Slashdot Mirror
Meteor May Have Wiped Out Middle East Civilization
GFD writes "The Telegraph has a story about how a recently discovered impact crater in Iraq could have wiped out several civilizations that 'collapsed mysteriously' about 4000 years ago. This is the first find, AFAIK, of a meteor impact affecting human civilization directly. Very thought provoking."
*wham*
Nah, not a meteorite, more probably those we caused by the first tests of "bunker buster" bombs thrown at Saddam by the U.S...
cheers
That "meteor" is going to be hitting any time now.... I think you know what I mean :)
...hopefully another one will hit the Middle East next week.
Frantic phone calls from the White House this morning, as "W" ordered his staff to find one of dem there meteor thingies and buy one, durnit!
Why is it called COMMON sense when so few people have it?
The only reason they're "discovering" this now is because it provides a conveniant excuse should Bush decide to carpet bomb Afghanistan or Iraq into the Indian Ocean...
Reporter: Mr. President, why haven't we heard from Bin Laden or Sadam Hussein in three weeks?
Dubya: They were hit by a... meteor.
This is the first find, AFAIK, of a meteor impact affecting human civilization directly.
Well that depends, human civilization or humans for that matter might have never evolved had that meteor 65 million years ago not wiped out the dinosaurs. We might still be rodent like creatures trying to not become lunch if the dinosaurs were still running around.
We have histories in the form of writing or stories when other civilizations were wiped out through catastrophe. At the very least we have ledgeds or religious tales of being smitten by the hand of God. But in this case, these civilizations vanished, to quote the article "without a trace" Wouldn't somebody have survived (maybe somebody who was traveling at the time) and passed the story of this down through history?
Are there any slashdot archeologists who can clarify this?
>>This is the first find, AFAIK, of a meteor impact affecting human civilization directly.
I seem to recall a meteor impact in Siberia in the early 1900's flattening a relatively large area... recently they discovered that it vaporized to an unusal degree on impact leaving a very small geological footprint, the area looked similar to Mnt. St. Helens after it erupted. In any case, I would be inclined to say that this affected human civilization directly, granted on a much smaller scale given the remote nature of the region hit.
is did it hit Sodom or Gomorrah?
Isn't it also odd that there is only one legend which tells of this event (Gilgamesh)? I would have thought there would be scriptures and whatnot all over the place.
Any information on what effect this impact had on other wordly civilisations, or indeed the environment? I for one would find it interesting.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
And I guess we're going to blame meteors for the death of all dinosaurs too?
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
The relevant books are things like Ages in Chaos, Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheval.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Ancient Red Cross centers were also accidently destroyed by the meteor.
Could a meteorite hit has sucked water from the Red Sea thus emptying it for Moses to cross?
As you can see, I am just making wild assumptions here trying to relate myths (Old Testament) with reality (Meteorite that hit 4000-6000 years ago). Didn't some religious people a long time ago date the beginning of the earth to be like 4090BC or near that anyway?
Wild, brainstorming thoughts that archeologists need to have to piece things together. It was only recently that they connected the volcanic destruction of an island in the mediterranean with the ending of a civilisation on Crete 100 miles away at the same time (i.e., huge tidal waves, killing of trade & crap weather killed the Cretian civilisation off - I forget the name of the civilisation though - Minoan?). Good TV program though.
Anyone else got a fave religious story that could be attributed to this event?
Wonder what kind of dust such an impact would have kicked up? Red sky at night? Global winter? Is there corroboration of this event in any historical documents?
Perhaps we should drop leaflets explaining this to the Muslims, after which they'll declare jihad on the "unbelievers from space." Then they'll like us, because we can give them a ride to war.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
If only a meteorite would land in Afghanistan...
:D
~Ken
Could a meteorite hit has sucked water from the Red Sea thus emptying it for Moses to cross?
Moses never crossed the Red Sea.
For those Christians/non-Hebrew-speakers who believe in the stories of the Exodus, read that as 'the Red Sea wasn't the one Moses crossed'.
The sea that is referred to in the book of Exodus is not 'red' - the word actually refers to a plant that grew in shallow waters/marshes/etc, and was extremely common. 'Red Sea' is a translation error.
Besides, the Red Sea isn't between Egypt and what was then Israel anyway.
--Dan
This reminds me of article from a few months ago on bad weather wiping out the Old Kingdom of Egypt.
If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs.
Historians say this would be the first proof of such an event to have happened prior to September, 2001, and may hinder the US's attempt to enter the Guiness Book of World Records for 'largest bombardment of the Middle East'
--Dan
We have histories in the form of writing or stories when other civilizations were wiped out through catastrophe. But in this case, these civilizations vanished, to quote the article "without a trace" Wouldn't somebody have survived (maybe somebody who was traveling at the time) and passed the story of this down through history?
Some did disappear 'without a trace', meaning 'without a historical record', not 'without leaving archeological remains'. In other cases, (Egypt is one cited in the article), we do have records and tales as well as archeological evidence.
I'm not disputing what the article says, but if this was such a large impact that it caused all of these civilisations to go into decline, how did we manage to uncover enough stuff to realise that they were prosperous civilisations in the first place?
Archeological digs, records of the civilizations that followed them, regional myths and legends.. Many sources, not always as clear and as direct as we might like, but more akin to detective work.
One interesting thing about the article, it points out one of the many advantages of being well read and educated, and reading constantly. (The two are not congruent.) The formation was discovered by accident in a photograph illustrating a magazine article.
Fortune favors the prepared mind.
But seriously, this is very interesting. Remember that this is just what we KNOW OF. It is possible that the first human civilizations (IE, nomadic tribes) might have been wiped out too. This could mean that human civilization has developed MORE THAN ONCE. Wouldn't that be an interesting turn?
OK, just remember that the thing at the top is a JOKE. It's not meant to be taken seriously.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Didn't Saddam and Gamora (I know they're spelled wrong, sue me) supposedly get destroyed by falling rock and fireballs? Those were in the middle east. Maybe this rock destroyed Atlantis!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
If a meteor hit the ocean in what today is Iraq, how much damage would it cause to Egypt, and how? Weather probably wouldn't change much, but we could expect floods. Egypt was quite used to having the Nile flood every year, and would not have been too vulnerable in the first place. Seems like the event might not be so major as to be responsible for the beginning of the civilization's downfall.
How big would a meteor have to be to cause significant damage all the way in Egypt?
Ceci n'est pas une sig
As an expert ;) (I saw the series Ancient Apocalypses) there must be some evidence of an event of such magnitude over the world.
In every part of the series they found evidence of some major event in the ice of the arctic.
Now that information would be nice to have online.
