[SFX]

Edit June 2009

On June 10, 2009 a Space.com article titled "Military Hush-Up" reported: "Scientists have benefited from data gleaned by U.S. satellites of natural fireball events [meteors] in Earth's atmosphere - but no longer. A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by government spacecraft of incoming bodies and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released. Scientists say not only will research into the threat from space be hampered, but public understanding…will be diminished…Where the space-based surveillance truly shines is over remote stretches of ocean…But all that ended within the last few months, leaving scientists blind-sided and miffed by the shift in policy. scientists want to know about these events so they can better predict the risk here on Earth. 'Fireball data together with astronomical observations of larger near-Earth asteroids define the nature of the impact hazard and allow rational planning to deal with this issue,' said David Morrison a Near Earth Object (NEO) scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, 'so it's ironic that the availability of these fireball data should be curtailed just at the time the NEO program is moving toward surveying the smaller impactors that are most likely to be picked up in the monitoring program. These data have been available to the scientific community. It's unfortunate this information is now shut off just when it's becoming more valuable to the community interested in characterizing near Earth asteroids and protecting our planet from asteroid impacts.'" - Space.com, June 2009

EDIT Aug 2009
NASA cannot keep up with killer asteroids
Congress assigned mission four years ago, but never gave NASA money

WASHINGTON - NASA is charged with spotting most of the asteroids that pose a threat to Earth but does not have the money to complete the job, a U.S. government report says. See last post for details

How many comets do you think there are in and around our solar system ?

1000 ?
10,000 ?
A million ?

well i have been doing some more research for my mars project ( yes i know i have been "researching" this for years !! it's just that it would be such an epic project and to do it justice the renders would have to be top notch..i am a bit doubtful if i am really capable of doing it justice..so i research !!)

Firstly there is of course the confusion as to what is the difference between an asteroid and a comet, the standard differences are these :

A comet gives off gas ( this gives the tail) though many comets can become inert and many asteroids have been known to "wake up" and out-gas. So it may well be that many asteroids are "dead" or dormant comets

Comets tend to have a very eccentric orbit coming close to the sun and then moving very far away from it, however many show more regular orbits.

In general we can say that a Comet is a large rocky/icy body that tends to vent gasses when near the sun, it can become inert and resemble an asteroid, which is a non venting rock or iron bollide. A meteor is the debris from a comet or asteroid that has fragmented and a meteorite is a meteor that has made it through the earhs atmosphere

That said if we take the classical view of what a comet is then how many are there ? Well we can only approximate since 1. we don't have the time or equipment to study them all and 2. Many are just too far away

The biggest concentration of comets is believed to be in the Oort cloud, a theoretical shell of comets some 50,000 AU ( AU = distance from the earth to the sun) from the sun. The Oort cloud may contain a TRILLION COMETS..depending on your definition of a trillion... that is 1x 10e12. It is estimated that many of these could be planet killers..over 300 KM in diameter

The other main collection of comets is in the Kuiper belt, a disc shaped region some 30-50 Au's from the sun, there is no real definitive calculation of how many comets are here but it is estimated that there are around 35,000 comets in the kuiper belt that are over 100 Km in diameter and maybe 100 million 20 KM objects. the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs was about 10 KM in diameter

Mars was killed by the sustained bombardment of thousands of large impactors ( asteroids or fragment of a comet that passed within it's Roche limit)

The Roche limit is an area around a planet whos size is dictated by the mass of the planet, rather like a black hole's event horizon. It acts as a sort of protection zone for the planet. Anything really massive like a comet which trangresses this zone will get pulled apart but the planets gravitational field. this fragmentation means that altough there may well be several extinction level impacts the planet as a whole should be able to survive the impacts

A classic example of the roche limit in action was the shoemaker-levy comet impacts on jupiter, during earlier passes the comet was torn apart into many smaller ( 2Km or so) fragments


Where do these comets come from ? It has been argued that they are made from matter that never made it into the main planets, others argue that the comets are the remamnets of an exploded planet or planets that collided.

