In just over a year, we will be marking the centennial of the Tunguska event. Anyone making plans to celebrate?

I'm not looking for stuff that should be in the long term section, but an actual celebration.

Whoa, 100 years already?! Hmmm, that sounds like a good reason to dust off my glassware and whip up something to remind people what happened then.

I think the hypothesis it was a comet hitting the atmosphere makes a lot more sense than some of the other thoughts. What do you think it was?

-Blast

Comet would explain the "light night", as might a rocky meteor.

I can't buy the "spontanious nuke" theory, and I'd also discount the "lost motor home" one to- you can't cross space with a fission reactor, and if you have fusion availble to you why not use it on your scouts? And if you crack a fusion reactor... big deal, you let the cold air in and the plasma dies down. Yes, everyone in a few thousand yards is kinda hosed but you don't get a 20 Kt bang. :P

I'm just glad it happened then, and not 50 or 60 years later.

If I may ask, what are yall talking about????

20 Megaton atmospheric explosive detonation in Siberia about about 53 years before the Russians dropped anything of such an equivalent size called the Tsar Bomb

Late June (29th or 30th, I don't remember), 1908, in the middle of Siberia something exploded with a force in the 20 kiloton range. The rattle was picked up on seismic instruments in the UK, and the difussion of light through atmospheric particulates was such that there was no night in northern Europe for two or three days. No ground crater, it was an airbursting whatever it was.

There are a couple of theories. My personal favorite is that it was a baby comet that blew due to air friction; the meteor theory parallels it but it would have to be a stony meteor becuase the Soviets got nothing on MAD sensors when they did an aerial survey in the 50s. Others theories that are almost possible but rather doubtful include a really tiny peice of antimatter, say about 20 times the size of what we have in the vault at fermilab, or micro singularity, a pin head blackhole. (Both would explain why some reindeer had what appear to be rad burns, but there is some mathematical evidence that any blast that big will have some radiation.) Going down the scale of oddness, you have the possiblity that a meteorite of something that could be compressed until it reached critical mass did a grav dive before cooking off.

Then there is a peice of actually halfway decent science fiction from the late 40s, early 50s from a professor in the Soviet Union who suggested that it was the powerpack on a UFO going critical. Honestly, if I had to ride a busted ship down to Earth in northern summer, I might steer for Siberia myself, bail out, hit the PLB and wait for my version of a Pave Low to show up. It's still one of those places you reach by going to the middle of nowhere and keep going for a few days. But honestly, if you can build a starship, you probably have fusion reactors, not fission. Fusion bottles aren't likely to be able to go off like that- you let the heat out and the reaction will stop, it will just be a splash of star-hot plasma that will take care of everything for a ways.

The reason why I asked if anyone here was going to or knew of plans to celebrate is becuase it is a little killer lump of something from space. And lets face it, if had happened over a Warsaw Pact or NATO nation in the 50s, the internet would have been invented by a cockroach. :P It is a little bit TEOTWAWKI, but it's also kinda cool. As a group we are odd enough that someone might celebrate it. Other than me.

Memorial might be a better term.

Memorial might be a better term.

Why? No one was killed.

You want a really scary thought, think about what would have happened if this hadn't air-burst? Either ground-level, in the ocean, etc? And you're right about if it had happened a few decades later...

There's actually something on the history channel about it tonight.