4 ms·

The city of Tall el-Hammam was destroyed by an airburst 3600 years ago

24 points by onychomys 5y ago

tschwimmer 5y ago
For an interesting fictional description of a comet hitting the earth (and the resulting aftermath), check out Lucifer's Hammer by Jeremy Pournelle and Larry Niven.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  Fun story, great science.
mrlonglong 5y ago
Well, that puts an end to that story about how Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed due to men's wickedness. I've always believed the Bible to be just a collection of stories edited for morality.
- erulabs 5y ago
  Well, it is a collection of stories edited for morality - but where those stories originally came from is the extremely interesting point. The bible for example seems to contain two, dual, and opposing creation myths (genesis and the garden of eden) - these two stories almost certainly started out as different belief systems and were homologized. Anyways, this article links to one about another impact at the end of the Younger Dryas period (~12k years-ago) (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60867-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60867-w) - when global sea levels rise dramatically, the mega-predators of the earth vanish, human civilization seems to appear, and we're left with (metaphorical?) stories about mega-floods and mega-monsters. There is a kernel of truth in all our rituals. As absurd as many of them are, they're like living history - a confused and tangled misremembering of... _something that actually happened_. And it makes one much more sympathetic to people who believed in an angry god if one understands they saw a city literally get smited from the heavens. Very interesting reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
  - timhand 5y ago
    From a christian perspective it's more that these stories are framed from a point of view. '“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Much attention is focused on how to reconcile Genesis 1 and science. But this is the wrong debate. Genesis 1 should be read not against current science books but against other stories of origins, especially the stories of the cultures surrounding ancient Israel: the Babylonians, Canaanites and Egyptians. Genesis 1 is best read as a polemic against these stories. Beneath some superficial similarities the Biblical account presents a profoundly different understanding of God, the world and humanity.' [1] [1] https://pbcc.org/sermons/in-the-beginning-god/ https://pbcc.org/sermons/in-the-beginning-god/
  - omega3 5y ago
    Why do you think the two myths are opposing?
    - erulabs 5y ago
      It's not so much that they're opposing in that they counter each other, it's just that from a literary perspective, there are two separate creation events in the first two books. Genesis 1 starts with a creation story: > In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth And after the entire creation of the world, Genesis 2 begins and seems to have forgotten the world was already created: > This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created There are a number of examples like this that make scholars believe the books were collected from different belief systems and then arranged together - sort of like a best-of compilation of existing religions.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Why do you think the two myths are opposing? Because different events occur, and the shared events occur in different order and context? When two different narratives notionally referring to the same events have those features, they are said to be opposing or conflicting narratives.
  - mrlonglong 5y ago
    Yes, that one is interesting. I believe it might be related to the flooding of the Black Sea circa 6,000 BCE. It is local enough to the region to become a story over millennia. The Eyptians may have heard about it and told Plato about it perhaps.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Not saying that I believe in this, but I have spoken with many believers. You won't change any minds with such reasoning: I've heard from a few with faith that evolution is compatible with Creation, because god provides the 'why' and evolution is merely 'how'. Same with an airburst -- it's merely the mechanism by which god (allegedly) punished men for doinking.
  - fourtrees 5y ago
    You can takes lines of reasoning like theirs very, very far and reach what and reach what Einstein called "Spinoza's God" -- a God indistinguishable from or identical to nature (or a God of whom nature is a part). At some point you do have to abandon human-like motives for the "why" and replace them with the laws of nature (chance has no place in the traditional forms of this system of belief, hence "God does not play dice"). A lot of big-name European thinkers in the 19th century (Goethe to name one stand-out example) found Spinozism an appealing compromise between traditional atheism and theism.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  I study history, and the locations described in the Bible are surprisingly accurate according to archaeology - I'm continually impressed. As far as behavior and morality, the Bible also matches evolutionary biology accurately as well, which is the underlying mechanism for human behavior. (And is diametrically opposed to wokeism, feminism and Marxism.) You could do far worse than to study the Bible.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
The science here may not be as good as it looks. Several of the authors appear to be nonscientists, scientists working outside their field, or biblical archaeologists with an agenda to prove this place is Sodom. Here's a thread about it by a real airburst scientist: https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1440377970497966089?s=19 https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1440377970497966089?...