A more interesting origin involves understanding how dynamic our solar system actual is. You see the sun orbits our galactic center ( and the galaxy orbits around within a cluster of galaxies)

Now differnet stars move at different speeds around the center of the galaxy, and stars pass through the spiral arms as they rotate ( the spiral arms are themselves dynamic) It takes about 250 million years for the sun to complete one orbit of the galactic center

At the same time the sun moves up and below the galactic plane in a cyclical fashion taking 120 million years to comple a single cycle

No one really knows what spiral arms are made of, it is thought that they are very dynamic and that the galactic core is constantly generating new ones and it is now thought that comets coalesce in the spiral arms, it takes about 50-100 million years for the sun to pass through a spiral arm and cou[led with the "up and down" cycles we think that the sun enters spiral arms every 30 milliom years or so

The sun also encounters Giant molecular clouds which can be inside spiral arms or outside them. these are star nurseries and also may contain many newly formed comets. In the suns lifetime it may have come close to a GMC on 50 occasions and possibly emtered some on 12 occasions

Whem the sun enters any of these comet rich areas it "grabs hold" of some comets which enter the oort cloud, others are knocked out of their orbits and spiral into the kuiper belt and there is a knock on effect which sends others into the inner solar system

This is a regular cycle of events with a 30 million year cycle modulated by another 250 million year cycle which can be directly linked to extinction events occuring on earth 94.5 million years ago, 65 million years ago and 36.9 million years ago. These can all be linked to massive earth impacts. We are due another extinction level event..now ..Unless of course it has occured..on mars

The K/T impactor which hit earth ( the one that "did for" the dinosaurs and around 90 % of all other living species, was as i said only 10 KM in diameter, but it impacted with a force equivalent to 1000 times all the nuclear weapons that exists on earth

But the three killer objects that hit mars were hellas ( about 100 KM diameter) Isidis ( 50Km diameter) and Argyre (36 Km Diameter). Most scientists do not connect these 3 but i am one of those who believe that these three, as well as many more smaller objects, impacted about the same time and were all part of one unimaginable catastrophe that decimated Mars in a few hours.


imagine what the 100 KM hellas impact on mars would do !! then imagine it's 50 and 36 KM companions and the countless other 1 KM impactors that hit around the same time..now perhaps you know why i am so nervous about starting the project... but wow what a movie it would make !!!

here is a topographical map of mars showing the blue hellas impact crater, the entire state of Alaska could be dropped into it


 marstopo.jpg (37.78K)
Number of downloads: 32

[Billabong]

Good lord Paul, I think its safe to say you have done your share of research on this matter

[SFX]

Well with C4D and celestia i have all the tools i need to do the project.

I think i will make a static version with html and some gifs, (maybe some small flash renders ?) If i can get the main body of the movie down in this format i would have a clearer idea of how to structure the movie. It would need some funding as i would jave to either buy some faster PC's or maybe use a render farm ( i prefer the former !!)...i have some ideas of who to tentativeley approach !!!

Actually i believe that the death of mars was also closely linked to catatrophic events on earth, i think the impactor of mars made several close passes before impact and the effect of these close passes on the earth were dramatic to say the least.

I also think that many of the fragments may have missed mars and hit the earth

Quote

Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations of heaven moved and shook, because he was wroth.
There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured: coals were kindled by it.
He bowed the heavens also, and came down; and darkness was under his feet.
He rode upon a cherub, and did fly: and he was seen upon the wings of the wind.
And he made darkness pavilions round about him, dark waters, and thick clouds of the skies.
Through the brightness before him were coals of fire kindled.
The Lord thundered from heaven, and the most High uttered his voice.
And he sent out arrows, and scattered them; lightning, and discomfited them.
And the channels of the sea appeared, the foundations of the world were discovered, at the rebuking of the Lord, at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.

II Sam. 22:8 and Psalm 18:7-15 identical passages


In Chinese, there is a name for Mars, and it comes from very ancient times. It was, and still is “the fire star”.