Sentry23
The only reason we see so few of these impact craters is that Earth's crust keeps changing. Without it, we'd look like the moon. Sure that would foster growth of civilization.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
Also, as someone else pointed out, this is technically the SECOND meteor to change the course of human development. The first was the meteor that struck when the dinosaurs were around, which caused the ice age that brought about the sudden jump in the evolution of mammals as a species, leading to man's appearance.
Hmmm. Makes you wonder if the impact may have caused 40 days and 40 nights of rain...
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Ummm... yeah. The hebrew is "Yam Suf", the Sea of Reeds. Not too hard to see how a simple typo made that the "Sea of Red", from which "Red Sea" is obvious. And yes, what we call the Red Sea is clearly identifiable as the biblical Sea of Reeds. If you actually _read_ your bible, you'll see that the Israelites didn't go directly from Egypt to Israel, they went via what's now known as Jordan, first crossing the Red Sea, then the Jordan (which retains its name to this day).
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
I thought there were already two leading contenders for explaning the collapse of these civilizations. Namely the eruption of the Thera volcano and the Great Flood when the Black Sea released much of its water suddenly.
The island you are referring to is Thera, also called Santorini. The idea that the eruption of Thera destroyed Minoan civilization has been around for about 30 years, so it's not exactly a recent idea. What we know is that there was a catastrophic eruption of Thera, an explosion that was approximately 1000x larger than Mt. St. Helens. There are geologic strata throughout the Eastern Mediterranean containing ash from that eruption. The ashfall even made it to Egypt, and there are believed to have been decent size tsunami that made it as far as Egypt (although not catastrophic waves, it seems).
A witty saying is worth nothing - Voltaire
As for crossing the Red Sea, according to Jewish history the exodus from Egypt happened in the year 2448, or 1312 BC, so the meteor would not have had much to do with the plagues or the splitting of the sea.
Hope that helps answer your question!
I might be able to shed some light - To say that the Minoan (yes you are correct) civilization was destroyed by a volcanic eruption is an oversimplification, that was certainly part of it, but mostly they were destroyed by the Mycenean (the first Indo-European wave into what is now Greece) civilization. I am not familiar with direct references to something resembling a meteorite hit in Greco-Roman or Middle Eastern mythology, apart from a brief mention that the entire earth (Gaia) was "charred and burned" after either the Titanomachy or the Gigantomachy; but I would say that's really stretching things. Btw, this is very early Greek myth, so the time of it's actual conception would be sometime 2000BC-1500BC, maybe earlier.
sic transit gloria mundi
Personally, I think that the "meteor" explanation is more a "buzzword-of-the-moment" phenomenon than anything else. Everyone has been talking about meteor imapacts in the past few years and trying to relate them to just about everything.
Secondly, a two-mile crater causing the downfall of multiple civilisations? No way! Sure, it does affect a much wider range than just two miles, but a civilization is usually something relatively large... it would most definitely not have a significant effect on egyptian or israeli civs, thousands of miles away.
...the 2000BC version of "Armageddon" only without a happy ending. :(
I'm a bit miffed that Dr. Masters (gosh, that looks weird, doesn't it?) is already guessing that this is reasonsible for a fall of civilizations when he hasn't even dated the site yet. Perhaps it's just the tone that the authors of the authors of the article opted to take, but it's premature to be claiming this is the cause of the events it is being blamed for.
Of course, getting into Iraq to take samples and date the crater will not likely happen soon.
Yeah, I saw a special on the Discovery Channel (so it must be true right?) that talked about that tsunami reaching the area where Moses crossed. The parting was achieved by the great withdrawal of water in the direction of the tsunami, the same thing that happens on the beach with a regular wave. After crossing and reaching higher ground, the actual tsunami came thru and wiped out the people chasing Moses. There was no magic involved, just nature hard at work.
The article says that the impact "must have happened within the past 6,000 years", and then immediately concludes that it is responsible for some specific events 4,300 years ago. Yes, 4300 is "within" the past 6000, but the proposal of cause-and-effect is a rather long stretch until we get the actual date of the crater.
Nor is there anything "mysterious" about the "sudden decline" of the specified nations/dynasties. After all, we know of lots of nations/dynasties that have suddenly declined during the past 6000 years. Do we require meteors to explain them, too?
The basic report of a powerful meteor strike is really interesting -- or at least will be if it is confirmed -- but let's not descend into pseudoscience by "explaining" history with it before there is any evidence to suggest cause-and-effect for specific events.
The claims about Sargonid Akkad seem to be entirely off base anyway. The glory days of Akkad coincided exactly with Sargon's personal reign -- no rare occurence in ancient history. Moreover Akkad saw a revival just a few decades later, during the reign of his grandson Narim-Sin. Not long after that Akkad did collapse altogether, but that can be explained by the ravages of Guti highlanders, without having to invoke meteors, divine wrath, aliens, or Microsoft's predatory marketing.
People are too quick to invoke grand catastrophes to "explain" things that don't need explaining in the first place. Let's stay skeptical until there is some actual evidence for something.
Also, notice that the article was dated back in April. Any more recent publications on it, anyone?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
We would be better at recording history because...?
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
A lot is made of the fact that almost every culture has some version of the Noah myth. (There's an interesting exception, that I'll talk about in a moment.) But why is this suprising? Cultures from this period tended to grow up around small (a few thousand people) cities built in flood basins. The river was source of life -- it provided topsoil, transportation and food. It was often considered divine (the Latin word for "priest" originally meant "bridge-keeper").
But life on the river has its downside, as everybody who lives near one knows. One major flood, and there goes your urban center. Not cataclymisic if you're one river town in a bigger culture. But suppose that town contains your entire government, economic establishment, and cultural elite? Obviously, the River God has decided to mod your civilization down in a big way.
The exception is very interesting -- sub-Saharan Africans don't have a Noah myth. Which is hardly suprising. Altough the pre-colonial Africans did build a few cities none of them were on flood plains.
Other things can wipe out a small civilization too. It can outstrip its resources, be decimated by plague, or simply get sloppy about maintaining its source of wealth. We need to consider the mundane before we start worrying about the exotic.
for Middle Eastern cultures than a meteor: US Foreign Policy.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
So anything coming from space that leaves a crater, is a meteorite.
sic transit gloria mundi
We were choosen to evolve to the state we are at.
By what? I dont have a clue. But i dont believe we of all the creatures on this planet just for no reason at all evolved to the state we did.
Which means, even if the meteor never hit the dinosours we still may have evolved to the state we are at, simply because we dont know WHY we are so much more evolved than everything else, or why things evolve to begin with, it could be pre programmed, like a self upgrading computer.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph in the UK aren't the most reliable rags. I'd really take this with a mountain of salt. Honestly.
Smegma.
Sodom and Gommorah are located on the Med. The remains of the towns have been found.
The Akkadian civilization hardly gets any attention. Silly given the fact they were more easily more important than the Sumerians. Their language was used by the Babylonians, and Akkadians. The city of Akkad has also never been located. It was only referenced as having been between Bagdad, and Basra.