24 points by onychomys 5y ago

For an interesting fictional description of a comet hitting the earth (and the resulting aftermath), check out Lucifer's Hammer by Jeremy Pournelle and Larry Niven.

merpnderp 5y ago
Fun story, great science.

mrlonglong 5y ago

Well, that puts an end to that story about how Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed due to men's wickedness. I've always believed the Bible to be just a collection of stories edited for morality.

erulabs 5y ago
Well, it is a collection of stories edited for morality - but where those stories originally came from is the extremely interesting point. The bible for example seems to contain two, dual, and opposing creation myths (genesis and the garden of eden) - these two stories almost certainly started out as different belief systems and were homologized. Anyways, this article links to one about another impact at the end of the Younger Dryas period (~12k years-ago) (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60867-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60867-w) - when global sea levels rise dramatically, the mega-predators of the earth vanish, human civilization seems to appear, and we're left with (metaphorical?) stories about mega-floods and mega-monsters. There is a kernel of truth in all our rituals. As absurd as many of them are, they're like living history - a confused and tangled misremembering of... _something that actually happened_. And it makes one much more sympathetic to people who believed in an angry god if one understands they saw a city literally get smited from the heavens. Very interesting reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
- timhand 5y ago
  From a christian perspective it's more that these stories are framed from a point of view. '“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Much attention is focused on how to reconcile Genesis 1 and science. But this is the wrong debate. Genesis 1 should be read not against current science books but against other stories of origins, especially the stories of the cultures surrounding ancient Israel: the Babylonians, Canaanites and Egyptians. Genesis 1 is best read as a polemic against these stories. Beneath some superficial similarities the Biblical account presents a profoundly different understanding of God, the world and humanity.' [1] [1] https://pbcc.org/sermons/in-the-beginning-god/ https://pbcc.org/sermons/in-the-beginning-god/
- omega3 5y ago
  Why do you think the two myths are opposing?
  - erulabs 5y ago
    It's not so much that they're opposing in that they counter each other, it's just that from a literary perspective, there are two separate creation events in the first two books. Genesis 1 starts with a creation story: > In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth And after the entire creation of the world, Genesis 2 begins and seems to have forgotten the world was already created: > This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created There are a number of examples like this that make scholars believe the books were collected from different belief systems and then arranged together - sort of like a best-of compilation of existing religions.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Why do you think the two myths are opposing? Because different events occur, and the shared events occur in different order and context? When two different narratives notionally referring to the same events have those features, they are said to be opposing or conflicting narratives.
- mrlonglong 5y ago
  Yes, that one is interesting. I believe it might be related to the flooding of the Black Sea circa 6,000 BCE. It is local enough to the region to become a story over millennia. The Eyptians may have heard about it and told Plato about it perhaps.
klyrs 5y ago
Not saying that I believe in this, but I have spoken with many believers. You won't change any minds with such reasoning: I've heard from a few with faith that evolution is compatible with Creation, because god provides the 'why' and evolution is merely 'how'. Same with an airburst -- it's merely the mechanism by which god (allegedly) punished men for doinking.
- fourtrees 5y ago
  You can takes lines of reasoning like theirs very, very far and reach what and reach what Einstein called "Spinoza's God" -- a God indistinguishable from or identical to nature (or a God of whom nature is a part). At some point you do have to abandon human-like motives for the "why" and replace them with the laws of nature (chance has no place in the traditional forms of this system of belief, hence "God does not play dice"). A lot of big-name European thinkers in the 19th century (Goethe to name one stand-out example) found Spinozism an appealing compromise between traditional atheism and theism.
redis_mlc 5y ago
I study history, and the locations described in the Bible are surprisingly accurate according to archaeology - I'm continually impressed. As far as behavior and morality, the Bible also matches evolutionary biology accurately as well, which is the underlying mechanism for human behavior. (And is diametrically opposed to wokeism, feminism and Marxism.) You could do far worse than to study the Bible.

dreamcompiler 5y ago

The science here may not be as good as it looks. Several of the authors appear to be nonscientists, scientists working outside their field, or biblical archaeologists with an agenda to prove this place is Sodom. Here's a thread about it by a real airburst scientist: https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1440377970497966089?s=19 https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1440377970497966089?...