A prehistoric cosmic airburst preceded the advent of agriculture in the Levant | Hacker News Reader

A prehistoric cosmic airburst preceded the advent of agriculture in the Levant

phys.org

40 pointswglb14 comments

> This event is not the only such evidence of a cosmic airburst on a human settlement. The authors previously reported a smaller but similar event which destroyed the biblical city at Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley about 1600 BCE.

Uh oh - these people again.

for the curious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...

It is a separate theory from Younger Dryas, but looks like it is same group, Comet Research Group, involved in both.

Also, giant black obilisks surrounded by violent chimpanzees.

So, they found 50 sites of early human settlements that look as if they were destroyed by nuclear explosions? I could make a conspiracy theory out of that.

The Times of India is way ahead of you.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/thedanispost/resea...

I remember watching a conspiracy documentary about exactly this, some 10 years ago. I remember it being a mix of the Nibiru / Planet X conspiracy theory and some super wacky shit that was really out there. According to the documentary giants, vampires and such used to roam the Earth before a devastating nuclear war with the Nibiru from Planet X devastated the Earth thousands of years ago.

One image in the documentary struck me: It was an archaeologist, digging out a skeleton of a giant somewhere in the middle east. I google-reverse-image-searched it and found out the image got 2nd place in an online photoshop contest under the theme "archaeology". 1st place was an Egyptian toomb with hieroglyphs with modern corporate logos mixed in (McDonalds in hieroglyph form).

There have long been folks interpreting a passage in the ancient Indian text Mahabharata as depicting "ancient nuclear war", although the "earlier humans describing a meteorite or similar as best they can" interpretation always struck me as "somewhat more probable".

ex: https://www.sanskritimagazine.com/nuclear-events-in-ancient-...

Funny, my first thought was Bill Wurtz saying "you could make a religion out of this"[1], and my second thought was that if it actually happened, they probably made a whole bunch of religions about it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs&t=360s

Patiently waiting for the detection of a neighbouring neutron star passing through the Solar System at 250AU in the next century.

For those wondering, 400,000 PSI is crazy.

For a nuclear weapon, a 20 PSI over pressure is considered sufficient to demolish reinforced concrete structures, with a very high fatality rate.

These bursts would have killed and atomized everything on the ground over a wide area!

Yes, 5-6 psi will demolish soft targets (civilian structures). 200 psi will dig out nuclear resistant bunkers. Over 1000 is in crazy territory.

That creates a problem for the airburst theory. Small asteroids, like the one over Chelyabinsk, make small blast and break windows. Big asteroids that would cause lots of damage reach the ground. It is possible to have one that explodes right above the ground and makes nuclear bomb sized explosion but probably not that much pressure.

The other problem is the likelihood of this happening. Above talks about 50 strikes which coincidentally stopped with better records. There should have been more destruction in last few centuries.

> cosmic airburst

I guess that the definition of this term is given in the "Journalism 101" course. /s

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