The ancient Romans venerated the planets, and above all Mars. For Mars adoration, they set aside two days. One was their tubulustrium, a day of trouble, turmoil and tumult, on March 20-21. The other was their armilustrium, a day of alarm, October 24

The tubulustrium correlates precisely with the date of the Hebrew Passover. The armilustrium correlates with October 24, the day of the onset of Noah's Flood October 24 was the 17th day of the second month in the old Tishri calendar of the Near East

The sumerian "Epic of Gilgamesh" equates the god Enlil with mars, it is the earliet known recounting of the great flood

Quote

(But) Enlil shall not come near to the offering,
Because without reflection HE BROUGHT ON THE DELUGE
And consigned my people to destruction!
As soon as Enlil arrived and saw the ship, Enlil was wroth;
He was filled with anger against the gods, the Igigi:
“Has any of the mortals escaped? No man was to live though the destruction!”

[Dark Crypto]

SFX, on Dec 3 2006, 05:29 PM, said:

Well with C4D and celestia i have all the tools i need to do the project.

I think i will make a static version with html and some gifs, (maybe some small flash renders ?) If i can get the main body of the movie down in this format i would have a clearer idea of how to structure the movie. It would need some funding as i would jave to either buy some faster PC's or maybe use a render farm ( i prefer the former !!)...i have some ideas of who to tentativeley approach !!!

Actually i believe that the death of mars was also closely linked to catatrophic events on earth, i think the impactor of mars made several close passes before impact and the effect of these close passes on the earth were dramatic to say the least.

I also think that many of the fragments may have missed mars and hit the erath
II Sam. 22:8 and Psalm 18:7-15 identical passages
In Chinese, there is a name for Mars, and it comes from very ancient times. It was, and still is “the fire star�.

The ancient Romans venerated the planets, and above all Mars. For Mars adoration, they set aside two days. One was their tubulustrium, a day of trouble, turmoil and tumult, on March 20-21. The other was their armilustrium, a day of alarm, October 24

The tubulustrium correlates precisely with the date of the Hebrew Passover. The armilustrium correlates with October 24, the day of the onset of Noah's Flood October 24 was the 17th day of the second month in the old Tishri calendar of the Near East

The sumerian "Epic of Gilgamesh" equates the god Enlil with mars, it is the earliet known recounting of the great flood

Good lord you certainly have researched alot, infact I'm even amazed you use celestia, that program is a perfect planetarium that would be perfect for all the info you need, plus its easily modified. but I thought i was one of the only people on this forum that used celestia :P

[SFX]

celestia is a great freebie, it does however lack one or two things..first it cannot account for prescession and second it cannot render out individual frames of a movie, only a full uncompressed movie and my PC does not produce smooth high detail movies from celestia

If i could get it to render out the individual frames as C4D does then i could stitch them together to make a smooth movie

[SFX]

Quote

. . and from heaven a great star shall fall on the dread ocean and burn up the deep sea, with Babylon itself and the land of Italy, by reason of which many of the Hebrews perished,

. . . Be afraid, ye Indians and high-hearted Ethiopians: for when the fiery wheel of the ecliptic(?) . . . and Capricorn . . . and Taurus among the Twins encircles the mid-heaven, when the Virgin ascending and the Sun fastening the girdle round his forehead dominates the whole firmament; there shall be a great conflagration from the sky, falling on the earth;

- Book V of the SIBYLLINE ORACLES

An alternative version is

Quote

O Indians and great-hearted Ethiops,
Together fear; for when with these the course
Of Capricorn and Taurus in the Twins
Shall wind about the middle of the heaven,
285 Virgo then rising, and about his front
Fastening a belt the sun shall lead all heaven,
There shall be moving downwards to the earth
A mighty conflagration high in air,
And a new nature in the warlike stars,
290 'so that the whole land of the Ethiops
Shall perish in the midst of fire and groans

It is interesting to note that the Taurid stream of meterors crosses us twice a year, the stream is so named because it appears as if the meteors orginate from the constellation of Taurus when viewed from the earth ( however i am not sure if that would have been the case when the oracles were written because of precession - i will have to check it out), Within the stream are probably thousands of bodies including asteroids, mountain-and island-sized boulders, smaller meteoroids, Encke's Comet and assorted fragments of celestial refuse.