:)
Nice to see them get reference after all this time.
There is this link. many good links on the page.
Of course, this has been discussed in the fringe areas for a while.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
They must've been thinking: "Where's Bruce Willis when you need him?"
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The relationship between crater size and impactor size is a complicated one. A simple rule of thumb, though is that the crater is 20 times the diameter of the object that created it. in this case the object was probably about 150 meters in diameter.
There would probably be a record in sediments in the region, in particular nearby. I don't know much about the geology of Iraq, though. If the imact occured in deep water, tsunamis were generated and tsunami deposits could be found away from the impact site. Melt glass and tectites (and perhapes deposits of irridium-rich dust) may also be found far afield from the site. No one, to my knowledge has documeneted these deposits, which isn't to say they don't exist (or even that they haven't been found and been ignored or unrecognized). It just means no one has really been looking.
The article says that the crater is developed in sediments known to be ca 6000 years old. If this is true, the crater must be younger than that. You are right, though, field work is necessary, but politically it's not going to be easy getting in there to do it. Too bad.
These places were smitten by god in the Old Testament
Uh, I don't think God was very smitten with those towns. Smoten might be the better word if you're talking about the wrath of God.
In today's news, more things fall from sky, again destroying Middle East civilisation.
</obvious-joke>
Although it may be stretching to call the Taliban civilised...
The hebrew is "Yam Suf", the Sea of Reeds. Not too hard to see how a simple typo made that the "Sea of Red",
Removing one letter from a Hebrew word is not likely to be the same as removing one letter from an English word. Possible yes, but not likely. Can anybody who knows Hebrew and English describe what happens when you remove a letter from "Yam Suf"? Does the English translation have any meaning? I doubt such a thing happened anyway, since the scribes did an excellent job. That work was taken *very* seriously. Even if a whole, carefully transcribed page had one blot, it was destroyed rather than risk corrupting the Holy Book. It is more likely that "Reed Sea" just happened to be another name for "Red Sea" or one of its gulfs.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think I have a candidate for you to consider. The so-called pre-Roman Celts of what is now France and northwestern Spain feared that the sky might fall on their heads. Although the so-called Celtic (as opposed to Basque) ethnic groups in present-day France and the mountains in the north of Spain (Liguri, Asturi, Kantauri, Gallici) most probably came from other mountain homelands in Europe, like (in the case of the probably Celtic Liguri) the Alps, poet and historian Robert Graves has pointed to similarities between Celtic myths of the western Celts (Spanish, Irish, Welsh, and Brittonic) and myths which were "displaced" in early recorded history (euphemism for ethnically cleansed) in lands that were later to become Greece and Persia. Now, it seems reasonable to object that people that far west could not have seen this event, but it is known that Celts, who preferred to live in easily -defended high grounds, periodically migrated in large groups; Julius Caesar reported that, during his "last" campaign against the Gauls, thousands of Celts passed near his encampment, apparently on their way to the Iberian peninsula. What I am trying to say is that the Celts may well have lived that far east a long time ago; indeed, not so long ago, the Isauri [sp?] were a well-documented (and almost certainly Celtic) pain in the ass in the middle east -- during early recorded history, IIRC. Or maybe there were many meteor impacts, some of which remain to be discovered near the traditional Celtic homelands. In any case, I don't know whether the collective Celtic memory of the sky "falling" is linked to the cataclysm alluded to in the article, but it's an interesting conjecture -- one that I make on no authority (I am not a historian) strictly for the sake of discussion.
2104BC would be 200 years AFTER the hypothetical meteor strike. BC gets lower as time goes on (years BEFORE Jesus was born).
-jon
Remember Amalek.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I don't have any links for you but I recall theories that Sodom/Gommorah are/were around the Dead Sea area, and were covered by volcanic eruptions. Supposedly some sites were found, but again no verification of this.
if you remove any hebrew letter from any word you get mis-labeled as a typist for discriminating against their letters.
Because all OUR records are COMPUTERIZED! If WE got hit by a asteroid, literally billions and BILLIONS (think Carl Sagan here) of plastic CDs and magnetic backup tapes full of grit and, and fragile hard drives would... um, survive the millennia to be discovered by, umm, to be discovered by...
Oh.
Nevermind.
Is there any way a similar meteor could have come into my living room and destroyed my VCR remote without a trace?
:)
I ask because of the fact that I am now unable to set my VCR clock or to make timed recordings (which wouldn't be so bad except for that damn daylight savings stuff)...
On second thought, maybe it was the MPAA...
Want Linux games? HERE.
YES!
A METEOR WIPED OUT OSAMA BIN LADEN
... oh wait... I get it now
It wasn't a meteor - it was a bug in iTunes 2.0.
Rest assured though, iTunes 2.1 WILL not wipe out hard drives OR civilizations.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
LOL, you're right! Good catch. I'll take another look at the numbers. If you want to figure it out yourself, this year (2001) was 5761 in the Jewish calendar.
did you have to waste a full page of your drivel on a topic of something hitting the earth a long time ago? This just shows that just because have a long winded post does not meant that you are any way intelligent.
The blast wave would travel quite a long way, but worse than that would be the fallout. A two mile crater would mean the excavation of a vast quantity of soil and rock, probably billions of tonnes of it. And that all has to come down somewhere, and would probably still be quite hot when it did descend. So, we've got the combined blast / tsunami / red-hot fallout hitting large distances from the impact site, all of which is incredibly destructive. Follow that up with disease and famine from the flooding, and you could easily lose a few primitive civilisations.
seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards
I agree and and take that piece of garbage by microsoft.. If you want a scalable OS go with waht IBM or SUN have to offer
heh, shiznit.
I'm not sure I'd read a lot into the fact that there may be only one legend (Gilgamesh) referring to this incident. Remember that the vast majority of history and culture of the time was conveyed orally; there simply wasn't a lot of writing, and much of what was written was undoubtedly focused on mundane things like keeping tracking of financial transactions or religious observances. I happen to be in the midst of reading Gilgamesh right now, so I'll quote from the introduction (this is from the Pengiun Classics edition translated by Andrew George): "Literature was already being written down in Mesopotamia by 2600 BC, though because the script did not yet express language fully, these early tablets remain extremely difficult to read....Texts in Akkadian appear in quantity from about 2300 BC....The early texts in Akkadian dating from this period include a very small body of literature." Incidentally, 2300 BC is just about the time this impact is supposed to have occurred.
I agree with you that the evidence for this seems pretty thin so far, based on what the article describes. But I don't think it's implausible on its face, either...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
What we call the Red Sea is the Sea of Reeds? Not necessarily. The Sea of Reeds sounds more like a swampy area than a true sea. The King James Version translators blew it, and Hollywood planted a meme about a body of water parting (hey, I went on that ride at Universal Studios), but it is a lot more logical to think that folks simply traversed a tidal swamp at low tide and were followed by others who got caught up in high tide.
