A Tunguska size burst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, Bronze Age city in Jordan Valley
nature.com
nature.com
What a way to go
If I'm not misremembering history, then their delay in action - due to the difficulty of getting news of the situation out of the area of destruction - led to the bombing of Nagasaki as well.
It was a bit more complicated than that [0]. There was intense resistance to the Allies' demands for unconditional surrender. Japanese scientists confirmed on the 7th August (the day after the bombing) that Hiroshima had been atom bombed and Nagasaki was bombed on the 9th. The Japanese didn't actually surrender until the 15th August, following a failed coup d'état in which elements of the Army rebelled against the emerging surrender plans [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_c...
According to an ethnic japanese teacher of mine, the Japanese remembered very well how badly it went for them when they tried to invade Mongolia and lost to URSS, and they were more afraid of post-war occupation by URSS than by USA, thus why the surrender became more accepted.
The Emperor singled-out the atomic bombs in his surrender message. Japan was depending on the USSR to mediate a conditional surrender, until they entered the war, which closed that avenue. And the reason the USSR hastily entered the war was because of the atomic bomb, they knew it was about to end. Japan was no doubt very concerned about a second front in the war, but I don't know of any particular fear of the USSR... Japan had soundly defeated a pre-USSR Russia in the Russo-Japanese War.
It's quite possible that they would have endured the USSR joining the war effort, if not for the additional "shock" of the atomic bombs, and Truman's bluff that the US would be dropping one every week...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/pacific/#t...
Phones / telegrams and cameras existed.
Nagasaki happened 3 days later, I find it hard to believe information couldn't travel that fast.
It didn't take days, but it did take many hours for Tokyo to realize that indeed Hiroshima was devastated in an attack. Some officers even thought it was a traditional bombing raid and that there was a technical issue or even sabotage with their communication lines between Hiroshima and Tokyo. Tho Officer Corps at first had little knowledge to understand that it might have been an atomic attack, and that therefore the war had changed in a very serious manner.
There were confused reports of a large explosion. As others have noted, there was no large observed flight of US/Alied aircraft, was would have been typical of a bombing raid.
It wasn't until the early afternoon that a Japanese Imperial Army aircraft was flown over the city and made the first direct assessment of the damage incurred to those outside the city. It wasn't until the United States Government informed the Japanese via diplomatic cable the next day that it was clear that what had delivered the damage was a new type of weapon.
That initial symptom of loss of communications is actually highly typical of major disasters. For smaller incidents, a more usual problem is that those directly involved simply fail to accept or change their viewpoint to understand what it is that's transpiring. In almost any large disaster, though, a highly consistent consequence is loss of regular or effective means of communications, such that this itself is a fair indication of the scope and scale of a disaster.
Compare for example the HMS Sheffield attack during the Falklands War.
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/hiroshim/hiro_med.html#AT...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf9yc/on_disa...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2ab25z/on_disa...
At this point in the war the Americans had been hitting Japanese cities with 300-500 super heavy bomber firebombing raids for four months. After bombing all the major cities the Americans were now well into their list of twenty five smaller 75,000 to 300,000 population cities.
So Hiroshima was just another day in Japan, just another bombed city. The only thing new to the Japanese was that the destruction was from a new kind of bomb, and the following morning an investigation group had been formed.
The Japanese leadership met the following morning, discussed that the city was wiped out via a new bomb, and decided to continue fighting while seeing what kind of better terms they could get before surrendering. Which is what they had been doing for quite some time, and continued to do even as the Soviets declared war on them a few days later.
News of the attack traveled to the Tokyo quickly.
For example, a major Go championship was being played on the outskirts of Hiroshima at the time of the bomb explosion. Although the windows of the building the game were played in were blown out, and one of the players knocked over, gameplay resumed a few hours later and the match was finished. (https://senseis.xmp.net/?AtomicBombGame) It was assumed in Tokyo that day that the players were probably killed, indicating that news of the city being hit had traveled there.
When you see a SINGLE B-29 bomber, you ignore it. Its just a scout, and one bomber can't do much damage... Until Hiroshima happened. Its unbelievable: the "rules" of the war changed overnight, in a dramatic way that no one in the Japanese army could have possibly imagined. Every __SINGLE__ bomber "scout" could in fact be, the next nuclear bomb.
Japan didn't have the resources to fight against singular bombers anymore. They focused only on the groups of bombers. At this point, it was clear that their air-force was soundly defeated.
> Japan didn't have the resources to fight against singular bombers anymore. They focused only on the groups of bombers. At this point, it was clear that their air-force was soundly defeated.
It doesn't really make sense that it is easier to take down 10 bombers than 1, does it?
It sounds like you mean the hypothetical where as many bombers were each sent individual to nuke as many cities that would be harder to defend against, because any bombers that got through would do so much more damage.
So it's important to differential between potential destruction and actual destruction. The firebombings did incontrovertibly more damage, and after the war both governments had reason to not emphasize this.
https://www.toptenz.net/brutal-facts-about-general-curtis-le...
This is not to say anything nice about the Axis powers, but more to dispel the illusion that the American military were some kind of heroic force.
If you fire an imprecise weapon at a group of 10 bombers, your odds of hitting one of them can be up to 10x what it is if the same weapon fired at a single bomber.
If you have limited ammunition, it is therefore sensible to wait for the group of 10 before firing.
So it's important to differential between potential destruction and actual destruction. The firebombings did incontrovertibly more damage, and after the war both governments had reason to not emphasize this.
Yeah. The USA invented a weapon (napalm) specifically intended to target the poorest neighborhoods in Japan. And those neighborhoods were so vulnerable exactly because the Japanese government didn't care about the people living there.
It was much safer to talk about how big and threatening nuclear bombs were.
