conflicts, sure, but we
| haven't had that kind of world for centuries...
| rscoots wrote:
| Why would they have to be stored near populated areas for
| this purpose?
|
| Even if you were gonna hit the meteor during significant
| downward trajectory (which seems unlikely), that would
| still have to be done at quite a distance from the impact
| location.
|
| Also wondering when there was ever a "politically stable
| world without conflicts"
| kadoban wrote:
| That's true, but we already have that. There's nukes all
| over the place. Not in all countries, but many.
| yesenadam wrote:
| > Not in all countries, but many.
|
| In 9 out of 195 countries.
| kadoban wrote:
| True (I think? Right ballpark anyway). But, how much of
| the population does that cover? Between China and India
| to start with, should be quite a lot. And then you have
| alliances, the US has nukes in Europe and submarines a
| bunch of places.
|
| And that's just all the publicly known ones.
| dr_zoidberg wrote:
| You're not wrong. Possibly the biggest issue would be how
| can you quickly launch one of these without triggering
| WW3.
|
| Another issue I'm thinking is that I don't know the state
| of the art of meteor/bolide trajectory estimation (it's
| apparently very poor), so you'd probably need to fire a
| bunch of these (or a very large one) along an (uncertain)
| path hoping for it to affect the impactor.
|
| So this is just more of the same problem: how do you fire
| a barrage of nuclear missiles over a region to stop an
| impactor in such a way that you're not mistaken for a
| madman starting nuclear war?
| kadoban wrote:
| Yeah that's a real problem, or several. Not even sure
| which would be the hardest to solve...
|
| Am I wrong to wonder if a nuke would even do it either? I
| mean it's a ~solid rock that's capaple of surviving a
| pretty good beating from the atmosphere. What's a nuke
| going to do exactly? Are we hoping for redirection, or
| destruction or?
| cuspycode wrote:
| As I understand it, redirection is our best hope.
| Destruction via nukes would only work for comparatively
| small rocks. There is a fairly comprehensive write-up of
| the various options on Wikipedia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| This discussion is all wrong - nuking an approaching
| asteroid is like shooting an approaching freight train -
| it's too late to stop.
|
| The asteroid needs to be pushed with a nuke, or another
| method, while it's still in deep space, months or years
| before it would strike. It would be many times beyong the
| orbit of the moon, millions of kilometers.
|
| ICBMs are for ground targets, their "reach" is a thousand
| kilometers or so, they have no navigation or tsrgeting
| for space.
|
| Instead a spacecraft like Rosetta would to be equipped
| with a nuke and launched on a normal space rocket like
| Falcon 9 or Ariane or Soyuz. We only need to produce a
| couple of them in case of launch failure, we don't need
| thousands of them like we have ICBMs. The launch would
| not look anything like an ICBM launch, it does not come
| back to earth.
| [deleted]
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Veritasium did pretty good video about this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wrc4fHSCpw
| aaron695 wrote:
| You were exactly correct.
|
| All these stories are bullshit of course. Indiana Jones
| style tales. Literally from the Bible for top post.
|
| Read the account, that's not even close to anything like a
| air burst.
|
| It's hail if anything to a normal person -
|
| "Stones fell like rain in the Ch'ing-yang district. The
| larger ones were 4 to 5 catties (about 1.5 kg), and the
| smaller ones were 2 to 3 catties (about 1 kg). Numerous
| stones rained in Ch'ing-yang. Their sizes were all
| different. The larger ones were like goose's eggs and the
| smaller ones were like water-chestnuts. More than 10,000
| people were struck dead. All of the people in the city fled
| to other places."
| rollo wrote:
| Poisson clumping.
| [deleted]
| mjfl wrote:
| Look for pillars of salt!
| ginko wrote:
| Another major explosion theorized to be caused by bolides is the
| 1626 Wanggongchang Explosion[1] in Beijing which is considered
| one of the major causes of the fall of the Chinese Ming dynasty.
|
| Although having its epicenter in the middle of a gunpowder
| factory would of course also heavily imply a gunpowder explosion
| (or maybe both).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanggongchang_Explosion
| thriftwy wrote:
| Bolides will very rarely hit a city precisely, especially in
| the periods where cities were small and not sprawling.
| Moreover, they usually fly tangentially and cover a huge area
| (such as, Chelyabinsk meteor was also seen from Yekaterinburg,
| 200 km away).
|
| There should be a lot of evidence towards it before it to be
| accepted as the primary cause (and not an omen, for example)
| dboreham wrote:
| This isn't unusual. In 2009 I was sitting in my hot tub in
| Montana and saw this event, which hit in Utah, 500 miles away
| : https://www.nevadameteorites.com/nevadameteorites/November_
| 1...
| thriftwy wrote:
| Thing is, it did not obliterate any specific area with 25
| km radius.
| dboreham wrote:
| No, high altitude burst.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Interesting! How do you know that this was a meteorite and
| not another thing that went wrong at Dugway?
| dboreham wrote:
| I could discern the rough trajectory, which was inbound
| towards the target. So unless they were under alien
| attack it had to be a meteor.
| ebcode wrote:
| In reality it could be both: meteor-flinging aliens.
| Keysh wrote:
| The suggestion in the article is that the bolide impact (or
| airburst) was well outside the city, to the SW, since a lot
| of the evidence suggests a blast moving from SW to NE through
| the city.
| [deleted]
| richthegeek wrote:
| This seems like the most obvious candidate for Occam's Razor,
| although stranger things have happened.
|
| Part of me wonders if it's easier to 'invent' a comet strike or
| otherwise imply divine intervention as a way of avoiding blame
| for putting a gunpowder factory in the middle of a city.
| wikidani wrote:
| While I am by no means a historian, wouldn't a "comet strike"
| in a gunpowder factory be a great way for the Mings to loose
| the mandate of heaven? Perhaps there's a political angle we
| should consider on this occasion as well
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| A comet strike, which is surely divine intervention, would
| imply they lost the Mandate of Heaven, I would think. So I
| think two different ways of saying the same thing.
| yyyk wrote:
| In the political context of 17th century China (and many
| premodern polities), it's much preferable to blame a
| scapegoat official for putting a factory in the wrong place
| than to blame divine intervention.
|
| The former means the government executes a couple of people.
| The latter meant to most people that the government has lost
| 'the Mandate of Heaven' and is ready to be overthrown. That's
| extremely bad news to the government.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| What a twisted logic they had back then. City got destroyed
| because of an incompetent government? That's fine, we can
| keep trusting them. City got destroyed by a meteorite? No
| way we can ever trust them again, they've lost the Mandate
| of Heaven!