Besides, lots of details about the Exodus were, uh, embellished after the fact. It's a Jewish book, and the Jewish tradition is far from "fundamentalist"; it doesn't take stories at their literal anyway. So it never mattered much what Yam Suf referred to, because it was a neat story that you learned lessons from, but not history.
Your response, among many others that can be concocted from the Bible, is the exact reason I don't believe in God.
Oh man, when I first read the title of this article I thought it said "Meteor May Have Wiped Out Middle Earth". I feel like such a loser!
mother nature was off by about 4000 years and missed by about 2000 miles (aim for afganistan) - would make it easier than war right?
Actually, it's not a typo at all.
The literal Hebrew is "Sea of Reeds", which has caused certain Bible scholars to to argue that the Israelites had merely crossed a swampy region and not the actual Red Sea.
However the amount of water must have been sufficient to cover the Egyptian military... impossible in a mere swamp.
Also Acts 7:36 and Hebrews 11:29 when refering to the same incident use the Greek expression erythra' tha'lassa, meaning "Red Sea".
In fact Herodotus used the same Greek expression to refer to the Indian Ocean which contains the Red Sea.
For more info on usage of "Red Sea" in the OT, check out Jeremiah 49:21 and 1 Kings 9:26... and check out where Edomite territory was known to be at that time. It's quite clear that "Sea of Reeds" was the Hebrew term in use for that region at the time.
-CODiNE
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I don't have a bible. Need to pick one up next time I'm around a Synagogue, or Jerusalem, or whatnot.
One I don't see mentioned is the Tower of Babel, where people were caused to disperse and to separate into language groups. One chronology lists that date as being 2200-2000 BCE. Of course, the problem with this one is no mention of 'fire from Heaven' or any such thing.
I'd doubt that it was the crossing of the Red Sea or whatever, that is placed about 1500 BCE, well after these craters are supposed to have been formed.
Bleh!
I've heard that some people have speculated that the sea of reeds was a 6 inch (15 cm) deep river in the area, (like the Everglades) I forget which one. We know of a large volcanic eruption near that river at about the time of the Exedous. The theory is the gigantic blast caused a huge wave to travel along the river, possibly sweeping away part of the Egyptian army. The observers assumed that the sea was returning to its properl level. After all, they were new to the area and didn't know what the water level was supposed to be and had probably never seen such a shallow, wide river.
Sounds like an stretch to me. On the other hand, I'm under the impression that the Bible fits archealogical evidence fairly closely from the Exedous onward. I've heard that they assumed that several Bible storries must have been written long after the fact because they mentioned a civilization that was not known to exist (the Chaldeans, perhapse?). Then they found some cuneaform tablets from teh same time period also mentioning the supposedly ficticious civilization. (Anybody know if they thought the Chaldeans were a myth arround the turn of the century?) I'm not a big fan of grasping for ways to match archalogy and breif millenia-old historical accounts.
However, if the Bible does match archealogical evidence as well as has been claimed, it seems legitimate to try and find corroberating storries.
In any case, I'm of two minds on the matter. Usually quite skeptical of anyone trying to match up archeaology and Biblical accounts. Every once in a while, though, I hear that they've found something neat. (Like Egyptian accounts of a slave uprising, or Egyptian mud and straw bricks showing a straw shortage at the same time mentioned in the Bible.)
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Well, I try not to let my faith get involved in slashdot, but.... awfully good timing for a once-in-history type event, huh? Maybe, just maybe, nature was set in motion by someone who really wanted to see Moses get across and the Egyptians get destroyed?
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
As for the great flood, that was probably the merger of the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea when the Dardanelles, formerly a barrier between the two, gave way. Many people lived in what is now the Black Sea, since it wasn't nearly so deep until the flood-like cataclysm ensued.
This is only late night speculation.
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
There have been a lot of cuneiform texts found by archaeologists that spoke about some wind of death bringing an abrupt end to the Sumerian civilization at around the late 2000's BC, and this is something that the archaeologists have been hard pressed to explain, giving far-fetched explanations about barbarian tribes raiding and pillaging Sumer. A cometary impact is a far more plausible explanation, it would seem, given the way the texts are written. Perhaps the comet fragmented on entry to the atmosphere and another fragment landed on the plain of the Dead Sea, destroying the settlements of Sodom and Gomorrah there and turning the area around the Dead Sea into the wasteland it now is. I wonder if there has been any geological study of the Dead Sea plain that could perhaps confirm or deny this conjecture.
So now, somebody kick Saddam out of Iraq so the archaeologists and geologists can study it more closely! :)
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
The article did not jump to conclusion that this impact occured around 2300 BCE, it merely mentioned it as an intriguing possibility. Nothing but intriguing speculation until scientists can study samples from the impact site.
The only people claiming that the impact *was* in 2300 BCE are Slashdot readers.
As for the other argument that this is a cop-out, Occam's Razor cuts both ways. Localized disruptions only require localized events, but widespread social collapse is easier to explain by one major catastrophe (literall, "ill star!") than dozens or hundreds of smaller independent events.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Even more impressive that the Pharoe and his army drowned in a sea of reeds.
funny munging
And here I read it as "Meyer May Have Wiped Out Middle East Civilization".
WAYYYY too much Civ3, methinks. Time to take a break.
I believe the civilization was the "Hittites." A really cute girl in high school gave her year report on the issue. IIRC, until about the turn of the century, critics claimed that the entire bible is a bunch of hogwash because they couldn't find any record of the hittites outside of the bible. Then they did. I believe her point was that in science, a more moderate view is often the most useful, don't let your personal biases get in the way of your work. Don't assume the bible is entirely correct on a few small details, but don't assume it's all wrong for the same reason.
funny munging
Lets try your translation theory out, only this time, we'll use french!
Sea of Reeds is Mer des Roseaux, and Red Sea, is mer Rouge.
Hmmm...funny...that don't work...
You can't take the sky from me...
The thing about being smitten "by god" is that the bible assumes that everything that happens is because of that god. So something catastrophic happens to that city on the other side of the mountain, and of course that was because god was displeased at them, why else would something bad happen to people?
Its not as if giant fiery rocks just fell out of the sky for no reason, right?
You can't take the sky from me...
Um, smitten? I don't think Sodom or Gomorrah (or the residents thereof) had a crush on (smitten by) God. :-) They were smited by God, though. There's a slight, but amusing, difference in meaning.
I always equivocate. Well, almost always.
I didn't say anything about what I think about what we are doing. I didn't say anything about what I think we should be doing.
