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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 every
by raducu 5y ago
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.
- erdewit 5y agoCould it have been ancient aliens ?!!!?....
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tokai 5y agoThat's stochastic events for ya.
- kuschku 5y agoNeolithic and Bronze Age settlements existed for tens of millenia, while modern cities only existed for 2½ 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 5y agoDoes 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 5y agoJericho 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 5y agoJericho? 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 5y agoThe more obvious connection is with Sodom & Gomorra being destroyed by divine wrath. Evidence of high temperatures and increased salinity..
- dr_zoidberg 5y agoThe 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 5y agoYes, they did avoid derailing the study very nicely.
- 13of40 5y agoHaving 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.
- BurningFrog 5y agoThat's what you'd expect after an "increased salinity" event.
- dhosek 5y ago"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.
- pvg 5y agoWe 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.
- rini17 5y agoEven if that were true, what is your point? Where did these 10m people live if not in settlements?
- pvg 5y agoThey didn't live in permanent settlements, no, never mind ones that lasted tens of thousands of years. That is my point.
- rini17 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_continuously_inhabited_cities 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 5y agoMostly because they hadn't invented agriculture, a less-than-10k-years-old development.
- kuschku 5y agoThe city of Abu Herey was destroyed 10'800 BC, almost three millenia before the timeframe you just stated for the first cities.
- pvg 5y agoDo you mean this site? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_Abu_Hureyra 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.
- javajosh 5y agoThis 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 5y agoWe should be able to find the impact geological records and build a probability model.
- javajosh 5y agoDid 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 5y agoBest definition of a city ever: “bolide sensor”. Love it
- jacquesm 5y agotrees flattened in a radial pattern might show up in the geological record somehow.
- gota 5y agoUnlikely after several years, let alone several thousands, right?
- bell-cot 5y agoIt 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- joshuaissac 5y ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1490_Ch%27ing-yang_event
- raducu 5y agoYeah, 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 5y agoWe 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/ https://b612foundation.org/
- vkou 5y agoThe 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?
- rollo 5y agoPoisson clumping.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nkoren 5y agoHere's another one, 1490 in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1490_Ch%27ing-yang_event 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campo_del_Cielo
- sva_ 5y ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk#2013_meteor
- gatronicus 5y agoThe speed of detonation also matters, a meteorite detonation is surely slower than a nuclear bomb which releases the energy in milliseconds.
- pja 5y agoThis quite strongly depends on the composition of the metorite and the angle at which it enters the atmosphere. The Chelyablinsk meteor entered at a very shallow angle & was a chondrite with little internal strngth, so it disintegrated over a longer distance forming a “line burst” rather than a single point airburst. Had it entered more steeply, then it would have concentrated it’s KE over a much smaller area, causing much more damage. A nuclear bomb may take a few ms, but after a few 100ms, you’ve got a dense, hot plasma in a small volume. Sounds a lot like the result of a metorite airburst! And indeed, people use the same codes that are used to model nuclear explosions to model meteor airbursts.
- rsynnott 5y agoThere was also the Tunguska incident (no city) and a recent near miss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sulawesi_superbolide 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 5y agoIt would look magnificent in the May day parade though.
- himinlomax 5y agoKeep in mind the bronze age lasted a long time, over 2000 years.
- q1w2 5y agoIt 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 5y agoI 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.)
- q1w2 5y agoIf 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 5y agoThe 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.