Slashdot Mirror
Tunguska Blast Was a Small Asteroid
malachiorion writes "The Tunguska event, an explosion on June 30, 1908, cleared an 800-sq.-mi. swath of Siberian forest. Was it a UFO crash? An alien weapons test? Now, Sandia National Laboratories has released its own explanation for the Tunguska event. Using supercomputers to create a 3D simulation of the explosion, the Department of Energy-funded nuke lab has determined that Tunguska was, indeed, the explosion of a relatively small asteroid. The simulation videos are well worth checking out — they show a fireball slamming into the earth from the asteroid's air burst. The researchers caution that we should be keeping watch for many more small, potentially earth-impacting asteroids than we are currently tracking."
It's television/film. How entertaining is it to sit through 2 hours of asteroids burning up in the atmosphere, never hitting earth?
How entertaining is it to watch tiny asteroids hit wastelands?
Make no mistake, the entertainment industry will never be in the business of education. They are in the business of making money, and entertainment does that much better than education.
Or were you talking about Discovery channel? The same channel that shows two Hollywood effects guys, a Battlebots champion, and some relatively mediocre-looking eye candy by the name of Kari using non-scientific "testing" methods as an excuse to blow stuff up? The same channel that shows a relatively mediocre-looking British "survival expert" who hides himself inside animal carcasses and drinks his own urine, and says "because you'll never know when this knowledge will save your life." Maybe if you're on the next season of Fear Factor, and you need the money for a heart transplant. With this kind of educational value, it's not surprising at all that Discovery (and its myriad derivatives) always show asteroids blowing up New York and LA. Though to their credit, the last one I saw also blew up Paris and London. No Chicago though.
It's entertainment, just like FOX, MTV, NBC, CBS, CNN, etc...where FOX entertains hardcore conservatives, MTV entertains pre-pubescent Atreyu fans, NBC and CBS entertains the "long day at work and I want to kill my brain and drink a beer" crowd, CNN entertains the "We're all doomed and Britney's having another baby!" group...DSC entertains the pseudo-intellectuals and the stoners. And it does a damn good job at it. But nothing on television should ever be mistaken for "science" or even an attempt at it, as every channel out there is just selling you entertainment targeted at nearly every demographic.