What I said was that what's going on is not a Good Thing and that crying for more people to die (especially those who can reasonably be described as not our enemies, yet are grouped with them because of nationality, religion or headgear) is not going to make it better.
That's of course my opinion only, some people may feel that what's going on is very good.
sic transit gloria mundi
The real (Biblical) history of the dinosaurs
The extinction of the dinosaurs is one of the greatest mysteries of secular science. It would not be if people believed the true eye-witness account of Earth's history recorded in the Bible. This reveals that:
Land animals (this includes dinosaurs) and man were created on Day 6 about 6,000 years ago--so dinosaurs lived at the same time as people.
Adam sinned and brought death, disease and bloodshed into the world. Before then, no dinsaur could have died.
A global Flood occurred about 1,656 years later, wiping out all land animals that breathe though nostrils (that weren't on the Ark). Thus billions of animals were buried quickly and formed fossils. This is when most dinosaur fossils formed.
Noah took two of every kind of land animal (seven of the clean' ones) on board an ocean-liner-sized Ark this included dinosaurs. For more information, see How did all the animals fit on Noah's Ark?
After the Flood, the descendants of those dinosaurs existed for a while with humans, and there seem to be eye-witness accounts of them, e.g. in Job 40:15 ff. and in the many dragon legends found around the world.
Eventually they all died out, except for possible rare sightings in uninhabited areas which have not been properly verified. The causes were probably no more dramatic than those that cause extinctions of other species, e.g. man's hunting, change of climate, loss of food source, fragmentation of habitat.s /dino_meteor.asp
Taken from http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/doc
PS. I'm not serious. Yes, that site has a LOT of fun stuff.
Slagborr
Yes, thanks to nature, the Ultimate: /bin/laden'
% alias meteor 'rm -f
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
Studies of satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a two-mile-wide circular depression which scientists say bears all the hallmarks of an impact crater. If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs.
With the current rumblings by the Bush administration about Iraq, there may soon be a chance to actually measure the effects of hundreds of nuclear bombs for comparison to a single huge meteor impact. Personally, I prefer the single huge meteor impact. The other way probably looks from orbit like a bunch of pimple pockmarks, which could lead to embarrassing questions if aliens ever visit for tea and crumpets at the White House. :)
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Major newspapers in the arab world with front page stories, accusing Israel of prehistoric orbital bombardment with giant meteors.
... I've been playing Civilization3 for the past week and haven't seen anything like this yet and no mention of "random meteor strikes" in the Civilopedia.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
We all know that the United States government went back in time and nuked the fuck out of them to make this war much easier for them.
The US is capable of time travel, believe it or not. Why else have we never seen Alien space craft land anywhere? Because the United States went into the past and blew the ship up.
Interesting. Depending on the dates, that could coincide a lot better with the Old Testament.
Do recall, there are two different accounts of the crossing of the Red Sea (more accurate, "Sea of Reeds, which is NOT the modern-day Red Sea but a small lake in what is today the Suez Canal) in Exodus, one in prose and one as a song/poem. Professional linguists have determined that the poem is in fact the older, more "original" version, based on the sentence structure. In the poem, the sea does not part for the Hebrews and then fall back in. Rather, the Hebrews meander around the Suez for a while, eventually ending up at the NORTHERN end of what is today the Suez Canal, near the Mediterranian coast. The Hebrews move across an area of dry land, and then the hand of God rises from the sea and drags the Egyptians into it. It is very clearly a tidal wave, not a parting sea.
A volcano-induced tsunami would certainly have caused such a tidal wave. Sprinkle lightly with religious imagery, add a dash of selective editing over the following few centuries, and you have a receipe for the story of Exodus.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Sounds awfully like what MS did to OS/2 to me.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Disclaimer: People seem interested in this, so I'll post it. I am a Chrisitian. This is not too start a religious flame war, but to offer what I believe is the truth. Nothing personal if you disagree. The Biblical explanation for this "sudden decline" in civilizations is the Genesis flood (Genesis 6). The whole earth was destroyed by a flood and the only survivors were Noah, his family, and the animals aboard the ark. The time frame of about 2000BC lines up with the most popular estimates for the date of the genesis flood. There are views that the flood could have been caused by a vapor canopy around the earth which is theorized to have existed prior to the flood. In any case, according to the Bible, the purpose of the flood was to destroy the wicked civilizations that had come into existance, and give mankind a new start. The Bible does also say that the water came not just from the rain, but also from the "springs of the deep" (Gen 8:2). Perhaps this crater has some relation to the waters from the deep. A very interesting find. What people often fail to realize is how much archeological finds agree with the Bible. (Cities, flood evidence, the ark, tower of babel, etc).
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Human events, maybe. Astrophysics, no. See the post you are replying to.
The reason why Velikovsky is not accepted is the same that Copernicus's theory was not.
Carlk Sagan once said something like: "They laughed at Galilieo. They laughed at Copernicus. But then they also laughed at Bozo the clown".
Not that it was against logic
But it is against logic: Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. And suggesting that "Venus was bored orbiting over there, and decided to wander over this way a bit" or "Jupiter burped" Aint it.
You seem to have touble letting go of outmoded things (OS2, Velikovsky). KDE is quite nice you know.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Maybe, just maybe, nature was set in motion by someone who really wanted to see Moses get across and the Egyptians get destroyed?
Not to mention the *entire* Minoan civilization.... You'd think a kind and loving god would have found a less destructive way for the Israelites to escape...
I try not to let my faith get involved in slashdot
That would seem to work better...
hinderfreude ('hin-dur-"froi-d&), n. The feeling of joy derived from being in the way.
Immanuel Velikovsky was ridiculed for his theories about the different natural disasters (this includes space generated disasters like meteors and comets) but his logic was tight and objective and probably was a disruptive force in religious circles because it damaged their dogmatic control of the general populace.
Check out "Earth in Upheaval", "Worlds in Collision" and "Ages in Chaos" for some truly enlightening thoughts from the early part of the 20th century.
This reminds me of an old argument:
Are carrots good for your eyes?
Of course they are - have you ever seen a rabbit wearing glasses?
PS: I don't discuss the validity of the whole post. Just the validity of the "trilobites argument"
A meteorite impact is like an explosion. A big enough one is like a nuclear explosion (think Hiroshima but 100 times worse).
A vulcano eruption like the one in Pompeii is more like an ashes rain and a blazing-hot wind (and i mean blazing-hot literally).
There have been huge explosions cause by volcanos (Krakatoa island), but nothing comparable in scale to a rock the size of a football field hitting the earth at 16 km/s (about Mach 50)
Could it be possible that os/2 (the poster) is stupid? Nah...
Carl is making a JOKE; metaphoricly confabulating two different senses of "laughed at."