|
| In practice I would assume though that people weren't much
| different than today, and the Mandate of Heaven trick would
| only work if the government doesn't appear to be too
| incompetent.
| yyyk wrote:
| That's because your causation is very different from many
| past peoples. They viewed reality as very affected by
| divine forces and the 'natural' event as divine
| intervention (directly or indirectly).
|
| City got destroyed by a meteorite? You view this as an
| accident. They think 'better remove whatever made the
| Heavens upset before we are smote again and again with
| meteorites or worse'.
|
| Now, since the government controlled just about
| everything in theory (few limits on power), the
| government is held responsible. People start spreading
| the notion that perhaps the government needs to be
| altered to people more pleasing to Heaven, and from there
| we get civil wars, rebellions, etc. Which can lead to
| more disasters (badly maintained dams for example,
| because the civil war takes too many resources away from
| maintenance) and so on. It's a cycle of instability every
| ancient government wanted to avoid.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >What a twisted logic they had back then. City got
| destroyed because of an incompetent government? That's
| fine, we can keep trusting them
|
| Back then?
|
| For how many years now have democrats been promising to
| be the savior of inner city minorities? And when are
| republicans going to get around to getting the government
| out of people's business?
|
| Humans have changed very little over time.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| Ok my comment was semi ironic and didn't think anyone
| would care much about it. I did acknowledge that things
| probably aren't that different today.
| brezelgoring wrote:
| The Mandate of Heaven is not that weird, we place similar
| levels of trust on Market Forces and such things, we're
| not so different.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Obviously, things have changed a bit, but we aren't
| _that_ much better at judging what leaders are actually
| responsible for. The global economy is so big that in
| most circumstances it could be modeled as a purely
| natural force that can be at best managed, like weather,
| but American presidents can lose reelection as if they
| are personally responsible for economic performance.
| There 's not that much evidence that a president, who has
| been in power for maybe a couple of years, could have
| more than a marginal impact on the trajectory of the
| economy in most circumstances. But we act like they do.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| Alternatively, the story about a comet strike may have been
| invented/popularized by the _next_ (the Qing) dynasty to
| further legitimize their power. It 's not preferable to the
| Ming to blame divine intervention, but it would be
| preferable to the Qing.
| BBC-vs-neolibs wrote:
| You can see similar dynamics now. If an explosion was
| caused by a collapsed buerocracy and a corrupt government
| ignoring basic safety standards, it looks bad on the
| government.
|
| It can be more convenient to imagine some evil terrorist
| organisation.
| Someone wrote:
| You need lots of gunpowder inside the city in case you are
| attacked, so you need an armory inside the city.
|
| Adding a factory doesn't seem to add that much risk to me. It
| can be cordoned of in a building with strong walls and light-
| weight ceilings. That directs any force of an accidental
| explosion upwards.
|
| The armory, on the other hand, needs protection against
| incoming projectiles. That calls for strong ceilings.
| gumby wrote:
| I don't believe "gun"powder was used in weaponry in the
| Ming era.
|
| Your logic is sensible but is not for this specific
| example.
| Someone wrote:
| I don't know whether it did, but Wikipedia thinks it was
| used.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanggongchang_Explosion:
|
| _"The epicenter was a major production center of
| gunpowder
|
| [...]
|
| a military storage facility that "dispatches 3000 catties
| (about 1.8 metric tons) of gunpowder every five days""_
|
| This was 400 years ago, about 800 years after the
| invention of gunpowder
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder#China) and about
| 600 after the first primitive guns
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun#History)
| gumby wrote:
| Learn something new every day. Thanks!
| yread wrote:
| > Based on the distribution of human bones on the upper and lower
| tall, we propose that the force of a high-temperature, debris-
| laden, high-velocity blast wave from an airburst/impact (i)
| incinerated and flayed their exposed flesh, (ii) decapitated and
| dismembered some individuals, (iii) shattered many bones into
| mostly cm-sized fragments, (iv) scattered their bones across
| several meters, (v) buried the bones in the destruction layer,
| and (vi) charred or disintegrated any bones that were still
| exposed.
|
| What a way to go
| AutumnCurtain wrote:
| It's fascinating to think how many early civilizations or
| cities may have met a similar fate with the remains just too
| obliterated to identify / study.
| dotancohen wrote:
| This is very reminiscent of the Hiroshima attack. The city
| was so devastated that it took much time for reports of the
| destruction to reach the emperor and advisors. And even then
| it wasn't fully believed.
|
| If I'm not misremembering history, then their delay in action
| - due to the difficulty of getting news of the situation out
| of the area of destruction - led to the bombing of Nagasaki
| as well.
| retrac wrote:
| That largely agrees with what I've read. There were no
| large air raids on the day of the Hiroshima bombing, and
| very few would have considered a bomb of that power. So in
| the first hours at least and into the next day, outside of
| the city there wasn't an understanding the whole city was
| basically gone. From their perspective immediately after,
| there were communication problems that had cut all the
| telegraph and telephone lines, presumably due to some sort
| of large (but more normal) disaster in the city centre.
| Only once the smoke started to clear and an aerial survey
| could be performed, along with large numbers of survivors
| pouring into neighbouring cities and towns, would the true
| scale of it have been clear to the Japanese government
| (around the same time the Americans were surveying the
| results, I suppose, a day or two later).
| danielvf wrote:
| The bombing of Hiroshima was unimaginable destruction, and
| yet did less damage than the very first mass firebombing
| attack on Japan four months earlier.
|
| At this point in the war the Americans had been hitting
| Japanese cities with 300-500 super heavy bomber firebombing
| raids for four months. After bombing all the major cities
| the Americans were now well into their list of twenty five
| smaller 75,000 to 300,000 population cities.
|
| So Hiroshima was just another day in Japan, just another
| bombed city. The only thing new to the Japanese was that
| the destruction was from a new kind of bomb, and the
| following morning an investigation group had been formed.
|
| The Japanese leadership met the following morning,
| discussed that the city was wiped out via a new bomb, and
| decided to continue fighting while seeing what kind of
| better terms they could get before surrendering. Which is
| what they had been doing for quite some time, and continued
| to do even as the Soviets declared war on them a few days
| later.
|
| News of the attack traveled to the Tokyo quickly.
|
| For example, a major Go championship was being played on
| the outskirts of Hiroshima at the time of the bomb
| explosion. Although the windows of the building the game
| were played in were blown out, and one of the players
| knocked over, gameplay resumed a few hours later and the
| match was finished.
| (https://senseis.xmp.net/?AtomicBombGame) It was assumed in
| Tokyo that day that the players were probably killed,
| indicating that news of the city being hit had traveled
| there.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Each of those "firebombings" were conducted by 50+ B-29
| bombers. When you see so many bombers show up on radar,
| you dispatch the fighters, you know things are about to
| happen.
