When Comets Attack 79
Red Flayer writes "Popular Mechanics is running a story that describes one of the more interesting explanations for the Tunguska explosion of 1908: 'Now, a controversial new scientific study suggests that a chunk of a comet caused the 5-10 megaton fireball, bouncing off the atmosphere and back into orbit around the sun. The scientists have even identified a candidate Tunguska object — now more than 100 million miles away — that will pass close to Earth again in 2045.' Note that Popular Mechanics' definition of 'close to' is somewhat different than most people's — the comet will be 3.8 million miles away at its closest. At any rate, the key to this theory is that hydrogen and oxygen in the ice shard exploded upon entering the atmosphere, resulting in the difficult-to-explain blast pattern (previous theories contend that the object must have 'skipped' on the atmosphere and then re-entered at the exact same spot). This would also, sadly, dash the theory that Nikola Tesla was responsible."
Re:incredible artist rendition (Score:2, Informative)
Links to related articles at Planetary Society:
http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/targetearth/tunguska.html [planetary.org]
http://www.planetary.org/about/press/releases/2008/0626_Target_Earth_How_Prepared_Are_We.html [planetary.org]
Re:incredible artist rendition (Score:5, Informative)
Note... That's Don Davis, not to be confused with Don Davis [wikipedia.org], aka General Hammond from SG1.
Although, I do believe that somewhere in the SG1 mythos it was suggested that Tunguska was either a failed Asgard or Goa'uld experiment, or that it was a weapons blast from orbit by a Ha'tak mothership.
Not that that has anything to do with this article or anything....
Re:Could have been a huge deal. (Score:2, Informative)
Alas - Lenin was in Geneva in 1908. Hardly Western Russia, or even Eastern Europe.
BTW, I think the GP means that if the explosion was off a few hours, it would have happened almost exactly over St. Petersburg - a capital of Russia back then.
Re:Why so feeble? (Score:3, Informative)
I never heard anything about the Germans not having the resources to build an a-bomb, but the Japanese had been prosecuting a war for some years before the americans intervened. This left them at a disadvantage.
From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
"Over the course of the Pacific War, the economies of Japan and its occupied territories all suffered severely. Inflation was rampant; prices in Japan in 1944 were 3.25 times higher than in 1936.[citation needed] Japanese heavy industry, forced to devote nearly all its production to meeting military needs, was unable to meet the commercial requirements of Japan (which had previously relied on trade with Western countries for their manufactured goods). Local industries were unable to produce at high enough levels to avoid severe shortfalls. Furthermore, maritime trade, upon which the Empire depended greatly, was sharply curtailed by damage to the Japanese merchant fleet over the course of the war. From a fleet of 6,000,000 tonnes of shipping in 1941, Japan was reduced to one of 2,000,000 tonnes by 1944.[citation needed]
By the end of the war, what remained of the Japanese Empire was wracked by shortages, inflation, and currency devaluation. Transport was nearly impossible, and industrial production in Japan's shattered cities ground to a halt. The destruction wrought by the war eventually brought the Japanese economy to a virtual standstill."
Of course, every sentence says "citation needed" after it, its up to you to either accept it at face value or google around and verify it, but that seems like a plausible explanation.
It seems wierd that money would really be a bar to making a nuke - i would have thought that the quantum physicists would be a more crucial resource than buildings and materials.
Re:Sorry Everyone (Score:2, Informative)