[HN Gopher] The Tunguska Mystery-100 Years Later (2008)
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The Tunguska Mystery-100 Years Later (2008)
Author : olivermarks
Score : 62 points
Date : 2023-03-03 06:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| [deleted]
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Was there a follow-up? This was written fifteen years ago.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| "115 years later" doesn't have as nice a ring to it :)
| mikequinlan wrote:
| June 30, 2008
| _qua wrote:
| Seems that there were follow up studies after this one in 2008
| which raise doubts about the conclusion that the lake was formed
| by an impactor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Have to mention the Tesla/Robert Peary conspiracy theory. The
| date Tunguska happened Tesla had asked Robert Peary to observe
| any unusual weather phenomena. None were reported.
|
| Tesla had reputedly activated his energy transmitter at
| Wardencliff, focused on Peary's location. If you draw that line
| (Wardencliff to Peary's expedition location) and double it, you
| have the Tunguska forest.
| Izkata wrote:
| Hm..
|
| > In 1946, for instance, science-fiction writer Alexander
| Kazantsev explained the puzzling scene by positing a scenario
| in which an alien spacecraft had exploded in the atmosphere.
|
| Maybe Tesla shot down a UFO, and it self-destructed to prevent
| their technology from falling into our hands.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Known to the Beta-Centaurians as The Earth Event. It
| essentially scuttled all further exploration of our solar
| system.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Or, as in Strugatsky brothers plot, the aliens were moving
| back in time so they continued living on in the age XIX, and
| perhaps left after repairs.
| hummus_bae wrote:
| [dead]
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| Why would you double the line?
| shellac wrote:
| Because you get right answer that way. Why would you want the
| wrong answer?
| bdhcuidbebe wrote:
| since its now written down, its basically established facts. /s
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Tomorrow in your friendly neiboorhoud LLM outputs !
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| The energy of the Tunguska event is estimated at around
| 60,000,000,000 megajoules. Assuming no transmission losses
| whatsoever, this can only mean that Tesla built the world's
| first nuclear power plant _and_ that it still dwarfs the output
| of all modern nuclear power plants today -- combined! He was
| truly a remarkable inventor.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Actually you can reconcile this. Maybe Tesla's transmitter
| acted like one of the laser targeting pods the military uses.
| The laser itself is minuscule energy, but it serves as
| guidance to a bomb or missile that is a lot more energetic.
| Maybe Tesla was in league with the aliens who wanted to test
| one of their missiles. Not wanting to cause a lot of
| casualties, they talked with Tesla about where they could
| target. Tesla used his device to help them target a very
| remote area of Siberia.
| ivalm wrote:
| Why would these super advanced aliens need Tesla? They can
| just target whatever themselves.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Tesla was actually the equivalent of an alien spy/special
| forces. Just like In Afghanistan, the US used embedded
| special ops forces on the ground to do targeting for
| missiles launched from fighters at high altitude.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| How about we compromise and say that Tesla made a Magnabeam
| from Forts[0], and that guided an iron-rich meteorite to
| Tesla's target?
|
| [0] https://forts.fandom.com/wiki/Magna_Beam
| miles wrote:
| From "Tesla Wireless and the Tunguska Explosion"[0]:
|
| "Tesla said his transmitter could produce 100 million volts
| of pressure and currents up to 1000 amperes, with
| experimental power levels of billion or tens of billions of
| watts.(18) If that amount of power were released in 'an
| incomparably small interval of time,'(19) the energy would be
| equal to the explosion of millions of tons of TNT, that is, a
| multi-megaton explosion. Such a transmitter would be capable
| of projecting the force of a nuclear warhead by radio."
|
| "18. Tesla, Nikola, _New York Times_ , 'How to Signal Mars,'
| May 23, 1909, pg. 10. He claims to have sent 'a current
| around the globe' on the order of '15,000,000' horsepower or
| 11 billion watts."
|
| "19. Secor, H. Winfield, 'The Tesla High Frequency
| Oscillator,' _The Electrical Experimenter_ , March 1916, pg.
| 615."