|
| When you see a SINGLE B-29 bomber, you ignore it. Its
| just a scout, and one bomber can't do much damage...
| Until Hiroshima happened. Its unbelievable: the "rules"
| of the war changed overnight, in a dramatic way that no
| one in the Japanese army could have possibly imagined.
| Every __SINGLE__ bomber "scout" could in fact be, the
| next nuclear bomb.
|
| Japan didn't have the resources to fight against singular
| bombers anymore. They focused only on the groups of
| bombers. At this point, it was clear that their air-force
| was soundly defeated.
| danielvf wrote:
| Japan's ability to defend itself from air attacks was
| essentially over before the mass firebombing attacks even
| began. Before the first firebomb raid the US removed all
| but one machine gun from each B-29's in order to carry
| more bombs, judging correctly that the Japanese defenses
| were weak enough.
| dragontamer wrote:
| It sounds like the removal of guns was not only about
| bombs, but also about speed.
|
| If you got shot at early, you simply drop your bombs
| (maybe over rural farmland) and hit the engines as hard
| as you can. You wanted to fall into the part of the sea
| where the US-Navy still controlled the area.
|
| The bombers were flighting high enough that even if they
| were shot down... there was a chance of being rescued
| after a crash landing. But the crash landing absolutely
| had to be outside of the control of the Japanese. As
| such, more engine power, less guns, more bombs.
|
| Drop the bombs if attacked unexpectedly, and drift
| towards the Navy.
|
| If all goes well... with a bit of luck, you outrun the
| enemy on the way back as well. Your plane is much lighter
| after the payload has been dropped
| danielvf wrote:
| It was for bombs, not speed. Here's right from General
| LeMay's autobiography:
|
| "...We had decided to take out the guns and gunners to
| make up for the shortage of airplanes, because it would
| be another factor in helping increase the bombload.
| However, if the change to low altitude had been quite a
| step to take, then going in at low altitude with half a
| crew was something else!"
|
| The firebombing of Japan was done at low altitude, not
| high altitude.
|
| Do you have a source on heavy bombers over Japan dropping
| bombs on farmland and fleeing if attacked? That seems
| against almost every principal of bomber warfare. Lone
| bombers are much easier to kill than a formation, and an
| entire formation jettisoning bombs and abandoning their
| attack just because a few fighters showed up, or AA fire
| began is hard for me to comprehend.
| asdff wrote:
| 50+ would have been a small raid. the firebombing of
| tokyo was like over 300 bombers. Same with those larger
| raids in europe that destroyed 50% or more of many major
| cities. WWII was about overwhelming air defenses with a
| sea of bombers. Japan couldn't do anything about a bomber
| fleet of that size by like 1943 when US had total air
| superiority in the pacific and could bomb anything
| anywhere at that point with their carriers.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The firebombings were done with 4-engine superfortresses,
| which couldn't be launched from a carrier. These were
| massive planes that required a proper airbase to deploy.
|
| I don't think carriers (or carrier air wings) were
| involved in the bombing of the Japanese mainland. The
| famous bombing of Tokyo that you reference was all B-29
| superfortresses, launched from a land-base in mariana
| islands.
|
| Superfortresses were so high in altitude, that they
| couldn't be escorted by typical fighters. Indeed, that
| was its #1 defense mechanism: just fly higher than other
| planes (which it could do because of the marvels of
| pressurized cabins: oxygen masks just weren't good enough
| to reach that height.)
|
| I'm sure the Japanese fighter pilots would fly as high as
| reasonably possible before shooting their guns at the
| bombers.
|
| --------
|
| There were a few attempts at strategic bombing in 1942
| from Chinese bases (ally of the USA at the time). But a
| single mission used up the entire fuel supply from those
| bases: it was possible but just not practical. The USA
| would have to island hop to somewhere closer before
| attacking the mainland... which began in full capacity in
| 1944.
| vkou wrote:
| The Doolittle[1] raid was done by carrier-launched
| bombers (Who then had to land in China and the USSR[2],
| because they could not land on the carrier that launched
| them), but that was a one-off propaganda stunt.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid
|
| [2] Because the USSR was not at war with Japan, by the
| rules of neutrality, the crew got to drink vodka and play
| cards for the next year, until they 'escaped' Soviet
| custody into UK/US occupied territories. Their bomber,
| however, remained.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Hmmm. Well, I stand corrected. It was an impractical,
| propaganda-based attack... but that was a true attack
| from a carrier.
|
| But with 15 of the 16 bombers being destroyed and the
| remaining 1 captured in the mission, it does show that
| the Doolittle Raid was very impractical outside of the
| propaganda purpose. (Proving to the American people that
| it was possible, though impractical, to strike Japan
| probably was a huge win for morale, and possibly well
| worth the destruction of all those bombers).
| splistud wrote:
| And it was of course a one-off, much earlier event. Your
| original point was correct with this one exception.
| eloff wrote:
| They didn't launch those kinds of raids from carriers.
| They used Island based airfields that had been
| captured/liberated. You can't launch a B29 from a
| carrier.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I don't think the Japanese was defending very well
| against the firebombs either by that point.
|
| > Japan didn't have the resources to fight against
| singular bombers anymore. They focused only on the groups
| of bombers. At this point, it was clear that their air-
| force was soundly defeated.
|
| It doesn't really make sense that it is easier to take
| down 10 bombers than 1, does it?
|
| It sounds like you mean the hypothetical where as many
| bombers were each sent individual to nuke as many cities
| that would be harder to defend against, because any
| bombers that got through would do so much more damage.
|
| So it's important to differential between potential
| destruction and actual destruction. The firebombings did
| incontrovertibly more damage, and after the war both
| governments had reason to not emphasize this.
| btilly wrote:
| _It doesn 't really make sense that it is easier to take
| down 10 bombers than 1, does it?_
|
| If you fire an imprecise weapon at a group of 10 bombers,
| your odds of hitting one of them can be up to 10x what it
| is if the same weapon fired at a single bomber.
|
| If you have limited ammunition, it is therefore sensible
| to wait for the group of 10 before firing.
|
| _So it 's important to differential between potential
| destruction and actual destruction. The firebombings did
| incontrovertibly more damage, and after the war both
| governments had reason to not emphasize this._
|
| Yeah. The USA invented a weapon (napalm) specifically
| intended to target the poorest neighborhoods in Japan.
| And those neighborhoods were so vulnerable exactly
| because the Japanese government didn't care about the
| people living there.
