151–160 of 311 posts
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There's a video of two guys driving by the zinc plant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptnGvd0dmLI
Is it just me, or is there always house/techno/trance playing in Russian dashboard videos?
The explosion is clearly audible 25 seconds in to this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np_mpGYSBSA
I'm almost certain that's a sonic boom. The upper atmosphere is several miles high and it would take the better part of a minute for the sound from a sonic boom to reach the ground from the stratosphere.
Edit: OK, I'm going back to it being a sonic boom. The sounds are too sharp and too similar to other sonic booms. That's what I get for not trusting my gut the first time.
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I don't know about "taking it out" per se but an air defense system designed to hit ballistic missiles in the terminal phase could also hit an inbound meteorite. It is within the performance envelope of those types of systems. That said, against a meteorite it won't do much good since it is an inert mass. It is plausible that the Russians launched an interceptor just to be safe. If it is a meteor, it neither hurts no…
Russians have scientists working on the meteorite problem, but I doubt the military would do a hail Mary launch on this. If anything, they would much rather let it fall intact than risk having it break up and spread damage to a much larger area. But that still assumes they can respond quickly enough or had missiles on standby with weapons that can affect a meteorite (not specifically ballistic reentry capsules, but a…
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This one is rather impressive to watch as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c-0iwBEswE
I don't understand why some of the people are still listening to the radio and so uninterested.
It's easy to get mislead by movies and tv and the way things happen and the way people react. In reality things don't work that way. It can sometimes be difficult to tell when an emergency is happening, and a lot of people won't pay enough attention. How often do people ignore fire alarms, for example?
Do you know what the symptoms of a stroke look like? Most people don't. I certainly didn't when the elderly lady sitting one table over from me at a fast food restaurant had a stroke. She dropped her food tray on the floor and I was sitting the other way and just wrote it off as random clumsiness. But other people were paying closer attention. Some of the staff helped her clean up her mess and other people came to help sensing that something was a bit off, after asking a few leading questions and making a few observations they decided she was having a stroke and called 911. Today I have a lot more training and am far better able to spot things like symptoms of a stroke or a heart attack and so forth, but that's not true for everyone. A lot of people don't know how to spot a heart attack, even in themselves, and they waste a lot of time before going to the hospital.
But this extends to everything. If you look at the 9/11 WTC attacks there were a lot of people who could have gotten out of those buildings who instead stayed in their offices because they were lulled into a false sense of security. The fact is that when things are burning down, smoke is everywhere, you can see the flames, etc. it's often too late, the time to take action was minutes or hours ago when you still had a chance. The time to evacuate a flood zone is when the water is at your ankles or knees, not when it's up to your armpits.
But most people are so conditioned by the norms of ordinary society they find it difficult to break out of them. It takes a surprising amount of effort to make a conscious choice to break those norms and switch to emergency mode, which is why most people are forced to rely on some even more dramatic event triggering a panic/fear/fight-or-flight response to jump into that mode.
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This one is rather impressive to watch as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c-0iwBEswE
I don't understand why some of the people are still listening to the radio and so uninterested.
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I'm almost certain that's a sonic boom. The upper atmosphere is several miles high and it would take the better part of a minute for the sound from a sonic boom to reach the ground from the stratosphere.
I'm going to change my mind on this. The more I watch videos the more I'm convinced that the loud bangs are actually the sound of the meteor exploding in an air burst, although I think there are some sonic booms mixed in. Edit: OK, I'm going back to it being a sonic boom. The sounds are too sharp and too similar to other sonic booms. That's what I get for not trusting my gut the first time.
Remember: each meteorite fragment will produce its own boom. And a meteorite explosion doesn't result from interior forces fracturing the body, but the body fracturing under aerodynamic stress. For a rocky bolide, what you've got is basically a flying rockpile, its internal bonding forces are relatively low, and the whole thing's going to have a pretty strong tendency to fly to pieces particularly in a hypersonic jetstream (a nickle-iron meteorite much less so, though Phil Plait links to the Sikhote-Alin meteorite Wikipedia page, which did just that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikhote-Alin_meteorite). So it's less an explosion (internally generated forces) and more a shattering (smashing into air) resulting in multiple fragments.
Impressive all the same.
Maybe this will help people appreciate that space is not some other world on TV, instead we are in space right now . Yes, it can reach out and touch us.