In 1944, these were largely "strategic" bombers: who had more range than our fighters. I believe they were unescorted (our fighters / carriers simply didn't have enough range yet to provide assistance).
These large "superfortress" bombers may have had machine gun defenses, but they couldn't dodge or dogfight. They were sitting ducks (albeit at higher altitudes than Japanese aircraft could follow, but these superfortresses weren't made for air-superiority... not at all).
This means that if a Japanese fighter / interceptor was most efficient vs these strategic bombing runs. Once you shot down one bomber, you're already to shoot down a 2nd or 3rd. Your most efficient use of fighters was therefore against groups of bombers.
----------
Its not about the "difficulty" of the task, and more about the "efficiency" of the task. One Ace pilot could kill 2 or 3 bombers during the defense of a city.
But if only 1-bomber "scout" were going somewhere, its just not worth your ace pilot's time or energy. The best they could do is shoot down just one enemy bomber.
Given their heavy defensive armaments, I would not describe that as a 'sitting duck'. As Japan lost the ability to actually put planes in the air, B-29 guns started getting stripped out, because they were no longer necessary.
Yes, they were big targets, but they were also flying quickly, at high altitudes. A fighter only carries so much ammunition, can quickly expend it, and has poor accuracy when shooting at a distant, fast-moving target. Due to the fuel shortages, available fighter loiter time was very low, so it doesn't get more than one, maybe two chances in a sortie to even take a shot at a B-29. And even if some of its shots hit, it's still quite likely that the bomber will make it back home.
If you got shot at early, you simply drop your bombs (maybe over rural farmland) and hit the engines as hard as you can. You wanted to fall into the part of the sea where the US-Navy still controlled the area.
The bombers were flighting high enough that even if they were shot down... there was a chance of being rescued after a crash landing. But the crash landing absolutely had to be outside of the control of the Japanese. As such, more engine power, less guns, more bombs.
Drop the bombs if attacked unexpectedly, and drift towards the Navy.
If all goes well... with a bit of luck, you outrun the enemy on the way back as well. Your plane is much lighter after the payload has been dropped
"...We had decided to take out the guns and gunners to make up for the shortage of airplanes, because it would be another factor in helping increase the bombload. However, if the change to low altitude had been quite a step to take, then going in at low altitude with half a crew was something else!"
The firebombing of Japan was done at low altitude, not high altitude.
Do you have a source on heavy bombers over Japan dropping bombs on farmland and fleeing if attacked? That seems against almost every principal of bomber warfare. Lone bombers are much easier to kill than a formation, and an entire formation jettisoning bombs and abandoning their attack just because a few fighters showed up, or AA fire began is hard for me to comprehend.
I don't think carriers (or carrier air wings) were involved in the bombing of the Japanese mainland. The famous bombing of Tokyo that you reference was all B-29 superfortresses, launched from a land-base in mariana islands.
Superfortresses were so high in altitude, that they couldn't be escorted by typical fighters. Indeed, that was its #1 defense mechanism: just fly higher than other planes (which it could do because of the marvels of pressurized cabins: oxygen masks just weren't good enough to reach that height.)
I'm sure the Japanese fighter pilots would fly as high as reasonably possible before shooting their guns at the bombers.
--------
There were a few attempts at strategic bombing in 1942 from Chinese bases (ally of the USA at the time). But a single mission used up the entire fuel supply from those bases: it was possible but just not practical. The USA would have to island hop to somewhere closer before attacking the mainland... which began in full capacity in 1944.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid
[2] Because the USSR was not at war with Japan, by the rules of neutrality, the crew got to drink vodka and play cards for the next year, until they 'escaped' Soviet custody into UK/US occupied territories. Their bomber, however, remained.
But with 15 of the 16 bombers being destroyed and the remaining 1 captured in the mission, it does show that the Doolittle Raid was very impractical outside of the propaganda purpose. (Proving to the American people that it was possible, though impractical, to strike Japan probably was a huge win for morale, and possibly well worth the destruction of all those bombers).
1. By mid-1945, Japan no longer had any fuel for those fighters.
2. B-29s cruised at 40,000', way out of reach of Japanese fighters.
At that point in the war, whether or not you see a single, or 50 B-29s, Japanese air defense would ignore them, because Japan no longer had a working air defense. The only difference is that in the latter, the firefighting crews would start getting ready.
> It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe, such as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic object, may have generated an oral tradition that, after being passed down through many generations, became the source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis. The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, e.g., (i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi) area crops were destroyed. If so, the destruction of Tall el-Hammam is possibly the second oldest known incident of impact-related destruction of a human settlement, after Abu Hureyra in Syria ~ 12,800 years ago.
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/victoria-s-volcanic-...
Which means it is very possible that we will see one in our lifetime. Hopefully it'll hit the ocean.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229492086_Historica...
Despite that, hitting the city in OPs article, even 35 centuries ago, still seems like an extremely low probability event happened.
Eventually a paper [1] was published that narrowed down the actual source of this tsunami to a massive earthquake, getting quite a bit of media coverage [2] at the time.
[0] http://cavereserve.org/blog/?p=410
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11069-016-2650-0
[2] https://www.livescience.com/48362-massive-historical-hawaii-...
Is it possible we could pass through a non-uniform, high probability density region? Perhaps a debris field where the orbit intersection with Earth is infrequent, but periodic?
Just read that bit - six cities ! 7,000 buildings. Imagine something breaking windows in LA and SF.
(wikipedia)
Not relevant to a prehistoric explosion.
Around that time, the non-Biblical Baal was supposed to have been some kind of sky/thunder deity, a proto-Zeus.
"duck and cover" which people tend to scoff at seemed to be exactly the correct approach as a schoolteacher saved their class that way.
This is extremely hyperbolic. Breaking a window is not "smashed".