|
| It was much safer to talk about how big and threatening
| nuclear bombs were.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I don't believe that Japan had limited ammunition quite
| yet. But they had limited ace pilots and limited fighters
| at this point of the war. (The strategic bombs targeted
| airbases, airplane factories, and radar. The longer the
| bombings continued, the weaker the airforce got).
| dragontamer wrote:
| > It doesn't really make sense that it is easier to take
| down 10 bombers than 1, does it?
|
| In 1944, these were largely "strategic" bombers: who had
| more range than our fighters. I believe they were
| unescorted (our fighters / carriers simply didn't have
| enough range yet to provide assistance).
|
| These large "superfortress" bombers may have had machine
| gun defenses, but they couldn't dodge or dogfight. They
| were sitting ducks (albeit at higher altitudes than
| Japanese aircraft could follow, but these superfortresses
| weren't made for air-superiority... not at all).
|
| This means that if a Japanese fighter / interceptor was
| most efficient vs these strategic bombing runs. Once you
| shot down one bomber, you're already to shoot down a 2nd
| or 3rd. Your most efficient use of fighters was therefore
| against groups of bombers.
|
| ----------
|
| Its not about the "difficulty" of the task, and more
| about the "efficiency" of the task. One Ace pilot could
| kill 2 or 3 bombers during the defense of a city.
|
| But if only 1-bomber "scout" were going somewhere, its
| just not worth your ace pilot's time or energy. The best
| they could do is shoot down just one enemy bomber.
| vkou wrote:
| 450 B-29s were lost in the pacific theatre (Only 300 of
| which to enemy action). They were credited for shooting
| down 714 fighters, with 456 probably destroyed, and 770
| damaged.
|
| Given their heavy defensive armaments, I would not
| describe that as a 'sitting duck'. As Japan lost the
| ability to actually put planes in the air, B-29 guns
| started getting stripped out, because they were no longer
| necessary.
|
| Yes, they were big targets, but they were also flying
| quickly, at high altitudes. A fighter only carries so
| much ammunition, can quickly expend it, and has poor
| accuracy when shooting at a distant, fast-moving target.
| Due to the fuel shortages, available fighter loiter time
| was very low, so it doesn't get more than one, maybe two
| chances in a sortie to even take a shot at a B-29. And
| even if some of its shots hit, it's still quite likely
| that the bomber will make it back home.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Curtis LeMay once commented that if the Axis had won he
| would have been tried for war crimes. Yea, the fire
| bombing was truly insane. A fictional account based on
| the author's experience of what occurred in Dresden,
| Germany can be found in Slaughterhouse V by Kurt
| Vonnegut.
|
| https://www.toptenz.net/brutal-facts-about-general-
| curtis-le...
|
| This is not to say anything nice about the Axis powers,
| but more to dispel the illusion that the American
| military were some kind of heroic force.
| vkou wrote:
| > Each of those "firebombings" were conducted by 50+ B-29
| bombers. When you see so many bombers show up on radar,
| you dispatch the fighters, you know things are about to
| happen.
|
| 1. By mid-1945, Japan no longer had any fuel for those
| fighters.
|
| 2. B-29s cruised at 40,000', way out of reach of Japanese
| fighters.
|
| At that point in the war, whether or not you see a
| single, or 50 B-29s, Japanese air defense would ignore
| them, because Japan no longer had a working air defense.
| The only difference is that in the latter, the
| firefighting crews would start getting ready.
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| This sounds completely improbable.
|
| Phones / telegrams and cameras existed.
|
| Nagasaki happened 3 days later, I find it hard to believe
| information couldn't travel that fast.
| eschulz wrote:
| You're correct, but the circumstances of the first atomic
| attack caused significant delays for accurate information
| to reach the Imperial General Headquarters. The first
| info stated that Hiroshima was devastated in an air raid,
| but the officers at high command considered this to be an
| error due to the lack of reports of hundreds of American
| bombers over the city on that day. However, they were
| unable to get any communication from Hiroshima (note that
| the military headquarters was at the Hiroshima Castle
| which was completely destroyed).
|
| It didn't take days, but it did take many hours for Tokyo
| to realize that indeed Hiroshima was devastated in an
| attack. Some officers even thought it was a traditional
| bombing raid and that there was a technical issue or even
| sabotage with their communication lines between Hiroshima
| and Tokyo. Tho Officer Corps at first had little
| knowledge to understand that it might have been an atomic
| attack, and that therefore the war had changed in a very
| serious manner.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > If I'm not misremembering history, then their delay in
| action - due to the difficulty of getting news of the
| situation out of the area of destruction - led to the
| bombing of Nagasaki as well
|
| It was a bit more complicated than that [0]. There was
| intense resistance to the Allies' demands for unconditional
| surrender. Japanese scientists confirmed on the 7th August
| (the day after the bombing) that Hiroshima had been atom
| bombed and Nagasaki was bombed on the 9th. The Japanese
| didn't actually surrender until the 15th August, following
| a failed coup d'etat in which elements of the Army rebelled
| against the emerging surrender plans [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hirosh
| ima_a...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attemp
| ted_c...
| speeder wrote:
| If I remember there was also the fact they didn't
| bothered with the usual emergency meetings regarding the
| atomic bombs because the damage was less than other
| things USA did to Japan (like firebombing of Tokyo), but
| they started to have meetings to plan the surrender when
| news came that Soviets were sending soldiers toward
| Japan.
|
| According to an ethnic japanese teacher of mine, the
| Japanese remembered very well how badly it went for them
| when they tried to invade Mongolia and lost to URSS, and
| they were more afraid of post-war occupation by URSS than
| by USA, thus why the surrender became more accepted.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I would expect very few considering how rare early cities
| were and how rare these low-atmosphere explosions are (and
| presumably were as well).
| dwd wrote:
| Sodom, Gomorrah... there's quite a list in the ancient
| literature from the region of cities obliterated.
| autokad wrote:
| 'some' theorized Tall el-Hammam is Sodom and Gomorrah
| panda-giddiness wrote:
| Sodom is specifically named in the article.
|
| > It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe,
| such as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic
| object, may have generated an oral tradition that, after
| being passed down through many generations, became the
| source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis.
| The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban
| center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been
| an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, e.g., (i)
| stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky;
| (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city
| was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi)
| area crops were destroyed. If so, the destruction of Tall
| el-Hammam is possibly the second oldest known incident of
| impact-related destruction of a human settlement, after Abu
| Hureyra in Syria ~ 12,800 years ago.
| q1w2 wrote:
| For an asteroid to hit a city this closely - the odds are so
| astronomical - that it implies that this magnitude of impact
| occurs frequently, perhaps every couple hundred years.
