Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Dad told him the world was 100 years old + Exploding comet ended Hopewell culture?

#1
C C Offline
Did an exploding comet help end an ancient Native American culture?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2...-ohio-air/

INTRO: The earth was scorched and covered with ash. Buildings vanished, leaving nothing but charred marks in the soil where posts had been. Temperatures on the ground may have reached 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Native Americans told of the sun falling from the sky and described a great horned serpent that dropped rocks from the heavens. And after the event about 1,700 years ago, on a spot in what is now southwestern Ohio, scientists believe the Indians created a huge earthwork image of what they had seen: a streaking comet.

This week, experts at the University of Cincinnati said the explosion in the atmosphere of a piece of that comet — an “air burst” — could have led to the unexplained decline of the Hopewell culture, which flourished in the eastern United States from about 100 B.C. to about 400 A.D. Their research was published in the journal Scientific Reports... (MORE - details)


My dad once told me the world was 100 years old
https://nautil.us/my-dad-once-told-me-th...old-13967/

EXCERPTS: How far does time go back? It’s a simple enough question that a child could have the temerity to ask. [...] I must have been around 5 years old when I made the mistake of asking my dad about history. ... So when I got around to asking him about what the world was like 100 years ago ... he playfully dismissed me by telling me that there was no history back then. Time only went back 100 years, he declared. ... I still wonder to this day whether my dad was just being a jerk, or whether this was his way of planting the seeds that eventually provoked me into becoming a theoretical physicist.

[...] This is dramatically illustrated by a simple thought experiment. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that our current cosmological model is in fact correct, that our inference is spot on, and that we have not been deceived by the assumptions that go into them—a prospect that I’ve never been able to completely shake. In this very universe that humans managed to glimpse around 13.8 billion years after the big bang, in the far future, say a trillion years from now, what would a sentient observer located in our galaxy conclude?

For starters, our nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, and the Milky Way will have merged into a single galaxy—Milkomeda. All other galaxies beyond our immediate galactic neighbourhood would have accelerated beyond our cosmic horizon. The relic radiation from the big bang would have a wavelength larger than our horizon, and so impossible to detect. An observer a trillion years from now, looking up from the galactic plane of Milkomeda, would see an empty universe in which they were the center, and probably declare that to be that. Their universe always was, always will be, unchanging. This observer could only infer a time without boundary in the infinite past and the infinite future, and be justified in their narcissism in concluding that they are at the center of it all.

Fortunately, we are not this future observer, and are in a relatively privileged position among all the cosmic archaeologists that might ever exist. Although we ourselves have our own limits in what we can infer given our location in history. Frustratingly, there may be certain questions that will remain forever beyond our reach from our vantage point. It could be, for instance, that the dust and detritus within our galaxy—foregrounds as they’re technically known—might fatally obscure our attempts to map the structure of the universe before stars even had a chance to form. Or, it could be that whatever preceded the big bang itself had an epoch preceding it, as did that epoch, and so on. Even if this process doesn’t regress infinitely, any information from the initial state of the universe will have been recycled through and possibly overwritten by multiple cycles of cosmic cataclysm.

[...] It’s entirely possible that we may never get to confront this ultimate veil of ignorance given our place in time. If, as is widely accepted, an epoch of primordial inflation was the origin of what looked like a big bang in our past, it’s entirely possible that the universe at its largest scales consists of multiple, self-reproducing regions,3 each with their own cosmic horizons, unaware of the other. By peering back at what might look like the big bang to them, any observer in this multiverse would merely be looking back at their nucleation—not unlike a bubble nucleating in a pot of boiling water—in their branch of a much bigger universe whose ultimate origin might never fully be revealed to them. It’s also possible that the universe undergoes periodic cycles of creation and destruction, rendering the very question of its origin moot.

The remarkable thing is that, in my view, there’s a chance that we may find out either way within a human lifetime... (MORE - missing details)
Reply
#2
Magical Realist Offline
My dad waxed philosophical to me only once in my lifetime. He said he thought that maybe the Sun was a planet that was judged by God and committed to flames ever after. This is as profound as he could get. I never knew where I got the genes for my prodigious imagination. But I doubt it was from him.
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Intersteller mission could last 100 years + Roaming black hole cores of dead galaxies C C 0 80 Oct 28, 2021 09:32 PM
Last Post: C C
  Exploding stars whacked ancient Earth + Mars' methane burps pinpointed + H-R diagram C C 0 87 Jul 16, 2021 05:18 AM
Last Post: C C
  Methane in plumes of Enceladus: life? + Over 100 black holes in star cluster Palomar C C 0 102 Jul 6, 2021 11:42 PM
Last Post: C C
  Huge comet + ETs of the 1,700 could see us + Pluto's red patches a mystery + Cos dawn C C 0 79 Jun 25, 2021 07:47 PM
Last Post: C C
  No one knows why rocks are exploding from asteroid Bennu C C 0 238 Dec 7, 2019 11:13 PM
Last Post: C C
  Haley's Comet 2019 Leigha 2 449 May 7, 2019 05:24 AM
Last Post: Leigha
  SpaceX’s Failed Landing Still Ended With a Clean Plop C C 8 1,346 Dec 11, 2018 08:33 PM
Last Post: Syne
  Video from the Surface of a Comet Yazata 0 274 Apr 30, 2018 04:10 AM
Last Post: Yazata
  Our 100-plus planet solar system + Young extra-solar system shows how planets evolve C C 0 500 Mar 19, 2017 02:02 AM
Last Post: C C
  The hairy Earth (DM) + ET life debate + Comet theory surpasses alien megastructure C C 3 966 Dec 2, 2015 08:20 AM
Last Post: Magical Realist



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)