Heh, in more ways than one I suppose
Years ago,while I was teaching the starts to kids on the mountain at night one of them asked for a bright star on the sky. We looked at the star and it became bigger until it was a big ball of fire so bright that we had to look away.
For two or three seconds, it became as bright as in daylight, but shadow moving ultrafast.
Then nothing,it became dark again. No sound, no nothing.
Nobody talked about that in the news. Most people were sleep. It must be normal.
You can't calculate the frequency of an event from one occurrence. At least, not without near infinite error bars.
As dredmorbius points out, we actually have a fairly comprehensive dataset of smaller events we can also use, plus a couple of bigger ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28612676
A thing to keep in mind is how very few cities there were 3600 years ago. There might have been 10-50 million people in total, the size of a single small town in China today.
But your prior probability distribution is either (1) based on a lot of other data, so that the final result is not based on the single data point, or (2) garbage.
> Your untutored intuition
It wasn't either, thanks, and its arrogant as fuck for you to assume this.
> As dredmorbius points out, we actually have a fairly comprehensive dataset of smaller events we can also use
I wasn’t commenting on a claim about what could be estimated based on that wider dataset.
> A thing to keep in mind is how very few cities there were 3600 years ago.
That has no impact on the uncertainty of the estimate from a single data point, only the actual estimate.
To do Bayesian reasoning at all, you need an initial prior probability distribution based on zero events, and all your posterior results are calculated from it. So if it's really "garbage" you're kind of in trouble regardless of how much data you have. In fact, it's easy to construct priors that cause Bayesian methods to give results that are obviously garbage by any standard even after updated with arbitrarily large amounts of data. This is often used as an argument for preferring frequentist statistics.
This is a fairly central aspect of Bayesian statistics: what can you pick as an "uninformative prior" for an unbounded distribution? A uniform distribution over the entire positive number line unfortunately isn't normalizable, so we unavoidably have some kind of falloff as we go to sufficiently low frequencies, and an exponential distribution is the least unreasonable thing to pick.
But, if we're completely uninformed and don't know anything about Earth or the universe, we might start with a prior exponential distribution whose median is at "one city-destroying-sized meteor explosion on Earth per nanosecond," not realizing that the Earth would be molten if this happened, or at "one city-destroying-meteor explosion on Earth per googol years", not realizing that the universe is vastly younger than that and in fact meteors do hit occasionally. Then, given the observed data that apparently a city was thus destroyed 3600 years ago, when cities covered maybe 0.001% of the land, and apparently less than ten cities have been destroyed since, and definitely none in the last 200 years even though cities spread to cover 1% of the land, the first of these gives us the posterior "city-destroying meteors happen every few hundred to every few thousand years" (even though it's not "based on a lot of other data" and the prior isn't very similar to that posterior, it succumbs to the evidence of those quintillions of nanoseconds when no cities got destroyed), while the second one gives us a much less reasonable estimate which could reasonably be described as "near infinite error bars" or "garbage".
So, in summary:
• you can compute the frequency of an event from a single observed occurrence;
• your prior does not have to derive from a lot of other data for this, not even the fact that the Earth is not currently molten;
• the only Bayesian way to derive a prior probability from a lot of other data is to use a prior that does not derive from any data, so any epistemology that rejects such priors as "garbage" necessarily rejects purely Bayesian reasoning entirely;
• such an uninformative prior can be obviously wrong in certain ways, to the point of absurdity, and still give you reasonable inference results; and
• these are very elementary facts about Bayesian statistics.
In short, the things you are saying are (with respect to Bayesian statistics) as incorrect as claims like "you can't trisect an angle," "you can't subtract 4 from 3," or "3 - 4 = -1 but there's no square root of -1."
> > Your untutored intuition
> It wasn't either, thanks, and its arrogant as fuck for you to assume this.
You evidently didn't know the elementary aspects of Bayesian statistics I explained above, so arrogant as fuck or no, I turned out to be right about that; I'd describe it more as an inference than an assumption. I probably can't teach you anything while you're in ego defense mode, but maybe I can keep you from misleading anybody else. I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, and if there is some way I could have totally dismissed your incorrect opinion without hurting your feelings, please tell me what it is so I can do it in the future.
> That has no impact on the uncertainty of the estimate from a single data point, only the actual estimate.
Yes, you're right, or very close anyway (since a proper prior for this problem necessarily depends on at least some kind of scale parameter, the shape of the results will vary slightly depending on at least the ratio between that scale parameter and the actual frequency estimate).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...
So, maybe two?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Frequency_and_ris...
I give it about a 70% shot.
This made their other arguments a little weaker as we as it reduced the temperature evidenced to just that of the melted bricks - which makes it possible that what they found was evidence of contemporary furnaces and/or other fire events/war/etc.
Still pretty compelling overall.
I understand they theorize an airburst, but I wonder if it would be possible to find a "ground zero" for the explosion, and thus more direct evidence.
They found it in the rubble layer they are studying? How would it get there if it wasn't produced at the same time as the rest of the stuff in that layer?
For things in a sediment layer to not be of equal age, you need some sort of transport mechanism to move the quartz there from some earlier or later period, and there's not much convective motion in dirt.
If you don’t respect consistency and prior probability, then causality itself breaks down, and I’m wondering how exactly do you feed yourself and cross streets safely. Unless you know perfectly well how reasoning works and you just don’t apply that when you comment on science articles.
The same way some people say what happened to Mohenjo Daro?
> In some Hindu texts, Agneya is considered the most powerful form of "holy energy" ever to have been created. The "Agneya Astra" is believed to have been the most powerful of the ancient nuclear energies and was often invoked by the most elite of Gods to ensure the victory of good forces. Hindu texts associate the Agneya Astra as a near infinite energy source with the power, brilliance, heat, and light exceeding those of a billion trillion Suns.
