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Comment by timschmidt | Hacker News Reader

> Consider that in all of human history nothing significant has hit us

This is incorrect. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor was very recent and caught on video by many people. It injured nearly 1500 people and damaged 7,200 buildings in six cities.

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event in 1908 was several times larger than the Chelyabinsk meteor and leveled 830 square miles of forest. It is fortunate that it detonated over an unpopulated area. It could have completely destroyed any major metropolitan city.

A little further back there's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi... which is controversial but very possibly caused planet wide climate change visible in the geologic record ~12,900 years ago.

Smaller meteors fall into our gravity well regularly, and usually detonate over or impact the ocean, as it covers most of the Earth's surface.

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I think it is worth saying that those two impacts were smaller and the same size as 2024 YR4 (which is ~60m diameter) respectively.

It is interesting to look at impact structures [0]. Note the highly suspicious correlation of impacts and places where well paid geologists like to live; there are probably a lot of impacts in the last few millennia elsewhere in the world where people just discarded the cultural memory because the stories were too fantastic, or nobody noticed the very large splash in the pacific. A lot as in I don't think we know about the majority of the impacts in any time frame.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Eart...

"Well paid geologists"

“Geologists sufficiently paid to afford both their typically substantial weed intake and still afford a home”

I thought they just got high from licking rocks. /s

Depends on the funding level.

Also the Kaali crater. The impact happened ~3500 years ago and was roughly equivalent to a small nuke.

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930_Curu%C3%A7%C3%A1_River_ev...

That wikipedia article has got to be up there with one of the worst I've read. I get it that most people think this hypothesis is bogus (I do too, for the most part), but the article is needlessly inflammatory and as a result it's hard to understand what the hypothesis even is other than "it's a dumb as cold fusion".

I agree that the article starts out needlessly inflammatory. There are big egos in Science, as in all other endeavors, and folks can get reactionary and arguments heated. "Science advances one death at a time" after all.

That said, further down the article, there is some legitimate discussion about alternatives and even mention that "Wallace Broecker—the scientist who proposed the conveyor shutdown hypothesis—eventually agreed with the idea of an extraterrestrial impact at the Younger Dryas boundary, and thought that it had acted as a trigger on top of a system that was already approaching instability."

I can't say whether an impact happened for certain or not. I await further evidence. But I do think that the hypothesis is plausible and it's clear from the Chicxulub impact that meteors can have disastrous impact on global ecology.

The best part is one of the cited articles: "Rebuttal of Sweatman, Powell, and West's "Rejection of Holliday et al.'s alleged refutation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis"

A rebuttal of a rejection of an "alleged refutation". You can tell there's a lot of academic egos involved here.

I don’t see where the Creationism comes in?

The article Wikipedia cites for that says the group publishing the hypothesis cited a PhD thesis that "pioneered the idea of using the Old Testament as a guide to our understanding of cosmic airburst phenomena", and that they cited a young Earth creationist journal for their information on the Tunguska airburst event. It's a weak connection IMO.

I thought I had heard it used as flood explanation, but it seems young Earth creationists know the timeline doesn't fit.

We're getting into the weeds here, but once I learned of the 400ft sealevel rise at the younger dryas, it seemed immediately clear to me that this could be the great flood immortalized in so much myth and legend around the world.

Researchers have verified oral histories of at least 10,000 years age among Aboriginal Australians against date-able geologic events. Consequently, it is now clear that we can maintain such socially important information across such time.

It seems to me that we most likely fudged the exact date somewhere along the way.

Ancient peoples are often underestimated. But they were as smart and capable as ourselves, and possessed of a great deal more contemplative time and opportunity to observe the natural world around them.

Scientists are trained to look for faults and reasons to invalidate. It's the fundamental skill for eliminating hypotheses. And that is OK. But I believe there is useful information to be found in ancient culture if one is willing to consider it in good faith from the perspective of someone living through it.

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