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And fire shall rain down from the heavens!...

18:38 / 06.11.01

Is it just me, or is this of extreme significance?

The important bits:

"LONDON - Scientists have found evidence that a meteor impact in the Middle East might have triggered the mysterious collapse of civilizations more than 4,000 years ago.

Satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a three-kilometre-wide circular depression scientists say bears all the signs of an impact crater. If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs.

The crater lies on what would have been a shallow sea 4,000 years ago, and any impact would have caused devastating fires and flooding. The catastrophic effect could explain the mystery of why so many early cultures went into sudden decline about 2300 BC.

They include the demise of the Akkad culture of central Iraq, with its mysterious semi-mythological emperor Sargon; the end of the fifth dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom following the building of the Great Pyramids, and the sudden disappearance of hundreds of early settlements in the Holy Land.
(...)
craters recently found in Argentina date from around the same period -- suggesting the Earth may have been hit by a shower of large meteors at about the same time."

Won't this:

a) Make us re-think just how much we really know about ancient history.

b) Result in a lot of re-interpretation of ancient mythological and religious texts.

c) Scare the hell out of people and make those scientists who used to say this kind of thing only happens every few million years look a bit silly.

14:12 / 07.11.01

Well, we're pretty convinced a similar event wiped out the dinosaurs and formed the current Gulf of Mexico.

It may revise history a bit, and should definitely make us think again about probabilies of major asteroid strikes, yeah. Then again, this event evidently wasn't of the same magnitude of the dinosaur-destroying collision. There's a scale they use to measure these things - the highest destroys planets, then causes planet-wide die-offs, then affects whole continents and so on. This event evidently had a wide area of influence (Iraq and Argentina), but didn't simply demolish everything between them.
In other words, it could have been much, much worse.
We could be intelligent, computer-using beetles or something.

gentleman loser

03:36 / 12.11.01

I don't know. This seems to be a pet theory that's going around in the past few years. I've heard it used to explain everything from the decline of the Roman Empire to the disappearance of Viking colonies.

So far, I haven't seen any hard evidence and it doesn't seem likely that the site will be studied anytime soon since it's in Iraq.

Still, there's the Tunguska Event.

In other recent asteroid collision news, the odds of a cataclysm caused by a asteroid striking the Earth have just been lowered. I suppose that's a good thing!

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

06:33 / 12.11.01

Is this supposed to be Noah's flood? I believe there's enough evidence to suggest that some kind of natural disaster happened at round about that time.

20:44 / 17.11.01

The traditional creationist timeline of biblical events by the seventeenth century bishop James Ussher declared the flood as taking place in 2350 BC, although there are many other interpretations which vary the dates by hundreds of years.

I think there would probably be a lot of evidence available for proving that this event was responsible for the flood stories of the Bible and of many other traditions, such as those of Sumeria.

I am also intrigued by how it may relate to the theory that the Sphynx was partly eroded by water, which has been used to claim that it is actually almost 12000 years old (from a time when the regional climate allowed for frequent raining).

My original thought when first finding this, though, was related to the psychological impact on the general population of being given proof that big rocks once fell from the sky and killed a large number of human beings, destroyed cities and brought about the decline of entire civilizations. It really makes you think once it sinks in.

08:09 / 18.11.01

quote:Originally posted by gentleman loser:
I don't know. This seems to be a pet theory that's going around in the past few years. I've heard it used to explain everything from the decline of the Roman Empire to the disappearance of Viking colonies.

Here I was thinking that it was the Vandals and Visigoths that were responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire.
Good old history.

Anyhow, as for the psychological impact, it may seem that this (the finding that a massive piece of space debris collided with Earth et al) would bring people into a somewhat fearful state. Myself I find it interesting more than terrifying, but that's me now isn't it.
Yes it is.