Imagine holding a silver cup. You raise it to give a toast. All of a sudden, the wine in your cup begins to boil, your flesh turns to ash and flies away as if someone with an infinity gauntlet had willed you away, the cup melts and splatters silver over your charred bones.
The only other place where I think I was impressed by scenery of this sort was the opening to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It seems that reality is even scarier than what our writers and cinematographers can imagine.
Now, that has a lot of duck-and-cover type stuff that should be familiar to older American readers. But if your teacher is prone to irony and dark humor, you can get some extras. In our case, it was a military joke that went thus:
"What should you do if you're a soldier, and a nuclear weapon goes off in the immediate vicinity?"
"Stand still and hold your AK in front of you, arms fully stretched out."
"Why?"
"So that the molten metal doesn't drip on and burn through your government-issued boots. Another recruit could still use them."
But TBH, would it even matter? I mean, to be that near for it to happen, there is so much radiation under way that it makes you unconscious before you even know it, I'd guess.
Maybe you'd see a flash, and then you would be gone. In the timescale of such things loooong before anythings starts to heat, char, be blown apart, away, to ashes and steam.
It looks like these simulations were referenced in the illustration & chart just ahead of the Conclusion section.
Also some pretty interesting results in the Sandia study: >> “The asteroid that caused the extensive damage was much smaller than we had thought,” says Sandia principal investigator Mark Boslough of the impact that occurred June 30, 1908. “That such a small object can do this kind of destruction suggests that smaller asteroids are something to consider. Their smaller size indicates such collisions are not as improbable as we had believed.”
Definitely worth checking out [1] https://newsreleases.sandia.gov/releases/2007/asteroid.html
In the story, Lot and his family were one of the few people to escape the city before its destruction. God told his family to not look back at the city as it was being destroyed. Lot's wife looked back and turned into "a pillar of salt". Maybe this is a metaphor for the people who went back to the site and couldn't grow food there due to the hypersaline that was spread across the region by the airburst.
Edit: I note that nearby Jericho is dated to have been destroyed and abandoned in the same time period (within 50 years, likely well within margins of error). One of the most striking thing about the Tel in Jericho is that half the Tel is missing. Specifically the side to the East, which would be facing this Tel. I have never seen any good reason given for that missing section of Jericho, and would not be surprised at all if the same event destroyed both cities. Obviously lending more weight to this event having been integrated into Biblical writings.
On the other hand we should not get too carried away matching up events like this. The team behind this article took pains to prove it must have been an airburst by finding molten glass that could only come from certain temperatures etc etc.
I always understood that walking round the walls of Jericho was supposed to be cover for the sounds of sappers, just as the wooden horse of Troy may well have been a animal shaped cover for a battering ram, as opposed to a rather easy to avoid foot-gun.
They reference this book which seems interesting: https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/edge-of-memory-9781472943262/
What is your source?
"Last week, archaeologists Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University released a new study that dates the arrival of the domesticated camel in the eastern Mediterranean region to the 10th century B.C. at the earliest, based on radioactive-carbon techniques. Abraham and the patriarchs, however, lived at least six centuries before then."
https://time.com/6662/the-mystery-of-the-bibles-phantom-came...
There's one really obvious solution to that mystery.
I wonder about the camel thing, though. Did the authors/editors of the texts consider camels ubiquitous? Did they know that camels were very special and wanted to mention it? Was it a mistranslation?
One obvious religious example would be the many paintings of Christ showing him as a blonde European wearing contemporary (for the time of the painting) European clothing.
Some other neat facts I just learned:
1. Apparently domestication can be defined as simply “12 generations of selective breeding”. What exactly is being selected is left open.
2. Feral is defined as first domesticated, then released. The only truly wild population of camels is apparently the wild Bactrian camels, in the gobi desert
3. Apparently camels started in the NA, traveled to Asia, got wiped out in NA (presumably by humans), got tamed in Asia, and then brought back to NA.
4. Apparently this also true of horses.
No matter how much evidence there is on the side saying the Bible is just as fictional as the Olympian, Roman, Egyptian, Aztec etc. pantheons, believers can always counter it.
The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
Scoring points in some long-running argument based on the common misunderstanding of both sides isn't really all that important.
Why not, instead, focus on what you yourself can accept as ineffable and universal?
So, this contingent usually is berated in religious forums ("No, the first two or three chapters in Genesis are 'historical narrative', heretic! ... BTW, here are the mental gymnastics for addressing inconsistencies in the two creation narratives [0]") or secular forums ("The Old Testament is a collection of inconsistent myths with no value in historical interpretation! There's no archaeological evidence of the Exodus! The New Testament passages weren't written till the year 300!").
But ... we (of this contingent) still want to meld the scientific and scriptural views, and we aren't too proud to be monkeys. For someone with this view, most of the New Testament makes little sense unless there was a literal Adam/Eve at some point, while evolution must also hold. There perhaps aren't many ways of reconciling these, so it's a struggle. The best I can reconcile is that "God made humankind from the dust of the earth" is the beautiful hack of evolution, and the Almighty chose, during one code review, from among candidate resulting species, his version 1.0 of the physical substrate of humankind, and "breathed the breath of life into [them]" to make them spiritually conscious. Then Garden-of-Eden, Tree-of-Life-vs-Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil, Partaking-of-the-Forbidden-Fruit, and we get to humankind's current reality. I look forward to seeing how wrong or right I am.
[0] https://answersingenesis.org/contradictions-in-the-bible/do-...
EDIT: mention the Exodus
I’m surprised to read this. I was raised Catholic in the UK, and everyone in my school years seemed to be fine melding scientific and scriptural views without having any problem assuming that Adam and Eve did not need to be literal.
