Is the Video of the Meteorite and the Skydiver Legit?
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There's no real evidence either way yet. Honestly even if they find the rock and it is meteoric, it still seems more likely to me that the whole thing was invented, than that a meteor passed within a few feet of a skydiver. I can't say for sure one way or the other, of course. I'm not even sure what would convince me, considering how small the chance is of this happening and the motive, opportunity, and techniques to fake it are easily identified.
- estimates of meteroid paths (per year); tenths of thousands;
- estimates of people sky-diving (per year); 3 millions; Source: http://www.statisticbrain.com/skydiving-statistics/
- time of one jump; minutes, say two;
- time of one meteroid drop; minutes, say two;
- length in meters of a typical jump; 3,000;
- length in meters of a drop; 20,000;
- and the square of an estimate of visibility boxes — say meters across —; 1000 m^3;
divided by:
- a year; 525,948 minutes;
- Earth’s jumpable atmosphere (that's the whole thing) squared: 3×10^24 m^3 (Wolfram Alpha).
My take is that the over-all volume of atmosphere and that meteroids can drop at anytime makes it extremely unlikely: an order of 10^-35 with my very rough estimates. 10^30 years of jumping would not make it likely. Even by estimating millions of asteroids shattering in millions of pieces, that even should be rarissime even considering the length of human species’ history.
More parameters, such as the fact that people tend to jump when there is daylight or pay attention to the landscape, certainly counts.
If you compare to how many cameras are in the ground, we should have seen a meteoroid last meters much sooner. So, if statistical disappointing skepticism is to be considered, what makes all those camera unlikely candidate appears that they are too stable and generally face other cameras and the ground were the stone might be recovered. It doesn’t make that video fake; it’s just that, using a Bayesian framework, it comes off as incredibly unlikely not to have been done using editing.
It makes it all the more spectacular if it were. I’m guessing the camera makers can easily tell that from the recording on the device.
Please — correct my math, reasoning or any assumption: I certainly got most of it wrong.
Considering a bubble with a 200 m radius (3×10^7 m^3) doesn’t really change the conclusion: at the current jumping rhythm, it’s still unlikely that it might happen any point throughout the human history.
We know, full well and without any calculation the chances of such a shot are infinitely small, given that, the only reasonable action is ignoring it for the sake of tangible evidence.
For example, the skydiver was in a wingsuit, and the rock flies past him just as his parachute had opened. This means another person would have needed incredible timing to be able to match a rock throw/drop; having it go past him at a recordable distance while not hitting him.
I'm a skydiver so I've had my share of scares connected to parachute deployment, hanging around above something is for example a huge no. As the parachute opens, it's practically dead in the air; widening in area rapidly. Were someone to hang above him he is putting himself in real danger, his wingsuit is susceptible to changing winds and a few hundred meters (a reasonable estimate for how far you can expect a human to be able to aim a falling rock near another skydiver) go by in a flash.
There is also the practicality of holding onto a rock in a wingsuit (which you'd need to be able to follow his trajectory in the air). He could have devised a contraption on his stomach for the rock, and pulled it out at a proper distance, but a wingsuit diver pulls in with both arms in a quick motion in order to pull his 'chute, and would have to do the same for the rock, or suffer a nasty spin at a time he needs full control...
But reaching in still causes a dive, and loss of control, he loses forward momentum and falls rapidly, and he has to pull out a few pounds of rock in sync with the free hand in order to maintain direction, and now, in the midst of all this he has to be sure his rock does not hit his friends parachute and rip a hole, at an altitude I would be uncomfortable deploying my emergency 'chute, if he even notices the nasty tear in time!
There are actually more points to be made, but all in all, the film may have been doctored, but the jump itself most certainly was not an elaborate hoax.
Hi Kristian.
I hope you are well.
I’m wondering what was your intention when responding to me that what took me 20 minutes of my free time was pointless. Someone asked if such a calculation was doable; I illustrated how.
Taking about things that might be pointless: no one explored or even mentioned the scenario of someone throwing a rock without saying how difficult and dangerous it would be -- whose concerns are you trying to respond to?
Most jumpers now have several cameras so you can assume the proportion of skydivers is enough. It‘s still less than ten millions minutes overall, while billions of humans live half a million minutes each year. Now considering three recorded events (listed in your source) over the course of five centuries… This still means it would take billions of years of jumping to reasonably come across such an event. That calculations makes it far more likely that the previous one I made, most likely because I highly underestimated the number of meteoroids.
The weakness of that method is that you are limiting the visibility of humans on the ground to being struck, although one can argue that the buy in Uganda was a case of it coming close enough to notice.
I know skydivers do a lot of filming, but seems more likely that the first dark flight would be caught by tourists on a sunny day or something.
=3000000 * 3.14 * 100*100/1000000/510072000 = 0.0001846798
They only cover .01846798 percent of the Earth. so you'd need 10,000 visible meteorites per hour for this to happen once per year. So it seems unlikely.
The fact they both got footage of it is obviously correlated but I also think it drops the probability a bit.
But things like that they are skydiving are not relevant. It's be equally amazing if they filmed it from a building or just looking up in the sky or from a plane. This is the tricky bit I'll just hand wave over. This might override the overestimates above.
Complicated, but looking at the figures and the fact they both got good footage I'd tend towards fake.
I'd be very interested to see a proper write up on this.
With me, you can assume it's meant in the spirit of "can you give three examples?"
According to this norwegian article from the Norwegian Meteorite Network they've already been searching for 100s of hours since 2012:
This shows how our environment has biased our science and thinking. An object hitting a planet's atmosphere should be thought of as having hit that planet. Otherwise, it becomes indeterminate to say when a meteor hits a gas giant planet, if at all. By the time atoms of the meteor get to where the gas giant planet's material can be described as solid, the meteor is no longer recognizably a meteor.
Means, motive and opportunity:
We should be looking into how the story came to light and whether those behind the story had anything to gain from the story. 15 minutes of fame is enough, however, did any news outlet pay for the story? We don't know who else was on the plane and whether they packed a few rocks.
Anatomy of a hoax:
Every hoax has to convince one person known as an expert (TM). Once you have an expert convinced then there is no need to convince anyone in the media, they will report what the story is and assume it is true because the expert says it is true. This story has an expert, he may want to believe the story is true and see what he wants to see.
I first saw the video last week and my thoughts were "Wow, that's freaky. I doubt that happens often" and didn't think of it again, until everyone started saying the video was fake, now it has started to take off.
A hoax or not I'm not sure why it's being given any more thought by anyone other than "Huh, that's neat".
When I watched the video I thought about the size of maybe 5cm.
http://petapixel.com/2014/02/12/real-fake-gopro-survives-fal...
TBH not sure if a GoPro was even used in this meteorite one, but it has taken off in the media in a similar way.