In 1983, a satellite revealed what appeared to be dust following Comet Encke, but some scientists, including Dr. Clube, now believe that this contains the single large missing body, perhaps as large as 20 miles wide, shrouded in dust and boulders

Actually i have a lot more up to date info on the various asteroid streams that we encounter and this will be part of the project. I believe that due to the regular "crossing" of these streams by the earth these may pose the greatest threat to our planet

By the way, do a check and see how much annual budget your country is setting aside to tracking even the largest near earth objects..it is pathetic..we are guaranteed at some time to be hit by an extinction level impactor and more likely by Tunguska sized object that will wipe out an area the size of southern england ( Do a google on the Tunguska impact in 1908)

Of all the natural disasters a comet or asteroid impact would be the worst yet we have the ability to not only predict it but possibly avert it..yet the world is doing little.. if anything !!!

Quote

Friday the 13th of April 2029 could be a very unlucky day for planet Earth. At 4:36 am Greenwich Mean Time, a 25-million-ton, 820-ft.-wide asteroid called 99942 Apophis will slice across the orbit of the moon and barrel toward Earth at more than 28,000 mph. The huge pockmarked rock, two-thirds the size of Devils Tower in Wyoming, will pack the energy of 65,000 Hiroshima bombs—enough to wipe out a small country or kick up an 800-ft. tsunami.

On this day, however, Apophis is not expected to live up to its namesake, the ancient Egyptian god of darkness and destruction. Scientists are 99.7 percent certain it will pass at a distance of 18,800 to 20,800 miles

99.7 % !!! ohh now that is comforting !!

Quote

Maybe. Scientists calculate that if Apophis passes at a distance of exactly 18,893 miles, it will go through a "gravitational keyhole." This small region in space—only about a half mile wide, or twice the diameter of the asteroid itself—is where Earth's gravity would perturb Apophis in just the wrong way, causing it to enter an orbit seven-sixths as long as Earth's. In other words, the planet will be squarely in the crosshairs for a potentially catastrophic asteroid impact precisely seven years later, on April 13, 2036

Oh Sh*t a gravitational keyhole ???

Of course there are the objects that we have not yet tracked..we may only get a few hours or days warning about them !!!

Here is a list Some NEO's that have been discovered ( remember an AU is the disatnce from the sun to the earth), and don't forget the predictions are just that..predictions. the calculations may prove wrong. extra inter-object impacts in space can wildly change the projections and the intenseley complex interaction of all the various gravitational fields make the calculations stress even the most powerful super computers

http://cfa-www.harva...HACloseApp.html

Quote

Objects with very uncertain orbits are excluded from this listing, as are recently discovered objects whose orbits have been computed without consideration of planetary perturbations

...hmmm..expect the unexpected

[SFX]

I often wonder whter there is any connection to the concept of the devil as a "fallen angel" and a comet, the devil has a tail as does a comet, we think of fire and destruction in association with the devil..just an idea !!

This from the Yakuts (Russian)

Quote

[CH]OLBON . . . is said to be "the daughter of the Devil and to have had a tail in the early days". If it approaches the earth, it means destruction, storm and frost, even in the summer; . . .

[CH]OLBON, the daughter of the Devil is a beautiful girl ... she is the bride and the sweetheart of Satan's son ÃœRGEL (Pleiades). When these two stars come close to one another, it is a bad omen; their eager quivering, their discontinuous panting cause great disasters: storms, blizzards, gales. When they unite, fathom deep snow will fall even in the summer, and all living beings, men, animals and trees will perish . . .

This from the Chinese :

Quote

"In his 10th year, the five planets went out of their courses. In the night, stars fell like rain. The earth shook. The E and Loh became dry."

- Chinese emperor Kwei's 10th year was 1807 BC

From the India Mahabhartra :

Quote

All the quarters of the earth, being overwhelmed by showers of dust, look inauspicious. Fierce clouds, portentous of danger, drop bloody showers during the night. Rahu of fierce deeds is also, O monarch, afflicting the constellation Kirtika. Rough winds, portending fierce danger, are constantly blowing

The mention of Rahu, the demon of eclipse, which originally had four arms and a tail that was severed by Vishnu to become Ketu (comet) is interesting in that the demon is here darkening Kirttika (the Pleiades) in the month of Karttika (latter half of October, through mid November), for the tale goes on to relate that:

Quote

. . . in course of the same month both the Moon and the Sun have undergone eclipses on the thirteenth days from the day of the first lunation. The Sun and the Moon therefore, by undergoing eclipses on unusual days, will cause a great slaughter of the creatures of the earth. Meteors, effulgent like Indra's thunder-bolt, fall with loud hisses . . . People, for meeting together, coming out of their houses with lighted brands, have still to encounter a thick gloom all round . . . From the mountains of Kailasa and Mandara and Himavat thousands of explosions are heard and thousands of summits are tumbling down . . . Fierce winds charged with pointed pebbles are blowing, crushing mighty trees. In villages and towns trees, ordinary and sacred, are falling down, crushed by mighty winds and struck by lightning.