Um, no. He is pointing out that while sometimes people with really good ideas are rejected for a while, rejection does not imply that your idea was good. People with utterly daft ideas generally get rejected too, and a it happens a lot more often. Most preople who seem to be cranks actually are: Demnetia is more common than unsung genius. A most seemingly daft way-out ideas actually are daft and way-out.
Is that simple enough or do you want it in even shorter words?
Maybe the extraordinary proof will be excavated near the iraqi crater? I guess we shouldn't even bother to look.
Craters are interesting. A crater is not proof that Venus went AWOL from the laws of physics. You have a very tenuos grasp on elementry logic.
Velikovsky and OS/2 are not outdated.
<sarcasm>Right - that's why the recent 0S/2 kernel and GUI developments, and not Linux is so interesting right now.</sarcasm>
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Yes, but the difference is, removing one letter from the hebrew text (which, incidently, has been verified as having been copied exactly by jewish communities worldwide independant of each other) would render it gibberish. Once it's been translated, it's pretty easy. To this day, the sea is known in hebrew as "Yam Suf", and anyone who learns the Bible in the original Hebrew knows that it's always found as Yam Suf. The current translation that most people know, the King James Version, is actually an english translation of a latin translation (the Vulgate) of a greek translation (the so-called Septuigent, though it's not-- the greek we have today was written by the Church Fathers, whereas the Septuigent was written by 70 (Setpa) jewish scholors under Ptolmy) of the Hebrew. Three levels down... so in general, a lot of subtle points are missed.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
We may have found the source of the Great Flood stories.
According to a couple of articles in National Geographic very recently, scientists have surmised a major rise in water level in the Black Sea due to a sudden surge of water coming through the Bosphorus several thousand years ago. There is now evidence that a large number of people living on the Black Sea coast of what is now modern Turkey died or were forced to move to higher ground in very quick fashion due to this ancient flooding.
I think the fact we do know that a major tsunami did hit the north coast of Crete and wiping out a number of ancient cities there does have a lot to do with the reason why Minoan civilization went into decline. With most of the Minoan centers of civilization destroyed by the Santorini eruption and the its aftereffects they were easy pickings for the Myceneans, that's to be sure.
The sea that is referred to in the book of Exodus is not 'red' - the word actually refers to a plant that grew in shallow waters/marshes/etc, and was extremely common. 'Red Sea' is a translation error.
With the most likely mundane explanation being that the Egyption forces charged into a marsh, ending up stuck in mud and "quicksand".
However the amount of water must have been sufficient to cover the Egyptian military... impossible in a mere swamp.
What you need for this is a fairly flat tidal area prone to quicksand.
If someone is stuck then flooding even to 2-3 metres will cover them.
I think the problem with a volcanic eruption causing major Earth changes is the fact that while a major eruption might affect climate, it doesn't do it for a long period of time unless the eruption is on an unprecedented scale.
After all, when Mt. Tambora erupted with its 15 cubic miles of volcanic ash spewed out in 1815, it did cause substantial Earth cooling but its effects were over in less than two years.
The eruption at Crater Lake must be way, way more powerful than the Mt. Tambora eruption to cause the changes in the Middle East you mentioned.
If you really want to understand why most serious scientist do not bother refuting these claims, just imagine how much time you could spend trying to convince a Mac fanatic that an open OS was better than a closed one. Different universes -- different rules -- different conclusions. Why would a credible scientist waste time trying?
Other recently uncovered tablets from the time around 2300 BC refer to attempts to construct a pair of reusable launch vehicles and several nuclear weapons out of mud bricks and papyrus, with the intent of diverting the meteorite before impact. Unfortunately, even though a team of expert well-diggers were assembled for the task, the plan "never got off the ground"...
:-) You know what's not funny? We're still about as prepared as they were to actually protect ourselves against such an impact.
Ha ha
Freedom: "I won't!"
The Bosporus straits is only 640m wide at its narrow point. It connects the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, which in turn connects to the Agean (via the Dardanelles) and thence to the Mediterranean and the world system of oceans.
In prehistoric times the Bosporus was a land bridge connecting Asia and Europe and separting the oceans of the world from the Black Sea, which was a freshwater lake hundreds of meters lower than sea level and much smaller than it is today. As sea level rose due to the end of the Ice Age, this land bridge was swept away in a flood which inundated an area of almost twenty thousand square miles.
There is disagreement as to how quick and this event was; time estimates ranged from weeks to thousands of years (of course it's much cooler to imagine it happening in a few weeks). Even if this event took months or a few years to complete, it would have been a huge catastrophe. Imagine your community was on the shores of the Black sea, and for several lifetimes you experienced a rise in the lake level of only ten feet a year (a rate at which it would have taken centuries to complete). It would seem like you were the target of a hostile and implacable deity bent on destroying you.
Supposedly refugees from this disaster spread the common flood myths of the near east, including the biblical Noah legend. Of course nobody can prove this, but it is an interesting idea.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Okay, I don't have my Bible near me, so this will be from memory...But I remember that the Israelites waited by the Sea of Reeds or the Red Sea or whatever it was for a couple nights...I think 3...while Moses 'communed with God' or whatever it is he does. Probably, what he was doing was just checking out the rise and fall of the tides, so that the Israelites all crossed while it was safe, but the Egyptians hit it at high tide. And even more likely than that is that the Egyptians weren't actually killed off by the rising tides, but just got so bogged down in the water that they decided that it wasn't worth it and just turned back...but how could the Israelites know? They just knew that the water rose and the Egyptians didn't come after them anymore...so therefore, they must have been wiped out by their powerful god YHWH.
Sodom and Gommorrah are not a very good fit. IIRC, while there's some debate about where those cities were, everyone agrees that they were east of the Jordan River. So any meteor strike in southern Iraq powerful enough to take out Sodom and Gomorrah would also toast all the civilizations in the region -- but judging from the text, after those cities were destroyed, their neighbors pretty much went on about their normal business.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
You'd think someone would have taken the initutive to rebuild.
God spoke to me
FYI, Carl Sagan also presents a refutation of Velikovsky's theories in Broca's Brain.
It's been a while since I last read it, but here are a few of Sagan's argument that I remember off-hand:
There's other objections too-- I think Sagan has about ten-- but those are the ones I remember.
True, it's only the story of the day/week/month
if it turns out to be true, which is a long shot.
But any meteorite from the asteroid belt to Earth
is, by definition, a very long shot anyway...
Now about the impact turning Sodom and Gomorrah into Ground Zero, and Lot's wife turning around (against orders) to view the impact fireball and being transmogrified...
Now, what's the chemistry for turning into a
piller of salt from watching a meteorite impact?
And are Middle Eastern Genii (Genies, Jinns) actually the ghosts of aliens, as in the computer-animated feature film "Final Fantasy?"
Um, Pharaoh did not die at the Red Sea, according to the Bible.
