Comment by INTPenis
21 hours ago
That is one crazy story. I need to see this done in Hollywood graphics. They're claiming the asteroid came in so low that it did a flyby of the Levant, igniting any flammable object or person on its way, and slammed into the side of a mountain in the Alps
It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.
In a movie, I'd definitely involve Ötzi as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi). Ötzi was found like 30 km from the impact site. And could have been a contemporary. E.g., he cursed the guy who shot him and whose village is struck by a meteor in the end.
The plot thickens: a commenter here posted this link, which indicates Ötzi might have been roped in to this story in quite an imaginative way:
"Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians or to explain the death of the Iceman as a human sacrifice to prevent a nuclear winter after the impact."
http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...
Unfortunately the sciforums link to discussion of the pseudoscientists is dead
Ötzi and his killers might have been up there looking for the impact site, there might have been a mad rush to find the impact, they might have seen it as some sort of holy item worth killing for.
There was after all a sun cult in Europe at this time.
And we have recovered an iron dagger made from a meteorite in the 14th century BCE. So this phenomenon of tracking a meteorite impact site and finding it might go much further back in human history.
A six degree angle?! That's insane. I never considered that as a possibility.
It is not as likely as some of the others but still more likely than five or four... it all depends on what you started out with.
Very perspicacious remark that it's more likely than five or four... are you an astronautical engineer by any chance?
But I'm wondering about such shallow angles - wouldn't it bounce off the atmosphere or somesuch? Perhaps it's just about possible somehow: just imagine firing a kilometre of rock from a mountain at a six degree angle with enough velocity to get it into orbit, but in reverse.
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