An asteroid clipped a mountain in the Alps, causing a landslide in Köfels (but no crater). The asteroid's trajectory had a low angle, which made the mushroom cloud arc over the Mediterranean and over the Levant, raining down fire and such. This asteroid was actually recorded by Assyrian scribes on a clay tablet, but its trajectory wasn't plotted until relatively recently (2008-ish).
If this event is the cause for the salt pillars in the area then I could also see people making up stories about it as well.
I am left with the question though of how does a bolide become full of salt?
Although having its epicenter in the middle of a gunpowder factory would of course also heavily imply a gunpowder explosion (or maybe both).
There should be a lot of evidence towards it before it to be accepted as the primary cause (and not an omen, for example)
Part of me wonders if it's easier to 'invent' a comet strike or otherwise imply divine intervention as a way of avoiding blame for putting a gunpowder factory in the middle of a city.
The former means the government executes a couple of people. The latter meant to most people that the government has lost 'the Mandate of Heaven' and is ready to be overthrown. That's extremely bad news to the government.
In practice I would assume though that people weren't much different than today, and the Mandate of Heaven trick would only work if the government doesn't appear to be too incompetent.
Back then?
For how many years now have democrats been promising to be the savior of inner city minorities? And when are republicans going to get around to getting the government out of people's business?
Humans have changed very little over time.
City got destroyed by a meteorite? You view this as an accident. They think 'better remove whatever made the Heavens upset before we are smote again and again with meteorites or worse'.
Now, since the government controlled just about everything in theory (few limits on power), the government is held responsible. People start spreading the notion that perhaps the government needs to be altered to people more pleasing to Heaven, and from there we get civil wars, rebellions, etc. Which can lead to more disasters (badly maintained dams for example, because the civil war takes too many resources away from maintenance) and so on. It's a cycle of instability every ancient government wanted to avoid.
It would be different with trains/cars, but before then?
Adding a factory doesn’t seem to add that much risk to me. It can be cordoned of in a building with strong walls and light-weight ceilings. That directs any force of an accidental explosion upwards.
The armory, on the other hand, needs protection against incoming projectiles. That calls for strong ceilings.
Your logic is sensible but is not for this specific example.
“The epicenter was a major production center of gunpowder
[…]
a military storage facility that "dispatches 3000 catties (about 1.8 metric tons) of gunpowder every five days"”
This was 400 years ago, about 800 years after the invention of gunpowder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder#China) and about 600 after the first primitive guns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun#History)
Edit: looks like it does:
> There is an ongoing debate as to whether Tall el-Hammam could be the biblical city of Sodom (Silvia2 and references therein), but this issue is beyond the scope of this investigation. Questions about the potential existence, age, and location of Sodom are not directly related to the fundamental question addressed in this investigation as to what processes produced high-temperature materials at Tall el-Hammam during the MBA. Nevertheless, we consider whether oral traditions about the destruction of this urban city by a cosmic object might be the source of the written version of Sodom in Genesis. We also consider whether the details recounted in Genesis are a reasonable match for the known details of a cosmic impact event.
> It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe, such as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic object, may have generated an oral tradition that, after being passed down through many generations, became the source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis. The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, e.g., (i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi) area crops were destroyed.
The Genesis story also includes a rain of burning sulphur which could have been identified by smell by the ancients. Sulphur isn't mentioned in the article but I'd be interested in knowing whether it was found in quantities above the normal background level.
I'm not a psychologist, but I could imagine such an event causing what we would now call PTSD, and maybe triggering catatonia or similar symptoms.
...
> we speculate that an impact into or an airburst above high-salinity surface sediments (26% of land in the southern Jordan Valley at > 1.3% salinity) and/or above the Dead Sea (with ~ 34 wt.% salt content) may have distributed hypersaline water across the lower Jordan Valley. If so, this influx of salt may have substantially increased the salinity of surface sediments within the city and in the surrounding fields. Any survivors of the blast would have been unable to grow crops and therefore likely to have been forced to abandon the area. After ~ 600 years, the high salt concentrations were sufficiently leached out of the salt-contaminated soil to allow the return of agriculture.
I find oral tradition fascinating and wonder how modern technology (eg. books onwards) has affected it.
I've always thought the flood narrative archetype had to do with uncontrolled river floods, predating early state building and large irrigation projects. It's certainly that way in China.
I admire the rigor of the archaeology and physical/chemical analysis of the site, but think it’s important to note the above when evaluating the conclusions.
If this event happened, I would expect it to leave long lasting trace in oral tradition.
Tunguska was apparently visible for 500 miles (800km); for a similar event north of the Dead Sea, that would be nearly to the Euphrates valley, central Anatolia, and most of the Nile Valley.
Namely, the article notes that the most probable locations for Sodoma and Jericho are two cities that show evidence for the air burst theory. Meaning story of Lot and the Fall of Jericho would have to happen on the same day, which kinda doesn't work with bible being infallible and inerrant.
"After eleven seasons of excavations, the site excavators [i.e., the folks affiliated with Veritas International University] independently concluded that evidence pointed to a possible cosmic impact. They contacted our outside group of experts from multiple impact-related and other disciplines to investigate potential formation mechanisms for the unusual suite of high-temperature evidence, which required explanation."
I think it stands to reason that at some point a city in the Levant was destroyed violently. A comet exploding and taking out a city seems like a very plausible reason for how such a event may be attributed to holy intervention. You can discuss whether or not it was some divine being sending a comet towards a particularly bad city or not, but I'd definitely tell stories about divine punishment if I saw the remains of a destroyed city like this. Even today, I think you'd find plenty of people who'd claim that whatever the people in those city were doing was bad enough to upset the divine powers enough to bomb them from space.
See New Orleans and Katrina.
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
The Navajos have a Soddom and Ghomorra tradition about the Anasazi.
THe Welsh had such traditions about the downfall of Roman Britain.