|
| Which means it is very possible that we will see one in our
| lifetime. Hopefully it'll hit the ocean.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Especially at a time when cities were dramatically fewer and
| farther between.
| GravitasFailure wrote:
| Tunguska in 1908 and Chelyabinsk in 2013, with who knows how
| many impacting the ocean or other harder to notice regions.
| Yeah, you're not wrong.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Chelyabinsk was lucky that the burst occurred very high in
| the atmosphere. Even with that, the amount of damage from
| the blast was shocking.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> Some 7,200 buildings in six cities across the region
| were damaged by the explosion's shock wave, and
| authorities scrambled to help repair the structures in
| sub-freezing temperatures.
|
| Just read that bit - six cities ! 7,000 buildings.
| Imagine something breaking windows in LA and SF.
|
| (wikipedia)
| koheripbal wrote:
| Nearly all the damage was broken windows.
|
| Not relevant to a prehistoric explosion.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| It's the scale of it - the videos of the meteor from
| Russian dashcams don't give a feel for the scale or the
| sound. But ... it smashed 7000 buildings across 6 cities
| - that is terrifying in our modern world. To a bronze age
| citizenry?
| macrolocal wrote:
| Can't help but wonder if there's a connection to the
| rapid expansion of Baal worship during the next few
| centuries.
|
| Around that time, the non-Biblical Baal was supposed to
| have been some kind of sky/thunder deity, a proto-Zeus.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Imagine sitting by a window, and having it blow up in you
| face.
| GravitasFailure wrote:
| It's definitely relevant to gauging the frequency of such
| events and gauging their destructive potential. Had that
| same meteor come in at a slightly different angle and
| exploded a little lower in the atmosphere somewhere that
| was a bit more sensitive, the destruction would have been
| significantly worse.
| tokipin wrote:
| Dashcams were common in Russia and it happened in the
| YouTube era, so there were plenty of videos of the event:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpmXyJrs7iU
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Had the Tunguska event occurred over a densely populated
| area, and the damage and loss of life would have been
| catastrophic.
| GravitasFailure wrote:
| Hell, just have the Chelyabinsk strike happen somewhere
| it could trigger an avalanche or landslide, or even a
| dense city with highrises.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > the odds are so _astronomical_
|
| Heh, in more ways than one I suppose
| bumbada wrote:
| It happens, only the probability of hitting someone-something
| human is almost nothing.
|
| Years ago,while I was teaching the starts to kids on the
| mountain at night one of them asked for a bright star on the
| sky. We looked at the star and it became bigger until it was
| a big ball of fire so bright that we had to look away.
|
| For two or three seconds, it became as bright as in daylight,
| but shadow moving ultrafast.
|
| Then nothing,it became dark again. No sound, no nothing.
|
| Nobody talked about that in the news. Most people were sleep.
| It must be normal.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| Meteor bursts in the upper atmosphere are a fairly frequent
| occurrence, detection is made with acoustic using sensors
| developed to detect atomic explosions. It is very rare that
| they occur low to the ground though.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229492086_Historica.
| ..
| q1w2 wrote:
| Impacts of this magnitude exploding near enough to the
| surface to cause significant damage on land are not common
| at all - perhaps on the order of once per century - given
| the recording of modern technology over the last ~150 years
| (obvious wide margin of error there).
|
| Despite that, hitting the city in OPs article, even 35
| centuries ago, still seems like an extremely low
| probability event happened.
| garmaine wrote:
| Given the distribution of land vs. sea, a recorded once
| per century event is probably once per 25 years or so in
| actuality (it just usually happens over the ocean).
| kijin wrote:
| The bones were splashed with molten metal.
|
| Imagine holding a silver cup. You raise it to give a toast. All
| of a sudden, the wine in your cup begins to boil, your flesh
| turns to ash and flies away as if someone with an infinity
| gauntlet had willed you away, the cup melts and splatters
| silver over your charred bones.
|
| The only other place where I think I was impressed by scenery
| of this sort was the opening to _Terminator 2: Judgment Day_.
| It seems that reality is even scarier than what our writers and
| cinematographers can imagine.
| Arun2009 wrote:
| I'd argue that this is one of the most humane ways to die.
| You're gone in a flash. Compare this to diseases like several
| cancers that kill you slowly over a period of time, while you
| suffer all the way through.
| toss1 wrote:
| Sandia Labs did some amazing supercomputer simulation work
| related to the Tunguska event, and produced a set of
| fascinating simulation videos [1].
|
| It looks like these simulations were referenced in the
| illustration & chart just ahead of the Conclusion section.
|
| Also some pretty interesting results in the Sandia study: >>
| "The asteroid that caused the extensive damage was much smaller
| than we had thought," says Sandia principal investigator Mark
| Boslough of the impact that occurred June 30, 1908. "That such
| a small object can do this kind of destruction suggests that
| smaller asteroids are something to consider. Their smaller size
| indicates such collisions are not as improbable as we had
| believed."
|
| Definitely worth checking out [1]
| https://newsreleases.sandia.gov/releases/2007/asteroid.html
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| But people keep saying they want to go out with a bang.
| yread wrote:
| The whole paper is definitely worth reading. The methods
| they've used to rule out everything else then a meteor blast.
| Or the microphotograph of bone with embedded molten glass
| koheripbal wrote:
| The quartz shocking was a bit weak as it wasn't clear how
| they dated it to the same time as the theoretical blast -
| similarly for the other metal deposits found.
|
| This made their other arguments a little weaker as we as it
| reduced the temperature evidenced to just that of the melted
| bricks - which makes it possible that what they found was
| evidence of contemporary furnaces and/or other fire
| events/war/etc.
|
| Still pretty compelling overall.
|
| I understand they theorize an airburst, but I wonder if it
| would be possible to find a "ground zero" for the explosion,
| and thus more direct evidence.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > The quartz shocking was a bit weak as it wasn't clear how
| they dated it to the same time as the theoretical blast
|
| They found it in the rubble layer they are studying? How
| would it get there if it wasn't produced at the same time
| as the rest of the stuff in that layer?
|
| For things in a sediment layer to not be of equal age, you
| need some sort of transport mechanism to move the quartz
| there from some earlier or later period, and there's not
| much convective motion in dirt.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| What I find interesting is that, civilizations have fallen so
| many times due to catastrophic natural disasters or in the hands
| of each other. Some fell suddenly (Pompeii, Tall el-Hammam) and
| some perished gradually (Indus valley, Mayans). All these prayed
| to different gods who were not much use. And we still continue to
| put our faith in another set of gods hoping that they are the
| real deal (until the next city-block sized asteroid comes along).
| Humans are truly incapable of learning anything from history.
