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Pennsylvania Meteor Report
squiggy writes: "Turns out the scorched corn field in Pennsylvania, and the reports of car sized space rocks hitting the earth were a bit overthe top. Likely, the object was very small, disintegrated before impact, and anything that might have reached the ground intact would have been cold to the touch. The full story is here"
No take a look at the speed - I don't actually know what the terminal velocity of of rock is but I'm guessing 150-300 MPH. Sounds impressive 'till you realize that there are cars that can hit the low end of that. It's fast but we're talking terrestrial-fast, not astronomical-fast.
So, now figger what damage a sports car going very very fast would do to the county: Not much. Seriously - a sports car weighs around a thousand pounds or so, what would one do if it hit a particularly hard part of the county - say slamming into a cliff along the highway?
Oh, the neighbors might hear the impact or notice the new ditch next door but we're not talking plowing-up-the-earth walls-of-flame call-out-the-Nat'l-Guard stuff here. It's a thud & likely a good thud but still a thud.
Even doubling the speed of the car doesn't do all that much - you just get a stronger thud that would rattle the dishes & crack some plaster on houses close by but that's about it. Now make it a car that's solid all of the way though - still just a big thud. Folks a few blocks away might hear & feel it but still not going to rattle any seismographs in the next state, probably not even ruin any houses it doesn't actually hit up against.
For comparison btw recall that a similar meteor behaved about the same of northern Canada last year and how many parts from it were found on the surface of a frozen lake. Not punched-though but laying on top of the ice melting through slowly - from solar-heat (like any rock on a frozen lake.) Not glowing hot, not punching through the ice, just sitting there.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Starts out car sized at the top of the atmosphere, ends up baseball-sized or smaller at the bottom if anything at all makes it to the surface (depends on trajectory, composition, and how the thing ablates.)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Apparently, he had a sign that said, "Ten dollars to see it, twenty dollars to watch me jack off."
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Quote:
"If this was a rocky asteroid, then it probably measured between 1 and 2 meters across and weighed 30 or so metric tons."
That sounds at least "car sized" by any definition I can think of.
If a car-sized meteor*ite* landed, it would definitely been bigger news...
They said it was car-sized, never said it weight as much as a car.
I don't know about a penny, but I have seen what happens when a bolt fall off the top of an oil derrick and hits someone's helmet:
Think 2 inch deep impact mark.
Fortunately, the helmet was steel, and the person I knew who had this happen to him (I was a kid at the time) didn't get killed...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
How about a Ningi dropped on the planet from space?
"Money
Monetary units - none.
In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flanian Pobble bead is only exchangeable for other Flanian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination."
Just think of the havoc THAT hyperaccelerated piece of small change would cause.
>was very small, disintegrated before impact, and anything that might have reached the ground intact would have been cold to the touch
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so what they're saying is that the UFO was small, capable of disintegration at very high speeds (obviously a sign of an advanced life form), and cold, eh? They were probably just searching for some nice hot cambells chick noodle soup
"Old man yells at systemd"
A Smallville couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kent, were arrested today on child kidnapping charges. The couple alleges they "found" the child in a corn field near their farm. Mr. Kent is undergoing tests at the Smallville Psychiatric Hospital while the authorities attempt to locate the childs parents.
Unnamed witnesses spoke of seeing author Stephen King dressed as a hayseed and approaching the object one it landed.
Witnesses heard Mr. King exclaim "Meteor shit!" at which point he smabled back to his shotgun shack muttering abuot "washing it off."
Mr. King was later unable to be found for comment. However, his shack did appear to be very well-stocked with houseplants and lush flora.
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
According to the report, Mark Wahlberg emerged from the 'object.'
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Of course you don't want anyone hurt or any serious damage done, but these things are great for science. They contain a lot of information about the early solar system that got chewed up on Earth a long time ago. Life on Mars nonwithstanding there are a lot of worthwhile questions which can be answered by meteors, such as what conditions were like when the planets were forming. (That's also one of the things moon rocks are good for...)
Plus, on a social note, now we don't get another round of asteroid movies. So much for seeing Jim Carrey climbing around on a metor and screaming as he gets stuck and rides it into Cleveland...
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
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Do I detect a lisp?
No, the answer is not Cowboy Neal!
Actually, for that matter if you read the original story it was saying baseball sized or thereabouts. If anything was the size of a car, maybe the fireball was, but that says next to nothing about the size of the actual meteor.
Believe me, when a car-sized meteor hits a populated area you won't need to go to Slashdot to hear the story.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
If a penny dropped from a very tall building is capable of killing someone, I worry about thousands of peices of rocks falling from the sky. I'm not comfortable thinking about the possiblility that my life could be suddenly and unexpectedly ended by an event so stupid. It's better to stay inside and post on Slashdot.
My #2 irrational fear?
Getting hit with a super-accelerated penny.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
If they were car-sized in the U.S. they would be Europe-sized.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
Preliminary reports from the cornfield seem to indicate little or no evidence of an actual impact; which would seem to indicate that whatever it was burned up before it reached the ground (as they usually do).
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
if they had fallen in Europe they'd be car-sized.
Space has a terrible secret!
But did any of you listen? Now please, go stand by the stairs, the space robots are coming to protect us.