My point is, that compared to a Planet Killer kind of meteor this things are like fire-crakers
Now if we only had a movie of the Yukatan hit
The Dead Sea currently covers the sites of these two cities. They were destroyed in the 19th century BC, so that's removed from the supposed impact by 500 years and over 500 miles. Their destruction was caused by an event localized to the "cities of the plain," not something that caused damage in a 500 mile radius.
Of course, recent articles describing how the moon (Luna) may have been pulled out of the earth are an interesting example of revisited theories. I remember reading stuff (1950-1960's) that claimed the Moon had come out of the Pacific basin 3+B years ago. Of course, Pangea/continental drift were ignored in that theory, I suppose. Perhaps one of the signature differences between pseudoscience and science is that discredited theorists pushing a Pacific-basin neonatany for the moon will not now point at these new theories and claim to have been right all along (at least, not seriously). Velokovski-supporters will claim (seriously) that this new theory validates their wacko claims.
... is the result of migratory tribes and goats.
Rich (therefore powerful) tribes have cattle. Poorer tribes have sheep. VERY poor tribes have goats. Guess who gets first pick of the grazing land.
Cattle only eat grass down to a handspan or so high, thus do no real damage. Sheep eat grass down to ground level (and also eat all the shrubs and weeds), thus leaving pasture in poor shape and vulnerable to erosion (this is why much of Wyoming is the wasteland it is today, too). Goats pull everything up the roots and eat it all, thus completing the transformation into barrenness.
A great deal of the Middle East (and parts of what's now the Sahara) was NOT desert back in "biblical" times -- it was turned into desert by nomadic tribes with goats. Hell, you can read about the Middle East's lush pastures in various texts of the era, but today those pastures are nothing but sand and rocks.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Not a serious theory, but what the heck.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
So you're saying that all the other times the Egyptians were intelligent enough to know not to drive a chariot into a swamp... however on THIS occasion they decide to charge into one and and drown in a few feet of water.
Forget the fact that as I have already shown it was indeed the "Red Sea" being spoken of. Oh and besides that the Israelites with their children and older ones must've had carts and caravans, etc... much heavier than a chariot... yet, they must've somehow been able to get through the same swamp a more nimble army couldn't.
Let's not forget this was an entire nation of people crossing this area... over a "dry ground", they must've lied... just like anything else you aren't able to easily explain away as a random occurance of nature.
-CODiNE
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
When the world is at the time we are in, this discovery doesn't go down well. Why? Because too many people are filled with hate towards the arab community, when we should not focusing racist hate towards an entire region of people, but an entire group of people (terrorists). But, I do find this discovery very interesting as I continue to follow a great interest in astronomy, and I'm wondering if there are any effects on the Accretion theory. This is a rather intereresting theory about how our solar system formed... what I find interesting is meteors of that size striking the Earth not so long into the past. Only time will tell as theorys develop and are proven & disproven.
I remember reading somewhere that fossil records show that there was a civilization the size of Europe stretching between Western India all the way to Iraq. The most well known records of this are the remains of the Indus Valley civilization (present day Pakistan).
Till this day there is no explanation for why cities and villages amounting to this size slowly disappeared. A meteor would explain a lot.
Nehru did a bit of research on this and has written about extensively in his book 'The discovery of India'. His thinking was some sort of floods may have caused this.
Slashdot looks deep within my heart and assigns me a number based on the order in which I join
Yes, people do think they know where Sodom/Gomorrah were. There was a TLC special on it. Rather silly, but located closer to the Dead Sea. Nowhere near the Iraqi crater.
Do they really think that this crater was formed 4000 years ago? You'd think that a crater that large and that young would be MUCH easier to spot. Having been a recent visitor to Arizona's Meteor Crater. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I can see how the type of content to which you are responding might cause you to disbelieve, but what is portrayed by the poster is not consistent with what the Bible says.
I believe that the existence of God gives a foundation of reason on which we can stand when investigating the universe through the scientific method.
If you have any level of interest in pursuing this discussion, please contact me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com.
God loves you and longs for relationship with you.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Good points, it's a whole different picture realizing there were _millions_ of people in the crossing. Likewise the narrow crossing portrayed in some movies is unlikely given the numbers that made the journey that night.
[from David Guzik Study Guide on the Blue Letter Bible site]
a. The Hebrew phrase for Red Sea is yam suph, which clearly means "Reed Sea." "The term aptly describes the lake region north of the Gulf of Suez comprising the Bitter Lakes and Lake Timsah. It is possible that the Israelites went along the narrow neck of land on which Baal-zephon stood and that the Biblical Sea of Reeds was modern Lake Sirbonis. We are certain that the crossing was in this area because the Israelites found themselves in the Wilderness of Shur after crossing the sea (Exod. 15:22)." (Pfeiffer)
i. We don't know exactly where the place was, and what the exact geography was (an area like this will change geography every flood or drought season); we do know there was enough water present to trap the Israelites, and then later to drown the Egyptians - perhaps 10 feet of water or so; and we know there had to be enough room for the Israelites to cross over in one night - perhaps a mile wide stretch
b. Could this really have happened? Isn't this just another interesting legend? It is completely plausible, according to a Los Angeles Times article by Thomas H. Maugh titled "Research Supports Bible's Account of Red Sea Parting" (3/14/92):
"Sophisticated computer calculations indicate that the biblical parting of the Red Sea, said to have allowed Moses and the Israelites to escape from bondage in Egypt, could have occurred precisely as the Bible describes it.
Because of the peculiar geography of the northern end of the Red Sea, researchers report Sunday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, a moderate wind blowing constantly for about 10 hours could have caused the sea to recede about a mile and the water level to drop 10 feet, leaving dry land in the area where many biblical scholars believe the crossing occurred."
Wishing for the death of millions of people is in no way funny. Over 99% of the people living in the Middle East are exactly the kind of people I would like as neighbors.
I understand that civilians are going to be killed in the Afganistan strikes, but don't wish it on innocent people.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
It's a bit late in Britain for me to look up the references (sorry!) but from what I recall there was some research done as to how the Red Sea might have parted, and they found a really, really unusual but still predictable and perfectly possible wind system which could actually blow a dry channel in the Red Sea.
;-)
If anyone knows the details and wants to beat me to posting them tomorrow evening at the earliest...
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
You forget Mars was involved in a show. The matter is dealt with in some detail in "Velikovsky Reconsidered". It does not contridict the laws of physics. It does not voilate the conservation of angular momentum, since these apply only to elastic interactions. We're not dealing this here.
Also, the laws of physics have been used to uncover planets, eg Neptune.
The escape velocity from the Jovian system is very close to the escape velocity of the solar system as a whole.
It would only escape if the radial component was the escape velocity.
Presumably, if a planet-sized body somehow managed to be ejected from Jupiter
Why not. Stranger things have been advanced for the Earth and Moon.
The earth has a molten core, without danger of falling to bits.