|
| PS: in case someone wonders where all this is coming from, I was
| pondering on the arrow that points to the Temple in this picture
| (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3/figures/1).
| Countless may have prayed at its steps for their safety and at
| the end, universe just swept all that aside.
| abrowne wrote:
| Pompeii wasn't a "civilization", it was one destroyed city (a
| couple, really, with Herculaneum). The Roman Empire lasted
| quite a bit longer!
| roenxi wrote:
| What would you like them to learn?
|
| Humans are small and the world they operate in is big.
| Sometimes humans get crushed.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Indeed. I guess I am going for not persecuting humans
| following other gods in the name of one's own gods.
| typon wrote:
| Build giant underground cities or diversify chance of
| survival by colonizing other planets
| bell-cot wrote:
| Giant underground cities have so many cost, safety, supply,
| and water issues that colonizing other planets can start
| looking darn attractive by comparison.
| fnord77 wrote:
| my opinion is that god/religions evolve simply to provide
| psychological comfort to people and for social control. I don't
| think any rational person believes their god is going to save
| their city.
|
| how many people would be motivated to do anything if they knew
| that when you die, you cease to be? Or that there's no trial of
| your life's deeds.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Allow me this quote:
|
| I am tempted to go full Slav on Conor, to explain to him how
| we are all just grains of dust suspended in the howling void,
| searching for meaning in the fleeting moments before we are
| yanked back to the oblivion from whence we emerged, naked and
| screaming. But for all his faults he's just a kid stuck
| spending his summer microwaving Yorkshire puddings for
| difficult people. I take pity.
|
| -- https://idlewords.com/2018/12/
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| Most? I'm not aware of any general apathy amongst the atheist
| crowd (who generally believe those things) and instead see a
| high percentage of them rising to positions of power and
| influence in Hollywood and science, IE places they don't
| generally have to hide their feelings on the subject. It's up
| to you to decide how many of our politicians you think are
| lip service Christians.
| sharmin123 wrote:
| Explore Happy And Healthy Relationship Tips To Be Happy In Life:
| https://www.hackerslist.co/explore-happy-and-healthy-relatio...
| sayonaraman wrote:
| So that's the infamous Sodom
| mh- wrote:
| This should have a "(1650 BCE)" added to the title.
| cs702 wrote:
| Not necessary, as the title is already qualified by "Bronze
| Age."
| jameshart wrote:
| Experts seem skeptical...
|
| https://twitter.com/markboslough/status/1440377970497966089?...
|
| https://twitter.com/chrisstantis/status/1440404380386160646?...
| vdfjpobvjdpsfi wrote:
| fdsnjvsdkaf<cvhdgfbvadusbn vbjsdjnkbvadjk
| collsni wrote:
| i agree
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The description is pretty scary. More worrisome is what are the
| chances of an event like this being mistaken for a nuclear attack
| and triggering a nuclear war.
|
| For example, if such an event happened to a major city in the US,
| how could you confirm that it was a bolide, and how do you
| convince the public calling for retaliation that it was not a
| nuclear attack.
| wrycoder wrote:
| There are satellites continuously monitoring the Earth for
| nuclear bursts. The latter have a characteristic double pulse
| of optical radiation, even in the case of a simple fission
| device.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_MASINT#Space-based_N...
| the8472 wrote:
| > More worrisome is what are the chances of an event like this
| being mistaken for a nuclear attack and triggering a nuclear
| war.
|
| Before worrying about the second-order effect maybe we should
| worry about having no defenses against such impacts.
| nabla9 wrote:
| There exists protocols to differentiate nuclear detonation from
| all other large explosions.
|
| Satellites dedicated for this purpose have gamma ray, x-rays,
| and neutron detectors. They would instantly rule out nuclear
| explosion.
|
| Air sampling and nuclear forensics makes it possible to even
| identify the culprit from the radionuclides.
| VLM wrote:
| nukes have a peculiar "famous" double flash
|
| Also don't forget the EMP effects of a large nuke. Just
| because a large nuke on the surface doesn't "vaporize all
| global electronics magically" doesn't mean it would be
| unmeasurable.
|
| I am curious how unclassified the detail level can be for
| seismographic analysis. Certainly, oil prospectors can output
| detailed 3-d models given prior preparation and "generic
| earthquakes" have nearly instant results for depth of the
| earthquake and precise location. Anyway my point is the
| destruction in the linked article was spread along a 100 KM
| (or so..) SW to NE line simultaneously whereas nukes are
| obviously point sources. I suppose incredibly unluckily a
| meteor could come precisely 90 degrees straight down to fool
| such analysis but those impacts are statistically unlikely.
| It would seem pretty trivial given enough seismographs on the
| ground and enough global computing power to instantly detect
| the difference between a single point source and a
| geographically long linear impact source.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Because IAEA coordinates and monitors NPT-treaty there is
| lots of open source information about the subject.
|
| Seismographic analysis has become really accurate. 0.1 t ..
| 10 t aka (extremely-low-yield testing) can be concealed
| from seismographs. Very-low-yield testing between 10 t and
| 1-2 kt is very hard to conceal, and everything from low-
| yield testing up (>20kt) can be detected with certainty.
| adriancr wrote:
| We'd ideally get early warnings of asteroids.
|
| Also, nukes don't get automatically launched (unless you're
| Russia at high alert and activated dead hand), that's why
| leaders exist.
| q1w2 wrote:
| Unlikely. The one that hit a couple years ago in Russia was
| not detected at all because it came from the solar side.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| We have radars you can see nuclear missile coming. Also you
| have radiation.
|
| In any case, how do you retaliate if you have no idea who
| attacked you?
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| We invaded Iraq after 15 Saudis flew planes into the WTC and
| the Pentagon - so it doesn't matter if you know who did it or
| not.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| > We have radars
|
| What if your strategic enemy secretly figured out how to
| evade detection?
|
| > also you have radiation.
|
| Ah, the lack of radiation explains it: this city-killing
| explosion was the horrible work of a top-secret kinetic
| impactor weapons program developed by [insert strategic enemy
| here]!
|
| > how do you retaliate if you have no idea who attacked you?
|
| The same way the USA justified invading Iraq: lie. The
| inevitable blizzard of online disinformation wouldn't help
| things either.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > What if your strategic enemy secretly figured out how to
| evade detection?
|
| They probably already do; stealth tech is a thing, as are
| hypersonic long distance missiles. Plus submarines, to
| bring the nukes in real close, reducing response time.
| kadoban wrote:
| Or just a suitcase bomb and person. (I'm sure there are
| _some_ detectors in ports and airports, but doubt they're
| infalible).