It is pretty much agreed that a large object impacting on the oceans ( the most probable impact) would cause more damage than an impact on land due to the fact that not only would we have the intial blast, disruption of the sea floor surface and a consequential global winter but the Tsunamis would be awesome, many hundreds of feet high and possible kilometers

And it is now pretty much accepted that the biblical flood story is based on the earlier sumerian flood story and that there are flood "myths" or should i say legends ? that occur all around the world in a variety of cultures

This from Plato in 30 AD

Quote

The vast ocean being raised to an height which it had never before attained, rushed with a sudden inroad upon islands and continents. The springs, rivers and cataracts, confusedly mingling their streams, contributed to elevate the waters . . . For every part of the earth sunk beneath the water, and the entire system of the world became . . . mutilated, and deformed by the vast amputation

Though it is possible that the flood was casused by sudden deglaciation (perhaps by earth crust displacemet which is a TOTAL shift of the crust at one, causing glaciated areas to thaw raidly and temperate areas to freeze rapidly), a sudden reversal of an ice age the speed at which it occured and the tangible evidence (the frozen mammoths for example) of this sudden onset make me think that it was more likely due to either an ocean impact or a very close fly by of a large object.

Even einstein agreed that earth crust displacement was posible ( mordern studies are coming to the conclusion that it must have occured on mars). the question is if we did have an earth crust displacement then what caused it ?


There is an Incan tradition :

Quote

Perhaps the stories about the ancients were right . . . Legend says that in those days of the jaguar-faced gods called huaca, the Andes were split apart and the Callejon was formed, when the sky made war on the earth

The more i study this the more i am convinced that these legends (myths) cannot be coincidences.. i am sure that mankind has witnesed large scale impact events in earlier times. i am also coming to believe that maybe..just maybe..an impact or series of imapcts was responsible for the world wide disruption of Bronze age civilization and in fact the total demise of some cultures

[SFX]

Now here is an interesting the fact.. the word "disaster" has tjhis etymology:

disaster
1580, from M.Fr. desastre (1564), from It. disastro "ill-starred," from dis- "away, without" + astro "star, planet," from L. astrum, from Gk. astron. The sense is astrological, of a calamity blamed on an unfavorable position of a planet.

[SFX]

At some time around 2300 BC, give or take a century or two, a large number of the major civilisations of the world collapsed, simultaneously it seems. The Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Early Bronze Age civilisation in Israel, Anatolia and Greece, as well as the Indus Valley civilisation in India, the Hilmand civilisation in Afghanistan and the Hongshan Culture in China - the first urban civilisations in the world - all fell into ruin at more or less the same time

A thousand years later, at around 1200 BC, many of the civilisations of the same regions again collapsed at about the same time. This time, disaster overtook the Myceneans of Greece, the Hittites of Anatolia, the Egyptian New Kingdom, Late Bronze Age Israel, and the Shang Dynasty of China.

The latest theories state that these massive cultural disasters were caused by the impact of comets or other types of cosmic debris on the Earth.

In 1948 Claude Schaeffer analysed and compared the destruction layers of more than 40 archaeological sites in the Near and Middle East, from Troy to Tepe Hissar on the Caspian Sea and from the Levant to Mesopotamia.

He was the first scholar to detect that all had been totally destroyed several times in the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age, apparently simultaneously. Since the damage was far too excessive and did not show signs of military or human involvement, he argued that repeated earthquakes might have been responsible for these events.