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20040203060110/http://www.fra
| nk....
| Oxidation wrote:
| Good to know the venerable "credulously repeat what the
| charismatic technology man said" school of journalism is
| now well into its second century of utility.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Tesla said a lot of shit, some of it was even true.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Or it somehow 'grounded' the entire ionosphere, producing the
| mother of all lightning discharges.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| There's no doubt that Nikola Tesla possesed some, let's not say
| a weapon, but knowledge about a very advanced way to cause mass
| destruction for it's time.
|
| In a way, his mind _was_ that weapon. And it 's a good thing,
| too. Imagine someone else with that kind of knowledge.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I think there's a lot of doubt, actually. He was very smart
| but he was not a magician.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Have you not seen the documentary "Prestige"?!
|
| /s
| somat wrote:
| Which makes me want to share my new favorite conspiracy
| theory about the movie(you know a story is good when
| there are wild theories about an event that was entirely
| imaginary in the first place, that is a sign of first
| class world building). anyway,
|
| The entire tesla arc never happened, the whole thing was
| an elaborate con. "but " you exclaim, "we saw the
| machine, the hats, the trip to america", to which I reply
| this is a case of second person narrative the only source
| for this information is the diary(which the movie
| dutifully animates) and the diary was planted, the diary
| was the con.
| dmitriid wrote:
| I absolutely love this theory. Now I definitely need to
| re-watch the movie
| Oxidation wrote:
| In the vein of fan theories about imaginary events, a
| favourite of mine was that James Bond died in Blofeld's
| brain drill chair and the second half of Spectre was
| hallucinations as his brain shut down.
|
| The release of a subsequent film with the same actor
| sadly disproved it.
| gpderetta wrote:
| I think that was another movie :)
| krapp wrote:
| "basically An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a
| perennial category of fan theory, along with "they were
| dead/in purgatory/hallucinating in an asylum all along"
| and "$X is a Time Lord." The latter i've also seen about
| James Bond.
|
| And of course Nikola Tesla. Which probably makes Edison
| The Master. There's definitely an AU fan fiction in there
| somewhere, which in its Golden Age (electropunk?)
| Lovecraft-noir incorporates "Edison's Conquest of
| Mars[0]," an influential but otherwise garbage sequel to
| H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Sorry, what was I.. oh
| yeah. Tunguska. Obviously Tesla accidentally reversed the
| polarity of the neutron flow.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison%27s_Conquest_of_M
| ars
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| You don't have to be a magician to make a doomsday weapon.
|
| In fact, he likely did not make it. He just possesed enough
| knowledge to imagine such a weapon possible in theory.
|
| There's a reason why I said _knowledge about a weapon_.
| Oxidation wrote:
| He didn't have more knowledge than we do now, 100 years,
| trillions of research dollars and millions of engineers
| later. He had a very amazing and intuitive sense of
| electricity, mechanics and physics in general, as well as an
| eidetic memory but it's not like he was conjuring mystical
| secrets out of the aether, any more than, say, OpenAI is
| today. And that's about how his inventions were received:
| with surprise that such things were possible, followed by
| credulity and wild predictions over where it might go, mostly
| relayed by people who didn't understand the technology.
|
| Electricity simply doesn't provide a practical mass
| destructive capacity in the way that, say, the strong nuclear
| force does. However, from the breakneck rate of electrical
| technology from the 1890s onwards, you could see why an
| extrapolation of those capabilities could make it plausible
| that it could eventually get there.
| recuter wrote:
| I'll just leave this here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kulik
|
| http://scihi.org/leonid-kulik-tunguska-event/
|
| I_am_not_saying_it_was_aliens.gif
| toss1 wrote:
| Related: Sandia Labs did some impressive simulations of that
| event entering the atmosphere. A couple of the resulting videos;
| well worth a minute to watch.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yY34uWty_0
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr7i33UhmC8
| andrewl wrote:
| A similar event in or near a populated area today might be
| interpreted as a nuclear attack.
| [deleted]
| remote_phone wrote:
| The entire world would have detected the meteor that large and
| been warned
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| Detecting incoming asteroids, especially small ones, is
| really hard. The recent 1-meter meteor that exploded over
| Europe, was only the seventh instance of a successful
| detection.
|
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2023/02/13/asteroid-
| expl...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Tunguska was a lot bigger than a metre across. Even the
| Chelyabinsk meteorite was a lot bigger, 18 m diameter, 9
| 000 tonne. So if we cn detect 1 m meteors I think we should
| be able to detect Tunguska scale objects.
| btilly wrote:
| We may notice some small things, but that doesn't mean
| that we've found all large things.
|
| According to https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/faq we
| only know about 40% of the rocks sized 140 meters+ that
| cross Earth's orbit. If one of the 60% we don't know
| about came at us from the direction of the Sun, our odds
| of seeing it before impact are fairly small.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| But it is the big ones, we are interested in, because they
| can do a lot of damage and not only fireworks.