| jjk166 wrote:
| What's to stop these people from just nuking themselves and
| claim it was their strategic enemy's stealth strike?
|
| If people want to go to war, it doesn't make a lot of sense
| to wait around for an asteroid.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Are you asking "what is a false flag operation?" or "when
| did the USA last do this (that we know of, outside of
| conspiracy theories) ?".
|
| The Wikipedia article (1) answers the first, and the the
| second was 1964 (2).
|
| Obviously, less expensive means are typically used than
| "just nuking themselves".
|
| 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
|
| 2) https://allthatsinteresting.com/gulf-of-tonkin
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > In any case, how do you retaliate if you have no idea who
| attacked you?
|
| You get to choose who you want to attack, go invade your
| preferred targets? It worked for the US about 20 years ago.
| It's not a hypothetical, it's recent occurrence.
| danjac wrote:
| It wouldn't take much:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83#False_alarm_fro.
| ..
|
| " false alarms were caused by a rare alignment of sunlight on
| high-altitude clouds underneath the satellites' orbits. "
| jjk166 wrote:
| The odds of erroneously detecting a missile launch and then
| a meteor exploding over a city at the exact time and place
| predicted by that fake missile's trajectory is
| astronomically small.
| majinuub wrote:
| I like the theory that this event is what inspired the biblical
| story of Sodom. It reminds me of how paleontologists use the
| ancient art and stories of Native Australians to figure out what
| Pleistocene animals looked like and how they may have behaved.
|
| In the story, Lot and his family were one of the few people to
| escape the city before its destruction. God told his family to
| not look back at the city as it was being destroyed. Lot's wife
| looked back and turned into "a pillar of salt". Maybe this is a
| metaphor for the people who went back to the site and couldn't
| grow food there due to the hypersaline that was spread across the
| region by the airburst.
| scns wrote:
| Or maybe they watched her burn to a crisp from afar, did not go
| back to check and took the ashes for salt.
| elwell wrote:
| I find it interesting that despite so many years of scrutiny
| these biblical stories have yet to be conclusively invalidated.
| It seems there's some balance between each critique and each
| discovery, always leaving room for faith, never 'proving' but
| never snuffing out.
| ben_w wrote:
| Given one side is positing an entity with a mysterious
| personality that can _create literally everything, ex nihilo,
| in 6 days_ , I wouldn't expect it to be possible to
| conclusively invalidate anything, ever, under any
| circumstances.
|
| No matter how much evidence there is on the side saying the
| Bible is just as fictional as the Olympian, Roman, Egyptian,
| Aztec etc. pantheons, believers can always counter it.
|
| The argument goes something like this:
|
| "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies
| faith, and without faith I am nothing."
| splistud wrote:
| What does validating or invalidating have to do with a work
| of allegory?
|
| Scoring points in some long-running argument based on the
| common misunderstanding of both sides isn't really all that
| important.
|
| Why not, instead, focus on what you yourself can accept as
| ineffable and universal?
| nwatson wrote:
| There's a large contingent of a minority of Evangelical
| Protestants who want to feel scientific exploration and
| discovery is done in good faith while also wanting to
| believe the Scripture, as currently received and
| understood (39 "books" of O.T., 27 "books" of N.T.,
| written by diverse authors over more than a millenium),
| is what Almighty wanted us to have, and that it
| represents the spiritual truth as we should understand it
| ... how literal/symbolic/allegorical that Scripture might
| be is hard to determine.
|
| So, this contingent usually is berated in religious
| forums ("No, the first two or three chapters in Genesis
| are 'historical narrative', heretic! ... BTW, here are
| the mental gymnastics for addressing inconsistencies in
| the two creation narratives [0]") or secular forums ("The
| Old Testament is a collection of inconsistent myths with
| no value in historical interpretation! There's no
| archaeological evidence of the Exodus! The New Testament
| passages weren't written till the year 300!").
|
| But ... we (of this contingent) still want to meld the
| scientific and scriptural views, and we aren't too proud
| to be monkeys. For someone with this view, most of the
| New Testament makes little sense unless there was a
| literal Adam/Eve at some point, while evolution must also
| hold. There perhaps aren't many ways of reconciling
| these, so it's a struggle. The best I can reconcile is
| that "God made humankind from the dust of the earth" is
| the beautiful hack of evolution, and the Almighty chose,
| during one code review, from among candidate resulting
| species, his version 1.0 of the physical substrate of
| humankind, and "breathed the breath of life into [them]"
| to make them spiritually conscious. Then Garden-of-Eden,
| Tree-of-Life-vs-Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil,
| Partaking-of-the-Forbidden-Fruit, and we get to
| humankind's current reality. I look forward to seeing how
| wrong or right I am.
|
| [0] https://answersingenesis.org/contradictions-in-the-
| bible/do-...
|
| EDIT: mention the Exodus
| ben_w wrote:
| > For someone with this view, most of the New Testament
| makes little sense unless there was a literal Adam/Eve at
| some point
|
| I'm surprised to read this. I was raised Catholic in the
| UK, and everyone in my school years seemed to be fine
| melding scientific and scriptural views without having
| any problem assuming that Adam and Eve did not need to be
| literal.
| gaoshan wrote:
| It's because many religions and mythologies based the stories
| they tell on actual events (or handed down stories of
| events). People naturally incorporate those into their own
| system of beliefs. Often the most prominent tales are shared
| amongst various religions and cultures and that certainly
| doesn't "prove" any one of their belief systems in
| particular. The prevalence does, however, help to validate
| the science behind the discovery.
| pythonlion wrote:
| I don't understand why you being downvoted, what is wrong
| with bible treasure hunting or validating one of the oldest
| books. if the bible was some part wrong it doesn't mean
| anything in it is false
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Here's just one of many anachronisms from the bible.
|
| "Last week, archaeologists Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen
| of Tel Aviv University released a new study that dates the
| arrival of the domesticated camel in the eastern
| Mediterranean region to the 10th century B.C. at the
| earliest, based on radioactive-carbon techniques. Abraham and
| the patriarchs, however, lived at least six centuries before
| then."
|
| https://time.com/6662/the-mystery-of-the-bibles-phantom-
| came...
| throwawaygal7 wrote:
| This is a really bad example of an anachronism, stop using
| it. They carbon dated a camel remain found in a particular
| settlement and are using it as the upper bound for
| domestication when it should be the lower bound. That's
| silly. Earlier this week on HN we saw evidence that camel
| statues in Saudia Arabia date to 5k BC or so. Clearly
| people have been interacting with camels in the region for
| quite a while.
| worker767424 wrote:
| "The 'Mystery' of the Bible's Phantom Camels"
|
| There's one really obvious solution to that mystery.
| choeger wrote:
| If you're going to tell us that the Bible is not composed
| of historically accurate accounts by contemporary
| writers, that's really nothing new.
|
| I wonder about the camel thing, though. Did the
| authors/editors of the texts consider camels ubiquitous?
| Did they _know_ that camels were very special and wanted
| to mention it? Was it a mistranslation?