Since then, however, natural scientists have found widespread and unambiguous evidence for abrupt climate change, sudden sea level changes, catastrophic inundations, widespread seismic activity and evidence for massive volcanic activity at several periods since the last Ice Age, but particularly at around 2200BC, give or take 200 years

What was the cause of these earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, fire-blasts and climate changes? By the late 1970s, British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier of Oxford University had begun to investigate cometary impact as the ultimate cause..

Then in 1980, the Nobel prizewinning physicist Luis Alvarez and his colleagues published their famous paper in Science that argued that a cosmic impact had led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. He showed that large amounts of the element iridium present in geological layers dating from about 65 million BC had a cosmic origin

In addition to the physical impact of comets, the British astronomers point to occasional massive influx of cosmic dust high above the stratosphere which can cause a dramatic drop of global temperature, leading to the suspension of agriculture; and also the massive influx of cosmic chemicals (associated with dust) with, as yet, incalculable biochemical potentials but which may be harmful to DNA and can trigger evolutionary mutations

According to current knowledge, Tunguska-like impacts occur every 100 years or so. It is, therefore, not farfetched to hypothesise that a super-Tunguska may occur every 2000, 3000 or 5000 years and would be capable of triggering ecological crises on a continental or even global scale. In the past, skeptics have demanded the evidence of a crater before they would accept an argument of cosmic impact, but it is now become understood that no crater is necessary for disastrous consequences to ensue. The difficulty this leaves scholarship, however, is that in a Tunguska Event no direct evidence is left behind. It may be impossible to prove that one ever took place in the distant past.

I am well awrae of the Santorini volcano erruption which was one of the most powerfull erruptions in the history of mankind, I also appreciate that the tsunamis that were created had a devastating effect on bronze age civilization.

However there is some argumnet as to wheter the volcano itself could have been responsible for the huge tsunamis alone. It is possible that impacts were the cause of earthquakes which augmented the tsusmanis created by the volcano

I am not sure if it is possible for the impacts themseleves to "tip" a volcano over a threshold and actually cause erruption

Note that A major earthquake caused extensive damage to the town of Akrotiri well before the volcanic eruption buried it

Anyway for some more info on the Santorini erruption see here

http://www.drgeorgep...miSantorin.html

Also the following link claims that no direct correlation can be established between the Santorini volcano and the collapse of Neopalatial Minoan civilization.
see:
http://projectsx.dar...s/les/17.html#2

[SFX]

It seems many of the apparent ancient nuclear explosions can be explained away by Tunguska like impacts. Sites that show evidence of nuclear events in ancient history ( ancient sheets of glass caused by massive heat

Quote

Libyan Desert Glass is found widely scattered over an area 130 km north to south by 53 km east to west.

The Libyan Desert of Egypt is one of Earth's most remote and inhospitable regions. Uninhabited, windblown and foreboding, the Sand Sea, near the Gilf Kebir Plateau, was nonetheless the site of a remarkable discovery in 1932.

The Egyptian Desert Surveys under the able direction of Englishman Patrick A. Clayton (1896-1962) recovered specimens (about 50 kg) of an unusual, often beautiful, translucent to transparent, yellowish-green gem-like, high silica natural glass.

Quote

Libyan Desert Glass is classified by most meteoriticists with the group of curious natural glasses known as tektites. In 1900, Professor Franz E. Suess of Vienna coined the term tektite from the Greek tektos meaning "melted or molten."

Tektites are compositionally restricted, high silica, natural glasses distinguishably different from other, volcanically derived, natural glasses. Tektites range in size from microscopic (less than 1mm) to macroscopic weighing many kilograms.

The ancient nuclear explosion theorists claim that these cannot be due to impact events as there are no craters but they have overlooked the above ground explosions that occur in tunguska like events

[slotrattler]

Interesting ... very interesting. Thanx for spending the time sharing info !!!

