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14-Year-Old Boy Smote By Meteorite
eldavojohn writes "Winning the lottery requires incredible luck and one in a million odds. So does getting hit by a falling space rock. A 14-year-old German boy was granted a three-inch scar by the gods. A pea-sized meteorite smote young Gerrit Blank's hand before leaving a foot-sized crater on the road. The boy's account: 'At first I just saw a large ball of light, and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand. Then a split second after that there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder. The noise that came after the flash of light was so loud that my ears were ringing for hours afterwards. When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road.' Curiously, the rock was magnetic, and tests were done to verify it is extraterrestrial. The Telegraph notes the only other recorded event of a meteorite striking a person was 'in November 1954 when a grapefruit-sized fragment crashed through the roof of a house, bounced off furniture and landed on a sleeping woman.' Space.com lists a few more anomalies and we discussed the probability of these things downing aircraft recently."
Why not a picture of his hand?
FTA: "A red hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and causing a foot wide crater in the ground."
First, meteors aren't hot. Second, if a "pea-sized piece of rock" is going fast enough to make "a foot wide crater in the ground," it's not going to be "bouncing off" shit, least of all this kid's hand. It would tear through him like a shotgun slug. Was the kid's hand blown off? No? Then it didn't leave a fucking crater in the ground either. How about some photographs? Oh, there are none? Hmmm.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
The injury was more likely from the debris kicked up from the impact of the meteor on the ground than the meteor directly striking him on the hand.
2 people hit out of 6 billion in the world, so odds are 1 in 3 billion or the PDOOMA 1 in 1 million FTA
what are the odds that either the androgynous boy or some reporter made the whole thing up?
You can't count with population of 6 billion. About 1.3 of that live in India. Have you ever been to the country's poor areas (=which is nearly all of it). I've only traveled once through the country and most of that time in a train but I feel confident to say that if someone gets hit by a small meteor there, it won't get reported and confirmed.
Same is true for chine which also has over a billion people. And the poor parts of Africa... And I would guess that the same stands even for a lot of South America and Mexico...
Hell, the amount of people among which such events would likely be reported is probably closer to a billion. And even among them, only those identified as meteor strikes. I wouldn't be surprised if a few would just go "Where the hell did that come from?! WHICH ONE OF YOU FUCKERS THREW A ROCK AT ME?!"
Yeah, one in a million sounds still way of but 2 reported incidents in six billion is far, far away from two incidents in six billion.
Pea-sized? That's about 9mm or even larger depending upon the cultivar. I've seen peas the size of .50 caliber rounds (about 12.7mm) and at the 30,000mph in TFAHL that would not only rip the boy's hand off but probably break the bones up to his elbow from the shock. Even at 400mph it would do way more than that. Also, to be pea-sized and make a crater that large, it would have to have more mass than it should have since it's supposedly composed of primarily ferrous material.
And I doubt 30,000MPH. Maybe 250 at best.
But this *IS* the Telegraph. Not exactly a reliable source of news. I'm surprised this actually made it here.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
the chance of (intelligent?) life occurring twice in our universe is very small, like the chances of any one person winning the lottery
Number of people in my state: about 6 million.
Estimated number of stars in the known universe: about 70,000 million million million.
(7x10^22)
People win the lottery every week. If the chance of finding intelligent life was similar to the chance of winning the lottery, we should expect to find about 10,000,000,000,000 stars with intelligent life per week.
His story might not be *true*, but.. um.. there's still the crater in the ground. I don't know how he would have been able to fake that. And the rock is reportedly actually from space. Even harder to fake. The odds of him just happening to find this while doing something he shouldn't have been that caused a scar, and deciding to blame it on this meteorite, are probably as small as him getting hit by it.
The meteor bounced off his hand then made a foot-wide crater in the road? Wow! He's got tough hands!
Oh, wait... Maybe the injury to his hand was caused by a debris fragment from the road impact. That would actually make sense.
If it was fast enough to leave an impact crater after hitting the ground, it would have shredded that kid's hand. I think it is more likely that the meteor hit the ground and the kid was hit with the stones and dirt that were tossed into the air.
Heh, the average American believes the only use for the word "smitten" is as a synonym for lovestruck, and you expect /. to get the grammar right?
Good luck.
-Matt