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I remember seeing a late medieval painting of a saint and
| he's wearing spectacles.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Art and literature of all kinds has a long, long history
| of portraying people from the past in historically
| inaccurate ways that the people doing the portrayal take
| for granted.
|
| One obvious religious example would be the many paintings
| of Christ showing him as a blonde European wearing
| contemporary (for the time of the painting) European
| clothing.
| ocschwar wrote:
| Camels were ubiquitous. And feral. The taming (camels
| remain undomesticated to this day - "trust in God and tie
| down your camel.") and exploitation of camels is what's
| anachronistic, not the camels themselves.
| setr wrote:
| According to everything I can google, camels are
| definitely domesticated, and the vast majority of them
| are today. According to wikipedia, there's technically
| only 1400 "wild" camels or so, from the wild Bactrian
| group
|
| Some other neat facts I just learned:
|
| 1. Apparently domestication can be defined as simply "12
| generations of selective breeding". What exactly is being
| selected is left open.
|
| 2. Feral is defined as first domesticated, then released.
| The only truly wild population of camels is apparently
| the wild Bactrian camels, in the gobi desert
|
| 3. Apparently camels started in the NA, traveled to Asia,
| got wiped out in NA (presumably by humans), got tamed in
| Asia, and then brought back to NA.
|
| 4. Apparently this also true of horses.
| unknown_apostle wrote:
| And that solution comes in many, many shades of gray.
| Picking the right shade is less obvious.
| sgc wrote:
| That area is full of salt pillars. The geology served as an
| opportunity to create a moral and religious story. Could this
| have also influenced the story? Perhaps, but the salt pillars
| are quite large, obvious, and unique.
|
| Edit: I note that nearby Jericho is dated to have been
| destroyed and abandoned in the same time period (within 50
| years, likely well within margins of error). One of the most
| striking thing about the Tel in Jericho is that half the Tel is
| missing. Specifically the side to the East, which would be
| facing this Tel. I have never seen any good reason given for
| that missing section of Jericho, and would not be surprised at
| all if the same event destroyed both cities. Obviously lending
| more weight to this event having been integrated into Biblical
| writings.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I get correlation and causation, but if I was sitting in an
| ancient Jericho, and watching another Army walk round the
| walls - and after they did a sodding great meteorite fell
| from the gods and blew down half my city walls, I would
| certainly think about religious conversion. :0)
|
| On the other hand we should not get too carried away matching
| up events like this. The team behind this article took pains
| to prove it must have been an airburst by finding molten
| glass that could only come from certain temperatures etc etc.
|
| I always understood that walking round the walls of Jericho
| was supposed to be cover for the sounds of sappers, just as
| the wooden horse of Troy may well have been a animal shaped
| cover for a battering ram, as opposed to a rather easy to
| avoid foot-gun.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| > A sapper, also called pioneer or combat engineer, is a
| combatant or soldier who performs a variety of military
| engineering duties, such as breaching fortifications
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapper
| sgc wrote:
| My edit was to indicate that the air burst might have been
| a distant inspiration for the Jericho story as well as the
| Sodom story. There are about 600-1000 years between event
| and writing by most estimates, so there was plenty of time
| for it to inspire more than one story. But local geology
| plays a big role in many Biblical stories, not just these.
| People who are teachers look for teaching moments, and find
| them in the things that surround them.
| eloff wrote:
| Wasn't Jericho the one where they brought down the walls by
| making noise in the biblical story? I wonder if that could
| have been inspired by finding the wreckage of the city with
| the East wall destroyed.
| bmcahren wrote:
| Like this? https://theconversation.com/of-bunyips-and-other-
| beasts-livi...
|
| They reference this book which seems interesting:
| https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/edge-of-memory-9781472943262/
|
| What is your source?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I know that for a people who were not yet understanding about
| bolides and ways in which the astronomical environment
| interacted with the planet, ascribing the destruction of the
| city to a deity seems quite plausible.
|
| If this event is the cause for the salt pillars in the area
| then I could also see people making up stories about it as
| well.
|
| I am left with the question though of how does a bolide become
| full of salt?
| jonathanlb wrote:
| Some time ago, I heard of another theory for the Sodom and
| Gomorrah story:
|
| An asteroid clipped a mountain in the Alps, causing a landslide
| in Kofels (but no crater). The asteroid's trajectory had a low
| angle, which made the mushroom cloud arc over the Mediterranean
| and over the Levant, raining down fire and such. This asteroid
| was actually recorded by Assyrian scribes on a clay tablet, but
| its trajectory wasn't plotted until relatively recently
| (2008-ish).
|
| https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html
| codesnik wrote:
| air resistance is too high on the height where asteroid can
| clip a mountain, for something to reach levant. it'd explode
| right there. But I could believe in asteroid fragmented much
| higher
| pythonlion wrote:
| nice article. but 700 BC is my be more fitted to another
| biblical story. sorry I forgot exactly which one but there is
| a story about a battle that ended when god rained fire on one
| of the sides
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Well, that sure makes it work out to be one hell of a victim
| blame!
| [deleted]
| _joel wrote:
| Scott Manley had an interesting video on the Meteor Crater where
| he also talked about the 1908 event and the differences in the
| projectile bodies.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=704POGQFDoQ
| mapt wrote:
| Confirming or falsifying this and locating the potential impact
| crater seems relatively easy conceptually, but it requires that
| they go beyond the archeological approach and into statistical
| geological tools. Shocked quartz is characteristic of impact
| events, and if shocked quartz is present in a layer here, it will
| be present in the surrounding areas (all of them, not just the
| ones where warfare is a reasonable alternate hypothesis) in a
| characteristically greater thickness & concentration, centered on
| the crater. Drill a few hundred or a few thousand sediment cores
| from the surrounding areas, and map out the shocked quartz layer.
| api wrote:
| Could this incident be the source for stories like Sodom and
| Gomorrah?
| [deleted]
| p_l wrote:
| It's discussed in the article, including also the story of
| Jericho - whose fall happened around the same time frame, and
| could be explained by blast wave destroying city wall
| (archeological evidence shows damage concentrated on one side)
| with thermal radiation starting fire that devastated the rest
| of the city.
|
| Interestingly enough, the explosion is hypothesized to cause
| hypersalinity in the area, which caused its abandonment for
| around 600 years (as it made it impossible to grow crops).
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