[SFX]

I have wandered off the Mars topic somewhat but i have an idea that assuming Hellas, Isidis and Argyre impacted Mars at the same time then I think it is possible that the Earth was effected in some way

The possibilities i am looking into are these

A large object several hundred KM in diameter made several close passes of the earth and mars in ancient history. Each pass of the earth had drastic effects ( poosible even earth crust displacement which even Einstein said was possible)

The object may have fragmented without impacting ( due to it's breach of the roche limit of mars or the earth)and some fragments hit the earth ( as well as mars) on successive fly pasts

The object fragmented inside the Roche limit of mars, causing a global catasrophy and fragments went on to the impact the earth

None of these ideas are new, i just want to piece together as much info as i can to help me narrow it down

This means researching the astronomy and cosmology as well as ancient history, mythology and folklore. then there is the geology and paelo-biology

One thing i am pretty sure of is that manking witnessed several periods of global catastrophyin the past, events that could well have led to the near total extinction of the human race

i also believe that these cataclyisms are not just the stuff of ancient history, they will continue to occur untill one day the earth is hit so hard that mankind will be knocked back into the stone age..if we survive

It is not a question of if a global extinction event will occur, it is a question of when

[SFX]

Here is a very interesting online impact calculator

http://www.lpl.arizo.../impacteffects/

Play around with objects in the 1km to 10km range, then go for the "earth smashers"

[SFX]

Quote

A theory put forth by a group of 25 geo-scientists suggests that a massive comet exploded over Canada, possibly wiping out both beast and man around 12,900 years ago, and pushing the earth into another ice age.

http://uscnews.sc.edu/ARCH190.html

[SFX]

Quote

New scientific findings suggest that a large comet may have exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, explaining riddles that scientists have wrestled with for decades, including an abrupt cooling of much of the planet and the extinction of large mammals

read more

http://www.physorg.c...s106410997.html

[yarko75]

Isnt there supposed to be an asteroid around the year 2012? and I heard there i supposed to be one 2020 that is big enough to destroy the world!

Dam.. I will probably be in the 40s by then

[SFX]

Apophis is due on friday 13th 2029, see my earlier posts on that asteroid

here is a list of some NEO's

http://cfa-www.harva...HACloseApp.html

[SFX]

Quote

The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly. A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature looks as if it might be swimming through a sea of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt cliff? For Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient petroglyph, scratched into a rock by a Native American shaman. “You can’t tell me that isn’t a comet,� he says.

In Masse’s interpretation, the petroglyph commemorates a comet that streaked across the sky just a few years before Europeans came to this area of New Mexico. But that event is a minor blip compared to what he is really after. Masse believes that he has uncovered evidence that a gigantic comet crashed into the Indian Ocean several thousand years ago and nearly wiped out all life on the planet

I love it when the "experts" agree with me !!!

More here

http://discovermagaz...the-great-flood

[SFX]

Mars could be in for an asteroid hit. A newly discovered hunk of space rock has a 1 in 75 chance of slamming into the Red Planet on Jan. 30, scientists said Thursday.


"These odds are extremely unusual. We frequently work with really long odds when we track ... threatening asteroids," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The asteroid, known as 2007 WD5, was discovered in late November and is similar in size to an object that hit remote central Siberia in 1908, unleashing energy equivalent to a 15-megaton nuclear bomb and wiping out 60 million trees.

Scientists tracking the asteroid, currently halfway between Earth and Mars, initially put the odds of impact at 1 in 350 but increased the chances this week. Scientists expect the odds to diminish again early next month after getting new observations of the asteroid's orbit, Chesley said.

"We know that it's going to fly by Mars and most likely going to miss, but there's a possibility of an impact," he said.

If the asteroid does smash into Mars, it will probably hit near the equator close to where the rover Opportunity has been exploring the Martian plains since 2004. The robot is not in danger because it lies outside the impact zone. Speeding at 8 miles a second, a collision would carve a hole the size of the famed Meteor Crater in Arizona.

In 1994, fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smacked into Jupiter, creating a series of overlapping fireballs in space. Astronomers have yet to witness an asteroid impact with another planet.

"Unlike an Earth impact, we're not afraid, but we're excited," Chesley said.

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Astronomers have identified asteroid 2007 WD 5 in archival imagery. With these new observations, scientists at NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif have refined their trajectory estimates for the asteroid. Based on this latest analysis, the odds for the asteroid impacting Mars on Jan. 30 are now 1-in-25 -- or about 4 percent.

Right now asteroid 2007 WD5, estimated to be 50 meters (164 feet) wide, is about half-way between Earth and Mars and closing the distance at a speed of about 27,900 miles per hour