, it is more likely to go flying off into deep space than settle down into orbit (an orbit, furthermore, with one of the lowest eccentricities of any body in the Solar System) around the Sun.
This problem can be perfectly addressed with a third body. Mars actually tames it, and it is Mars, not Venus, that has a last unstable orbit.
The whole "Venus born of Jupiter's brow" shtick is an over-literal
Just because you can't cope with it, does not mean it didn't happen. It's called denial.
Also, the circularisation of Venus' orbit after these transits doesn't jibe with what we know about gravity, tidal effects, etc
But what we knew in the 1950's has been shattered by what we found out by going there. I mean, the idea that things can fall from the sky was not taken seriously until seen.
The interesting thing with your URL is that the first review says "Use with caution".
So a refutions from people who have difficulty thinking that things can fall from the sky should not be taken seriously.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
In fact there are several areas that probably experienced mass inundation at the end of the last ice age. When you consider that estimates of sea levels at the peak of glaciation average 80-100m Lower there are many large gulf regions that would have flooded rapidly. When you combine that with eroded chokepoints and the (at least 3) times when the sea level jumped by 10m in a short period (~month) it is easy to see possible cataclysmic flooding.
The leaps in ocean depth were caused by northern ice dams giving way to the ocean in Canada and northern Russia/Siberia. There is also believed to have been a major break out event from a central asian region, although this could of occurred over a longer period. There may also have been a major volcanic event in northern Canada that melted and displaced a very large chunk of the northern Canada Ice sheet as well.
As to whoever lived in the area before one of the largest waterfalls in history opened up they would have been inundated quicker than they could of got away. A 10m jump in mean sea level combined with mass erosive effect would of caused a stream to graduate into a ocean straight in only a few days after breakthrough. Spectacular is not really the word to describe it.
It is suspected that a Black sea breakthrough may have been a major event in stopping Cyclic steppe glaciation and resultant ice ages. The Climatic effect of an area of water like the black sea can be quite important. It is certainly possible that the fairly rapid ice ages and cataclysmic ocean level cycle may actually have been broken by the black sea. The recent geologic record would indicate that we should of been shifting into another ice age around 2000-1000 BC but it just didn't happen after at least 15 previous 4-8000 year cycles. It is suspected that it would take several 1000 years of interglacial to start a civilsation and periods of stable warm climates have been scarce over the last 100 000 years but they have occurred before and then been snuffed by fairly rapid glaciation.
This cycling has almost certainly caused the elimination of several pre iceage coastal civilisations in asia at least. For example the colonisation of Australia occurred almost certainly through the use of open ocean water craft in the 4th and 5th last interglacials. The limited technology base for the colonisation was then lost during the next three (more rapidly cycling) glacial periods, until the current very long one.
One aspect other postings have neglected is the low probability a lone impactor should hit near a center of bronze-age civilization.
It is unlikely that the impactor was the only object, or even one of a few objects, involved in the impact; it was likely one of several fragments from a disrupted "rubble-pile" asteroid hitting the Earth.
Statistically, a meteorite is far more likely to hit the Pacific, or the Sahara than, say, New York or some other center of civilization.
Mesopotamia was one of the few centers of civilization of the period. If Mesopotamia was hit, it makes sense to assume that it was part of a "shotgun blast" of many impacts.
Some objects (like the precursor to comet SL-9 that hit Jupiter) are loosely bound "rubble piles" only held together by gravity.
If the impactor was a fragment of a loosely bound object, broken up by tidal forces during a previous near miss (like SL-9), it would have been a member of a swarm of objects hitting the Earth.
The probability that Mesopotamia would be hit was high, since the probability was high *everywhere*.
There might be many other impact sites buried under sediments around the world, or maybe most fragments were too small to survive atmospheric entry.
Most would have hit the ocean; if tsunami-generated deposits can be dated, it would be interesting to see if there is a cluster near 2300 B.C.
You stipulate a football-field-sized asteroid, which would make it 8x the mass and therefore 8x the energy of the above, or 80 megatons. That's pretty big, all right.
But from this page about the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa:
Krakatoa, though gigantic, is hardly the biggest eruption the world has ever seen. Mt. Mazama (now Crater Lake) in Oregon is said to have erupted with the force of approximately 10 thousand megatons of TNT. But that's nothing in comparison with the biggest Yellowstone eruptions, which are estimated to have exceeded 2 million megatons. If such an eruption happened today I'd expect it would blow away most evidence of civilization in the western U.S., but the rest of the world might be quite nicely preserved under the ash.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
How come nobody flammed me for misspelling "apocalypse"?
Nope, what I'm doing is explaining once again that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. Which is lacking.
Um, you're awfully silent on what the astronomers had to say when the comet fell into Jupiter
That's cause I really don't see what a comet falling into jupiter, spectacular but understandable and predictable using even 1800's vintage mechanics (Newtonian physics) has to do at all with a planet suddenly falling out of Jupiter, which is an extraordinary claim, without any plausiable mechanism.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Wow, Mr. AC, that is an informative and very on-topic link! Maybe there is hope for Shalshdot after all. ;-)
I am not aware of Celtic tribes who feared that the sky might fall on their heads living in or near Estonia at the prehistoric times suggested by the article, but I will tell you what I know that might be relevant to your question in case you are interested:
Thank you for the link, by the way. I wish you had posted while logged in. In any case, let me know what else you find.
You make a very good point: the case of an ethnic group "inheriting" some of the mythology of the people already living in the lands to which they migrate is indeed well known.
I want to thank you again for a very interesting link, and I encourage you to post while logged in so that we can pay special attention to other such posts from you in the future. I think that's the idea behind Slashdot Karma, which is finally just a formalism that automates this primitive evaluative efficiency enhancement technique (which is to say that Slashdot Karma institutionalizes a sort of justifiable prejudice on a per-individual basis).
In any case, thanks for joining the discussion, AC.
Hmmm, better check your Bate, Mueller, White (be sure you have the errata sheet as well) to see how orbital mechanics work -- by the way, I used to be a rocket scientist (well, actually I was a mathematician doing ballistic missile analyses and satellite orbital mechanics calculations).
I presume, without evidence to the contrary, that the rest of the refutations in the referenced post are equally without merit ... ;-)
Velikovsky offers no astronomical calculations or explaninations for this, but advances it as an observer might. Others have dealt with this in the book Velikovsky Reconsidered.
Whether escape velocities come to play in it, and how they might escape jupiter on an inbound orbit, I am not sure. But orbital capture of bodies is not unknown.
As for the others comments, they are essentially true.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
I'm imagining a loose cluster of meteors that hit here and there and created legends everywhere.
The biggest hole is the lack of craters in the area they are supposed to be, archeologists have been all over that area trying to prove or disprove the story from the Bible.
Bleh!