The Greeks accused the Minoans of hubris (hence the legend of Atlantis.)
The Jews accused themselves of sin again, and again, and again, every time an outside force came to their borders. Both exiles are attributed to corruption and sin.
> Starting with the publication of his book Discovering the city of Sodom in 2013 and after fifteen years of excavations of the upper and lower tall, Collins has been arguing that Tall el-Hammam is the site of the biblical city of Sodom. A 2018 conference paper identified a likely Tunguska-like airburst event near the Dead Sea ca. 1700 BCE, which destroyed a region including Tall el-Hammam[18]. According to professor Eugene H. Merrill, himself a Biblical inerrantist, the identification of Tall al-Hammam with Sodom would require an unacceptable restructuring of his early biblical chronology.
Seems worth noting that there's not a consensus in the inerrantist camp.
Veritas International University (VIU) is an accredited non-profit Christian university located in Santa Ana, California. Founded in 2008, the university began as a seminary before transitioning to a university with the addition of undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in late 2017.
Trinity Southwest University (TSU) is an unaccredited evangelical Christian institution of higher education with a campus in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Principally a theological school that encompasses both the Bible college and theological seminary concepts of Christian education, it offers on-campus and distance education programs and degrees in Biblical Studies, Theological Studies, Archaeology & Biblical History, Biblical Counseling, Biblical Representational Research, and University Studies.
The researchers in question are specifically looking for Sodom (and believe they have found it at Tall el Hammam).
And that's it, as cities kept poping out everywhere, this never happened again.
Between Abu Hereya (10'800 BC) and Tall el-Hammam (1'650 BC) there was a 9'000 year gap.
Of course you’re going to get more cosmic events if you wait a longer time.
EDIT: The article discusses the potential impact at Tall el-Hammam in 1'650 BC, which also covered Jericho. A second impact at Abu Hereya in 10'800 BC is only mentioned, but not discussed in detail.
Not disputing that, but my interpretation would be that there was just one airburst that covered both cities.
Abu Hereya (several hundred kilometers away, 9000 years earlier) was also discussed in the article, and is a separate impact.
"The geographical extent of the (Younger Drias) YD impact is limited by the range of sites available for study to date and is presumably much larger, because we have found consistent, supporting evidence over an increasingly wide area. The nature of the impactor remains unclear, although we suggest that the most likely hypothesis is that of multiple airbursts/impacts by a large comet or asteroid that fragmented in solar orbit, as is common for nearly all comets. The YD impact at 12.8 ka is coincidental with major environmental events, including abrupt cooling at the YD onset, major extinction of some end-Pleistocene megafauna, disappearance of Clovis cultural traditions, widespread biomass burning, and often, the deposition of dark, carbon-rich sediments (black mat). It is reasonable to hypothesize a relationship between these events and the YDB impact, although much work remains to understand the causal mechanisms."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_Abu_Hureyra
It's a unique site of possible early long-term hunter-gatherer settlement right in the middle of one of the regions in which agriculture was first developed. It also happens to be one of the first agricultural sites! The pre-agricultural populations we're talking about are a few hundred people, which feels a little short of a city.
And it's one of the earliest examples of the transition from nomadic hunter gathers to more permanent settlements.
Nomadism doesn't preclude semi-permanent settlements, especially as migratory patterns retrace sites.
There is a theory by Jared Diamond [1] of how pre-Agricultural Jomon people of Japan were able to invent pottery 18K years ago: the wild-food rich environment of Japan, being moist, temperate, and surrounded by ocean - allowed them to have very settled lives while other hunter gatherers had to constantly move.
Outside of rate examples like this, there is little evidence that non agricultural societies reached even moderate populations.
My point is that human cities are "bolide sensors" and unevenly distributed in time and space, so the "measurements" are necessarily fewer than what occurs in nature.
Then there's bolides over desert, savanna, tundra, ice sheets, etc.
An air burst impact that’s large enough to take out a city won’t leave a major impact crater. And back in the day it might even be the case of the perceived cause contributing more to the decline of a city or even an empire than the physical damage.
If a meteor hit blows up your town when you have no ability to comprehend what just happened other than god/gods are angry you gonna move to a less cursed place.
It can also cause social impacts such as the toppling of a given religious or leadership class because they angered the gods.
And not even that guarantees a complete picture - what if a tsunami event erases or conceals the record of something like this? Volcanic activity? Desertification?
My point is that we can't reason about the rarity or uniqueness of these events as a main factor for accepting or refuting the hypothesis
I don't think this claim is supported by the article. There have been other cosmic air bursts, like the 1490 Ch'ing-yang event, which had a large number of casualties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1490_Ch%27ing-yang_event
It seems the chinese were lucky like the russians while the Bronze Age folks were not so lucky.
So I guess we should invest more in asteroid defense.
Fortunately there are groups that are doing just that: https://b612foundation.org/
Meteors large enough to detect are both incredibly rare, and are very difficult to deal with, and meteors too small to detect will hit you before you see them.
Not to mention that any detection will come with very large uncertainty bars. Suppose that you somehow discover that a ~500 KT meteor (Like the Chelyabinsk bolide - which was only ~20 meters across - good luck figuring out an accurate orbit for it) is an impact risk. The overwhelming majority of the Earth is covered with water. The overwhelming majority of the rest is... Not densely populated. And observations put it at a 0.5% chance of striking the Earth next year, with zero ability to predict which part of the Earth will be struck.
That's the most likely outcome of a detection program. Not '100% chance', not '90% chance', but a '0.5% chance of a rock that's scary only if you're in its immediate path'. Is that worth doing anything about?
The cost of all rockets ever launched is a pittance compared to NYC real estate
Also there is a project for a space telescooe spesifically designed to locate asteroids, its not that difficult or even expensive.
In 9 out of 195 countries.
