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Pharaoh's Gem Brighter Than a Thousand Suns
Tamas Feher from Hungary writes "An Italian archaeologist accidentally found that the central gem in Tutankhamun's regal necklace is not amber, but a mere piece of yellow glass. Kinda cheap for the famous Egyptian pharaoh, best known for his splendid golden mask. Except that piece of glass is much older than civilization. Where did it come from, StarGate? Kind of. Scientists now think a meteorite much larger than the Tunguska event fell from the sky and exploded over the Sahara in prehistoric times. The tremendous heat of the 1000 A-bomb sized fireball melted large chunks of desert sand into perfect glass. The memory of such an apocalyptic event may have made sand-glass gems a desirable symbol, meant to emphasize the pharaoh's heavenly powers."
If the explosion happened "before civilization" then it might be hard for there to be any memory of the "apocalyptic event" that created the glass. We're talking 800,000 years here... even before the advent of oral legend (Mmmmmmm.... oral legend).
The actual gem was replaced with a piece of yellow glass by grave robbers who did a very good job of concealing their tracks.
is in thier rarety. Glass was a gemstone before it could be made in quantity. This necklace may be OLD. Glass, Diamond, Sapphire, Ruby, it's all the same. The jewlery industry is trying very hard right now to find some way to discount the value of man made stones, or we may soon see the value of all gems erode as the value of glass did once.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
From TFA:
Compare and contrast.
two words:
First word: Science
Second, and most importantly: Fiction
It is fiction. Fiction. Fiction. Keep repeating it until you have it in your mind.
Scrutinizing the abnormalities of fiction compared to the real world is pointless, mate.
Not to mention that in your own post you show that Asmiov states "or, by that time, something more appropriate". This indicates to me that the best tool available at the time was a nuke and Asimov understood that it may not be the best tool but was the only one available and that in the future there may be better tools.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Given the unusual color of the glass (for the period), it seems quite reasonable that it being formed by "the light of a thousand suns" was the source of its value.
Well, that's assuming that someone saw the meteor strike, wasn't killed by it, and the legend was passed down through the generations. That's quite a lot to swallow with their being no evidence for any of it.
The distinguishing feature of the glass is that it isn't man made. Given that glass beads were common in Egypt in 1500 BC, and Tut ruled around 1300 BC, I'd say they must have known this wasn't just normal man-made glass. Perhaps they found it in the desert, but knew of glass as only a man-made substance. Finding something in the middle of nowhere in large chunks that couldn't possibly be made by a person, but which you've only seen before as being made by a person is pretty amazing. It'd be like finding big chunks of pure iron in the middle of knowhere. You've seen Iron before, but it's something that's created by people. I could easily see that such a find would make this glass special.
In fact, the earliest known uses of Iron around 4000 BCE come from meteorites. From wikipedia:
Which brings up the possibility that this glass was found before glassmaking became common, so it had a special value assigned to it. The point I'm trying to make is that no one had to see the actual meteor impact to know that this was special glass.
AccountKiller
Hmm.
Ok, so glass was priceless until we figured out how to make it.
Why isn't diamond cheap yet?
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
throw a 10 pound bowling ball off the empire state building
throw 20 pounds of BB's off the empire state building..
same effect? I don't think so.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Prove this. I expect it should be difficult because much more meteor dust rains down in a single day than most would believe.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
That assumes that the ancient Egyptians had the same notions of value about stones that we have today (for instance, valuing diamonds the most because DeBeer's shelled out so much advertising as being the best). How rare is this yellow glass? How beautiful? Is it the exact correct symbolic color for anything in the pharaoh's theology?
I don't think we can correctly assume a pharaoh would not have glass in his finery.
My wife wears one of those man-made gem-quality diamonds. She says she was never comfortable with really expensive jewelry, and said she'd rather us take a nice vacation or buy a car instead of me buying her a diamond, so that's what we did. The gem she wears really is perfect, and a jeweler friend of ours said it was "magnificent". I won't shed any tears for the diamond industry, bloody monsters that they are, nor for the diamond merchants who in the 20th century somehow convinced everyone that diamond rings were required to demonstrate love. Let them find honest income.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Remember though, Kay Jewelers sells only Created gemstones not synthetic ones.
That's actually a more accurate description. A lab-grown diamond is a diamond, just as much as a mined diamond is a diamond.
That makes synthetic diamonds sound cooler than natural diamonds...I'd love to avoid the dirty cartels AND have a stone that phosphoresces (granted only with specific light that is probobly dangerous to skin).
They were having a discussion on synthetic diamonds on npr today somewhere around early afternoon and it reminded me of the fantastic wired article on the topic. It's a little dated in terms of the newest cutting edge techniques (both for creation and analysis) but it is very very good.
Bottles.
Nearly everybody is missing the point. Blow the object into smithereens, and every smithereen acquires its own vector increment of velocity. The farther away it is at the time of the detonation, the farther those increments take the pieces away from the original trajectory. So it was headed for Chicago? OK, some of the pieces will hit there. Some will hit Lake Michigan. Some will hit Caracas. And quite a few will miss the planet altogether.
The answer to your pellets-vs-slug question? At ten feet, it doesn't matter. At a hundred yards, you damn well bet I'd take the pellets.
rj