| retrac wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
|
| > The Chelyabinsk meteor was a superbolide that entered
| Earth's atmosphere over the southern Ural region in Russia on
| 15 February 2013 at about 09:20 YEKT (03:20 UTC). It was
| caused by an approximately 18 m (59 ft) diameter, 9,100-tonne
| (10,000-short-ton) near-Earth asteroid that entered the
| atmosphere at a shallow 18.3 +- 0.4 degree angle with a speed
| relative to Earth of 19.16 +- 0.15 kilometres per second
| (69,000 km/h; 42,690 mph).
|
| > [...] The asteroid had a total kinetic energy before
| atmospheric impact equivalent to the blast yield of 400-500
| kilotons of TNT (about 1.4-1.8 PJ), estimated from infrasound
| and seismic measurements. This was 26 to 33 times as much
| energy as that released from the atomic bomb detonated at
| Hiroshima.
|
| If it had been at a slightly sharper angle, or slightly
| larger, or moving slightly faster, and if it had hit the
| right location, it could have destroyed a city. Fortunately
| it disintegrated in the upper atmosphere, so it only blew out
| windows across a large area as it burned brighter than the
| sun across the sky.
|
| There was no warning. The Tunguska rock, if it was a rock,
| was only a few times wider. I don't think we can reliably
| detect those, either.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Do you actually need to have detected it as it was coming
| in to be able to say 15 minutes later "oh that was a
| meteor" detection and forensics are different... it's just
| really if the forensics happen fast enough to avoid a
| counter strike. Eg if some nuclear capable countries
| capitol just evaporated with no nuke early warning systems
| going off and no one could look up and see the massive
| trail coming in and had not streamed it on the internet
| first.
| ianburrell wrote:
| There is space surveillance network tracks things in
| orbit. I don't think that covers all of the sky and could
| miss a rock.
|
| There are early warning satellites that look down for
| ballistic missiles. I don't know if the infrared
| detectors would see the rock. They are probably best as
| negative signal with no rocket being detected.
|
| The main signal that wasn't nuclear weapon would be the
| size and location. Nuclear weapons don't explode as high
| as Chelyabink meteor. Nuclear weapons aren't as big as
| Tunguska event. Also, hitting a city is unlikely, hitting
| one dead on is really unlikely. There would also no
| nuclear fallout detected.
| andrewl wrote:
| The Wikipedia page for the Tunguska event says it was "a
| stony asteroid about 50-60 metres (160-200 feet) in size."
| How far out would something that size be detected? This is
| very much out of my area.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The other mentioned much smaller one has a whole article on
| it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_CX1
|
| This one was 1 m wide and it seems like it was detected
| about 6 hours before coming down.
| ale42 wrote:
| But, as someone mentioned in another comment, the fact
| that we can detect a 1 m objects doesn't mean that we can
| detect all of them, far from that. Same for larger ones,
| we just have more chances of detecting those than 1
| m-sized ones.
| adastra22 wrote:
| No, we routinely get hit by rocks we didn't see coming.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > We sought evidence that the little lake existed before the
| event. Reliable, pre-1908 maps of this uninhabited region of
| Siberia are not easy to come by, but we found a czarist military
| map from 1883 that fails to show the lake. Testimony by local
| Evenk natives also asserts that a lake was produced by the 1908
| explosion.
|
| this is about as suggestive a set of facts as you're ever likely
| to get. We don't need any exotic theories about Tesla or aliens.
|
| > The first step in preparing ourselves would be to decide
| whether the cosmic object that affected Siberia was an asteroid
| or a comet.
|
| What would we do differently if we determined conclusively which
| it was? A comet _could_ strike Earth, even if Tunguska was not
| one. Knowing that it happened doesn 't make it any more likely it
| could happen again.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| One is more common that the other. And size matters. The
| smaller this object was, the more likely it will be to happen
| again. So it's exact size and composition matters when
| calculating future likelihoods.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| well, it caused a city-killing explosion. What would we do
| differently if the projected size estimates varied by 10x?
|
| It's scientifically interesting. Nothing wrong with that.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It might make the difference between ignoring a potential
| city-killer impact, and an all-or-nothing attempt to save
| us from civilization-ending event. To make such decisions
| we need to know what a particular type of incoming object
| might do. That means careful study of the few examples we
| already have in our history.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| OK. And the debate about "what should we do about that
| massive object out there heading for Earth" would be calm
| and rational, and the voices saying "hey, don't worry,
| it's just going to be Tunguska-sized, we can ignore it!"
| would win out?
|
| Please. It's an interesting question, and that's it.
| faceloss wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| virgulino wrote:
| "First expedition to depths of Lake Cheko close to epicentre of
| Tunguska event to start in February", Siberian Times, February
| 2022
|
| https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/first-expedition...
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