Even if you were gonna hit the meteor during significant downward trajectory (which seems unlikely), that would still have to be done at quite a distance from the impact location.
Also wondering when there was ever a "politically stable world without conflicts"
If your nuke can slow the asteroid from 20km/s to 19.9 km/s, then you need to nuke it 6 days before it hits earth.
There is a fascinating logistics and timing feature to this whole topic. Aside from global panic'd masses. There is a huge logistical difference between sudden and unplanned electrical grid shutdown and subsequent black start vs a pre-planned five minutes outage (assuming we can predict impact to five minutes). Another interesting electrical utility issue is the radiological damage from a melted-down nuclear power plant varies exponentially with time... There's a huge difference in expected damage between whacking the coolant pumps a month in advance vs a day in advance vs a minute of warning vs no warning at all just no coolant flow.
And of course if the 2013 Chelyabinsk bolide had been just a bit larger, then the city would no longer exist. (Larger size = lower airburst, so even a modest increase in megatonnage can result in substantially more energy transferred to the ground).
And there are other recent city-killer-size impacts that are well-known but fortunately didn't have cities underneath them, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campo_del_Cielo
Looked it up, from Wikipedia:
> The power of the explosion was about 500 kilotons of TNT (about 1.8 PJ), which is 20–30 times more energy than was released from the atomic bomb detonated in Hiroshima. The city managed to avoid large casualties and destruction due to the high altitude of the explosion.
The Chelyablinsk meteor entered at a very shallow angle & was a chondrite with little internal strngth, so it disintegrated over a longer distance forming a “line burst” rather than a single point airburst.
Had it entered more steeply, then it would have concentrated it’s KE over a much smaller area, causing much more damage.
A nuclear bomb may take a few ms, but after a few 100ms, you’ve got a dense, hot plasma in a small volume. Sounds a lot like the result of a metorite airburst! And indeed, people use the same codes that are used to model nuclear explosions to model meteor airbursts.
Even though an atomic bomb blast is not applicable because of the historic absence of atomic explosions in the area, an atomic blast produces a wide range of melt products that are morphologically indistinguishable from the melted material found at TeH (Fig. 51). These include shocked quartz64; melted and decorated zircon grains (Fig. 51a, b); globules of melted material (Fig. 51c, d); meltglass containing large vesicles lined with Fe-rich crystals likely deposited by vapor deposition (Fig. 51e, f); spherules embedded in a meltglass matrix (Fig. 51g, h). Also, atomic detonations can replicate the physical destruction of buildings, the human lethality, and the incineration of a city, as occurred in World War II.
added: though, I forget to mention, that they also found many chemical elements and compositions that are hard to find under normal conditions (atomic bomb tests included as I understood), but abundant in meteorites.
And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sulawesi_superbolide
They happen every now and again; of course normally they're not close enough to a city to be a big problem, but over ten millennia...
And, I mean, what's the alternative explanation? Bronze Age nuclear war? You'd have a hell of a time making an ICBM out of bronze :)
Another fun theory is that there's an alien berserker in far solar orbit that is periodically sending asteroids to Earth to stunt human development while a more powerful device is dispatched to exterminate us. This would imply that additional "events" are immanent. ...food for thought.
I could maybe believe it if they were throwing them for fun / to study how we react. Which might go in line with the theories that many "UFOlogists" espouse: that sightings are sporadic and rare because aliens are basically pranksters trolling us all. (For the record, I find this pretty contrived, and I believe the far more likely explanation is that there haven't ever been any visitations.)
Perhaps after detecting intelligent life and reporting it, perhaps it attached itself to the largest convenient asteroid/comet, and altered it's orbit just so to stunt human development just enough to allow for a more complete extermination ship to be dispatched.
Like a galactic immune system - suicide berserkers designed to signal the human infection, and then suicide themselves to slow the disease evolution.
The galaxy is many billions of years old. I would not rule out the development of such a system.
Is it though? Isn't food for thought something you're supposed to think about? I'm not going to spend much time pondering a petulant alien overlord scenario, especially considering that humanity would probably qualify for a rock or two from such a being as of late and none have been forthcoming.
In ancient times, people were much more limited by the distribution of resources, so rather than one big city, they'd have lots of smaller settlements. Note that most ancient "cities" would be small towns by modern standards - Jerusalem for example had a population of around 5000 inhabitants around 1000 BCE. Pretty much every place where there could be such a settlement, there would be.
Thus in that period, if you picked a random spot on earth, the odds that there would be a (by the standards of the day) dense population center in close proximity would be much higher than today.
"diamond-like carbon; soot; Fe- and Si-rich spherules; CaCO3 spherules from melted plaster; and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 °C."
Lots of close by civilizations had a rapid decline during the same timeframe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImnqYT9C0Ws
> Eric Cline, Professor of Classics and Anthropology at George Washington University, discusses the factors that caused the Bronze Age to come to an end.
- I do recommend the book, but for most folks the YouTube lecture is probably enough detail :)
Extra Credits once did a series of videos describing various weak points that could lead to the Late Bronze Age collapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMP328eU5Q
There are worse names. Like the Beaker Folk. A thousand years of presumably history and culture, and you get named after a cup.
Those dates are separated significantly beyond their margins of error.
For the Chelyabinsk meteor, quick math shows the kinetic energy was about 2e15 joules or .5 megatons. Apparently, ALL of the kinetic energy was converted to radiation and heat, even though it never hit the ground.
My mental model was that something that big (20m) would just punch through the atmosphere and hit the ground, converting all its kinetic energy, and leaving a nice crater.
An airburst, instead, is caused by the inverse operation, i.e., the atmosphere punching into the meteor and shredding it.
Hmm. In the airburst case, the meteor is slowed down just as if it had hit the ground. Okay. Model updated. Thanks for reading.
