Tag: disaster

Sodom Air Burst

people may have passed down accounts of the spectacular disaster as oral history over generations, providing the basis for the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah—which, like Tall el-Hammam, were supposedly located near the Dead Sea.

The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. A city-wide ~ 1.5-m-thick carbon-and-ash-rich destruction layer contains peak concentrations of shocked quartz (~ 5–10 GPa); melted pottery and mudbricks; diamond-like carbon; soot; Fe- and Si-rich spherules; CaCO3 spherules from melted plaster; and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 °C. Amid city-side devastation, the airburst demolished 12+ m of the 4-to-5-story palace complex and the massive 4-m-thick mudbrick rampart, while causing extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans. An airburst-related influx of salt (~ 4 wt.%) produced hypersalinity, inhibited agriculture, and caused a ~ 300–600-year-long abandonment of ~ 120 regional settlements within a > 25-km radius. Tall el-Hammam may be the second oldest city/town destroyed by a cosmic airburst/impact, after Abu Hureyra, Syria, and possibly the earliest site with an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis). Tunguska-scale airbursts can devastate entire cities/regions and thus, pose a severe modern-day hazard.

2022-02-01: while the Sodom Air burst has been debunked, there’s other interesting meteorites in history:

K/T extinction event

66 ma ago, maybe on a Tuesday afternoon, life was the same as it had been the day before or 1 ka before or pretty much 1 ma before. Things were good for our feathered dinosaur buddies. Until a tiny, tiny detail in the sky changed.

2021-04-06: Chicxulub created rainforest

the dinosaur extinction was also a massive reset event for neotropical ecosystems, putting their evolution on an entirely new path leading directly to the extraordinary, diverse, spectacular and gravely threatened rainforests in the region today.

2022-10-05: The Chicxulub Impact Produced a Powerful Global Tsunami

The Chicxulub asteroid impact produced a global tsunami 30k times more energetic than any modern-day tsunami produced by earthquakes. Here we model the first 10 min of the event with a crater impact model, and the subsequent propagation throughout the world oceans using 2 different global tsunami models. The Chicxulub tsunami approached most coastlines of the North Atlantic and South Pacific with waves of 10m high and flow velocities of 1 m/s offshore. The tsunami was strong enough to scour the seafloor in these regions, thus removing the sedimentary records of conditions before and during this cataclysmic event in Earth history and leaving either a gap in these records or a jumble of highly disturbed older sediments.

Biggest EMP in 10 ka

Today, such a superflare would be civilization-ending.

In the year 774 AD, an enormously powerful blast of matter and energy from space slammed into Earth. Nothing like it had been felt on this planet for 10 ka. A mix of high-energy light and hugely accelerated subatomic particles, when this wave impacted Earth it changed our atmospheric chemistry enough to be measured centuries later. Such an event happening today would be catastrophic. It could take out numerous satellites — the particles and high-energy radiation can short out even hardened electronics — and cause widespread blackouts. Those could take a long time to fix, since the bigger transformers used by power grids cannot be mass-produced.

2022-01-29: An even bigger EMP happened in 9125 BP. It was 2x bigger than the 774 AD one.

Mitigating X-Risk

The initial advocate for off-planet colonies now concedes that the additional difficulties associated with constructing a space colony would encourage the successful construction of terrestrial lifeboats before attempts are made to construct one on another body. The only reason to still countenance their construction at all is an issue which revealed itself to the advocate for terrestrial biospheres towards the end of the collaboration. A terrestrial lifeboat could end up being easily discontinued and abandoned if funding/political will failed, whereas a space colony would be very difficult to abandon due to the astronomical (pun intended) expense of transporting every colonist back. A return trip for even a relatively modest number of colonists would require billions of $ allocated over several years, by, most importantly, multiple sessions of a congress or parliament. This creates a paradigm where a terrestrial lifeboat, while being less expensive and in many ways more practical, could never be a long term guarantor of human survival do to its ease of decommissioning (as was seen in the Biosphere 2 incident). To be clear, the advocate for terrestrial lifeboats considers this single point sufficient to decide the debate in its entirety and concedes the debate without reservation.

Existential risk and growth

Technological innovation can create or mitigate risks of catastrophes—such as nuclear war, extreme climate change, or powerful artificial intelligence run amok—that could imperil human civilization. What is the relationship between economic growth and these existential risks? In a model of endogenous and directed technical change, with moderate parameters, existential risk follows a Kuznets-style inverted Ushape. This suggests we could be living in a unique “time of perils,” having developed technologies advanced enough to threaten our permanent destruction, but not having grown wealthy enough yet to be willing to spend much on safety. Accelerating growth during this “time of perils” initially increases risk, but improves the chances of humanity’s survival in the long run. Conversely, even short-term stagnation could substantially curtail the future of humanity. Nevertheless, if the scale effect of existential risk is large and the returns to research diminish rapidly, it may be impossible to avert an eventual existential catastrophe.

Long-termism

This spring Richard Fisher at BBC Future has commissioned a series of essays about long-termism: Deep Civilization. I really like this effort (and not just because I get the last word):
The perils of short-termism: civilization’s greatest threat by Richard Fisher.
Technology in deep time: how it evolves alongside us by Tom Chatfield.
Are we on the road to civilization collapse? by Luke Kemp.
Why we need to reinvent democracy for the long-term by Roman Krznaric.
Why catastrophes can change the course of humanity by Seth Baum.
How and why did religion evolve? by Brandon Ambrosino.
Why the ‘post-natural’ age could be strange and beautiful by Lauren Holt.
How art and culture can help us rethink time by Ella Saltmarshe and Beatrice Pembroke.
How to build something that lasts 10 ka by Alexander Rose.
Deep ethics: the long-term quest to decide right from wrong by Simon Beard.
The simple rule that can help you predict the future by Tom Chatfield.
Strange evolution: the weird future of life on Earth by Mico Tatalovic.
Has humanity reached ‘peak intelligence’? by David Robson
The greatest long term threats facing humanity by Anders Sandberg.