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When Comets Attack
Red Flayer writes "Popular Mechanics is running a story that describes one of the more interesting explanations for the Tunguska explosion of 1908: 'Now, a controversial new scientific study suggests that a chunk of a comet caused the 5-10 megaton fireball, bouncing off the atmosphere and back into orbit around the sun. The scientists have even identified a candidate Tunguska object — now more than 100 million miles away — that will pass close to Earth again in 2045.' Note that Popular Mechanics' definition of 'close to' is somewhat different than most people's — the comet will be 3.8 million miles away at its closest. At any rate, the key to this theory is that hydrogen and oxygen in the ice shard exploded upon entering the atmosphere, resulting in the difficult-to-explain blast pattern (previous theories contend that the object must have 'skipped' on the atmosphere and then re-entered at the exact same spot). This would also, sadly, dash the theory that Nikola Tesla was responsible."
The sun's trying to start a snowball fight.
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It was the great Nikola Tesla who summoned the comet in the first place!
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This artist's rendition of the explosion graced the back cover of this month's The Planetary Report (from The Planetary Society). It illustrates how the bolide likely blew up above the ground and hence produced no crater. The artist is Don Davis.
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Maybe you did. Were you in Siberia in 1908?
I think this is one of the great what-ifs of recent history... what if this event took place in a populated area, rather than in the Siberian woodlands? We still don't know what happened today, so how would people have dealt cognitively with it back in 1908 if thousands or even millions had died?
I find it intriguing to consider.
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all these comet theories are great, but how to they explain the extra Carbon 14 found in tree rings in that area, for that year? (The trees that hadn't been blown down, of course.)
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
The Japanese were well aware of what had happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They had people working on an atomic bomb as well but they were barely scratching the surface of what needed to be done as they just did not have the industrial capacity.
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It was shown back in 1966 that the butterfly shape of the fallen trees may be caused by the several explosions combined with the ballistic wave.
The Russian researchers built a model of the site (1:10000), with explosion modeled by an explosive cord with an explosive charge at the end. The forest model was built from the tiny flexible wires with plastic crowns.
They have shown that placing the cord at some inclination angle (close to 30 degrees) the impact shape was clearly resembling the butterfly shape of Tunguska event.
The abstract (in Russian) is here:
http://tunguska.tsc.ru/ru/science/conf/1966/zotkin/
The FA talks about the comet having a 'host planet' around which it orbited long enough for the 'host planet's' magnetic field to electrolyse the water in the comet into hydrogen and oxygen. It was the ignition of the hydrogen that is claimed to have causes the explosion. Possible of course but it seems a bit of a stretch to me. Occam's razor and all.
It was me, that day I had 2 bean burritos, and happened to be in the area when I had a major attack of gas. And the extinction of the dinosaurs that was me again. I really need to stop it with the bean burritos but they are just so damn good.
I never heard anything about the Germans not having the resources to build an a-bomb, but the Japanese had been prosecuting a war for some years before the americans intervened. This left them at a disadvantage.
From wikipedia:
"Over the course of the Pacific War, the economies of Japan and its occupied territories all suffered severely. Inflation was rampant; prices in Japan in 1944 were 3.25 times higher than in 1936.[citation needed] Japanese heavy industry, forced to devote nearly all its production to meeting military needs, was unable to meet the commercial requirements of Japan (which had previously relied on trade with Western countries for their manufactured goods). Local industries were unable to produce at high enough levels to avoid severe shortfalls. Furthermore, maritime trade, upon which the Empire depended greatly, was sharply curtailed by damage to the Japanese merchant fleet over the course of the war. From a fleet of 6,000,000 tonnes of shipping in 1941, Japan was reduced to one of 2,000,000 tonnes by 1944.[citation needed]
By the end of the war, what remained of the Japanese Empire was wracked by shortages, inflation, and currency devaluation. Transport was nearly impossible, and industrial production in Japan's shattered cities ground to a halt. The destruction wrought by the war eventually brought the Japanese economy to a virtual standstill."
Of course, every sentence says "citation needed" after it, its up to you to either accept it at face value or google around and verify it, but that seems like a plausible explanation.
It seems wierd that money would really be a bar to making a nuke - i would have thought that the quantum physicists would be a more crucial resource than buildings and materials.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Of course, every sentence says "citation needed" after it
Actually, its pretty accurate. Japan was hurting economically before the war even began. The USA stopped selling Japan raw materials, like steel and oil were cut off, and in response the Japanese extended the imperial drive into the resource rich pacific.
But even then you have to keep in mind that the industrial japan of world war II was nowhere near the industrial japan of today. The GDP of Japan was a fraction of that of the USA and to some extent the Japanese Navy headed into 1941 was built up over the years by accumulating a bunch of different classes of warships. On the other hand the USA of then was not the USA of today. Back in those days the USA was a protectionist industrial powerhouse, rather than a free trading banking state.
A great web site maps out the economic disparity between the two:
http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm
Some things are just amazing... like, just look at how many Essex class aircraft carriers, aircraft, and battleships the USA built. Everyone raves about the Japanese 70,000 ton Yamato, but there are some Navy fans out there that say the USS Iowa class could probably come out ahead in that fight, there were four of those versus two Yamatos.. and, if it had been a battleship war, and the Iowa couldn't do it, then the Montana would.
But as it was it was a carrier war. We build 25 Essex Class carriers, the Japanese a fraction of that. We build more than 300,000 aircraft, the Japanese a fraction of that. We have radar. The Japanese don't. We have self sealing fuel tanks. The Japanese don't.
The Japanese had no shot to win that war.
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