Yeah, for some reason, I was thinking that stuff that got vaporized by the atmosphere didn't generate as much energy compared to the stuff hitting the ground.
A berserker in far solar orbit could conceivably stunt human development every couple thousand years with an asteroid, while a more effective extermination ship is being dispatched.
Interestingly enough, the explosion is hypothesized to cause hypersalinity in the area, which caused its abandonment for around 600 years (as it made it impossible to grow crops).
For example, if such an event happened to a major city in the US, how could you confirm that it was a bolide, and how do you convince the public calling for retaliation that it was not a nuclear attack.
Also, nukes don't get automatically launched (unless you're Russia at high alert and activated dead hand), that's why leaders exist.
In any case, how do you retaliate if you have no idea who attacked you?
What if your strategic enemy secretly figured out how to evade detection?
> also you have radiation.
Ah, the lack of radiation explains it: this city-killing explosion was the horrible work of a top-secret kinetic impactor weapons program developed by [insert strategic enemy here]!
> how do you retaliate if you have no idea who attacked you?
The same way the USA justified invading Iraq: lie. The inevitable blizzard of online disinformation wouldn't help things either.
They probably already do; stealth tech is a thing, as are hypersonic long distance missiles. Plus submarines, to bring the nukes in real close, reducing response time.
If people want to go to war, it doesn't make a lot of sense to wait around for an asteroid.
The Wikipedia article (1) answers the first, and the the second was 1964 (2).
Obviously, less expensive means are typically used than "just nuking themselves".
The whole point of the False Flag is the False part.
Further, what happens when people start asking why China blew up Cleveland instead of some place more valuable? Or they ask why there was no build up to this attack? Or ask why your government did nothing to avert this? If you try to utilize a real disaster which you did not have foreknowledge of, you don't have time to carefully craft a story which stands up to basic scrutiny and run the serious risk of putting yourself in a worse position than you started with.
Again, the whole point of a false flag is that you are choosing to make up something instead of relying on real life to justify what you want to do. You control the story, you can make it serve you however you like on your timetable.
The saying "never let a crisis go to waste" is something that sounds smart and edgy so long as you don't think about it for more than 5 minutes.
What are the odd that _something_ useful happens? a lot higher than the odds of _this specific thing_ happening
> The saying "never let a crisis go to waste" is something that sounds smart and edgy so long as you don't think about it for more than 5 minutes.
shrug. It is what it is. I feel no slight from your criticism - If you think that this is my saying then you didn't even google it. Clearly, it has lasted longer than 5 minutes so far. If you're not interested, ok.
Perhaps you should google it
> Charles Doyle of the University of Georgia, my coauthor on the forthcoming Yale Book of Modern Proverbs, has found that this expression is now commonly applied to economic or diplomatic crises that can be exploited to advance political agendas, but he traced it back at least as far as 1976, when M. F. Weiner wrote an article in the journal Medical Economics entitled “Don’t Waste a Crisis — Your Patient’s or Your Own.” Weiner meant by this that a medical crisis can be used to improve aspects of personality, mental health, or lifestyle.
I obviously was not saying you made it up, quite the opposite. I was accusing you of parroting a proverb you thought sounded smart and edgy but never gave any serious thought to, and ridiculing the idea that anyone actually follows this proverb.
[0] https://freakonomics.com/2009/08/13/quotes-uncovered-who-sai...
I'm aware of that medical usage, though if you think it's the only relevant one you're not using google very well. Not being able to generalise seems to be your thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83#False_alarm_fro...
" false alarms were caused by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds underneath the satellites' orbits. "
You get to choose who you want to attack, go invade your preferred targets? It worked for the US about 20 years ago. It's not a hypothetical, it's recent occurrence.
Before worrying about the second-order effect maybe we should worry about having no defenses against such impacts.
Satellites dedicated for this purpose have gamma ray, x-rays, and neutron detectors. They would instantly rule out nuclear explosion.
Air sampling and nuclear forensics makes it possible to even identify the culprit from the radionuclides.
Also don't forget the EMP effects of a large nuke. Just because a large nuke on the surface doesn't "vaporize all global electronics magically" doesn't mean it would be unmeasurable.
I am curious how unclassified the detail level can be for seismographic analysis. Certainly, oil prospectors can output detailed 3-d models given prior preparation and "generic earthquakes" have nearly instant results for depth of the earthquake and precise location. Anyway my point is the destruction in the linked article was spread along a 100 KM (or so..) SW to NE line simultaneously whereas nukes are obviously point sources. I suppose incredibly unluckily a meteor could come precisely 90 degrees straight down to fool such analysis but those impacts are statistically unlikely. It would seem pretty trivial given enough seismographs on the ground and enough global computing power to instantly detect the difference between a single point source and a geographically long linear impact source.
Seismographic analysis has become really accurate. 0.1 t .. 10 t aka (extremely-low-yield testing) can be concealed from seismographs. Very-low-yield testing between 10 t and 1-2 kt is very hard to conceal, and everything from low-yield testing up (>20kt) can be detected with certainty.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_MASINT#Space-based_N...
PS: in case someone wonders where all this is coming from, I was pondering on the arrow that points to the Temple in this picture (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3/figures/1). Countless may have prayed at its steps for their safety and at the end, universe just swept all that aside.
Humans are small and the world they operate in is big. Sometimes humans get crushed.
how many people would be motivated to do anything if they knew that when you die, you cease to be? Or that there's no trial of your life's deeds.
I am tempted to go full Slav on Conor, to explain to him how we are all just grains of dust suspended in the howling void, searching for meaning in the fleeting moments before we are yanked back to the oblivion from whence we emerged, naked and screaming. But for all his faults he's just a kid stuck spending his summer microwaving Yorkshire puddings for difficult people. I take pity.