Tunguska 1908: The Mystery Behind the Devastating Impact

Hello everybody welcome back to another episode of decoding the unknown as always I'm your host Simon welcome welcome written today by casy the mystery of the tusar event exploring the 1908 explosion in Siberia I didn't realize I mean I know there was a bit of historical mystery around this but didn't they work it out is that a comet or an asteroid that came towards the Earth and then boom blew up a little bit of HS and knocked down a bunch of trees but there was no crater and stuff but I think that's because they figured it out eventually it just exploded above the trees I think I'm not entirely sure I've almost certainly made a video on this before and everyone's going to be like Simon don't you remember making this video I'm going to be like no it's like 4 years ago I don't remember what I had for lunch yesterday Jesus anyway the format of the show I've never read it before uh Katie's written it for me my job is just to read it that's all I do it's the best job in the world let's [Music] go there's nothing like a giant explosion to set imaginations a light especially if there are few Witnesses no investigation for over a decade and not much in the way of physical evidence to work out what happened today we're investigating the 19 1908 tusar event a huge explosion that affected the planet from the Siberian wastelands to the English Coast oh my God wait that's really far was it I mean I know it was a big explosion but I didn't realiz it's was that big well we think we pretty much got a handle on what happened these days there's always room for alternative theories and when something like this happens you know some of those theories are going to be good and by good we don't mean particularly well thought out or credible we just mean straight up weird yeah honestly this show Like I Do I Do several YouTube channels if you're not familiar with my other body of work and they're very much like this is what happens and then this happens and then this happens and I hope it's entertaining and I hope it's educational but generally it's good when we have information in this show it's good when we have something entertaining that is just wild ass crazy and I love it I love it what was the tusar event imagine the aura reindeer in early 20th century Russia I do every day KT you're hanging out by the Pod C blah blah blah that's a very long word in Russian that I can't read it's a river and you've got your Pal's Yuri Le Al linaa it's the 30th of June 1908 or if you're still using the Julian calendar as Russian was at the time it's the 17th of June 1908 didn't they miss the Olympics because of this one year they were like using the wrong calendar or like their calendar and the Olympics was on the other calendar and they were laugh let me interrupt today's video to tell you about our fantastic sponsor and that would be one that's going to bring a little bit of excitement to your life and that's bespoke post you spoke post is like their friends who always brings 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but she's not that interested and yurian lever too far away so you just continue munching the pipe shape object gets brighter and brighter so it's like there are two suns and then the sky fills with smoke banging noises like Boulders tumbling or those things humans shoot at each other fill the air the Earth shakes like you've never known and everywhere around you trees are crashing over a if you ever look up in the sky if you're just hanging out outside one day and there and it appears that there are two suns in the sky you there's the reason there are two suns in the sky is never good it's never like oh yeah no it's just it's just extra bright today you yurian leather flattened by the falling trees no Yuri Elina is burned to a crisp and all you see is Blackness as your life swiftly comes to an end see I told you it's never a good thing sorry reindeer you've just become a victim of the tusar event I did originally make your outcome a happy ending but I felt this was more realistic as lots of reindeer did indeed perish oh no not the reindeer let us get into more detail as we said it was a clear day in the area of Siberia that is located in what is currently known as the Karas cry but back in 1908 it was part of the Yen government this incident is known as the tunguska event as it took place by the Pod CIA that River again tunguska River we may just refer to the area as tunguska or as we go along and I'm sure you know you'll know what we mean it a me a to pronounce the the first part which is nice while the area was and remains very sparsely populated there were some people who witnessed the event and articles were published shortly afterward in various Russian newspapers the accounts are all quite similar with people variously describing the start as an intense light in the sky a native EV eny tribesman reported quote the morning was sunny there were no clouds our sun was shining brightly as usual and suddenly there came a second one wait this guy survived he saw a second sun in the sky and he's like LIF aate to tell the tale while the San newspaper wrote of some strangely bright impossible to look at bluish white Heavenly Body this bright light moved downwards towards the Earth and as it did it turned into a giant Billow of black smoke according to seir after that came a pillar of fire and an expl ion so intense that they knock down trees across an area of 2,150 KM which is 830 s mil which is absolutely massive which is one and A3 times the size of London or 2 and a half times the size of New York City it flattened trees that is massive with this explosion came shock waves that registered as at seismic stations across the globe and noise that was described by witnesses as if rocks were falling or can cannons were firing a loud Thunderclap as if large Stones were falling or artillery was fired lots of the these were all separate quotes and it sounds like stones falling down was the big one and I mean I guess it is a kind of stone falling down isn't it a stone falling down from the heavens this was accompanied by intense heat hot winds and ground Tremors the explosion had happened in a remote area but buildings still had shattered windows and other minor damage the closest were at least 65 km or 40 mi from the epicenter but even those hundreds of kilom away felt the effects anecdotally it's been said that up to three people might have been killed during the events but officially the confir confirmed death toll is a remarkable zero that's not counting the reindeer obviously an estimated 80 million trees were F holy all falling outwards from the blast Center in the middle of the blast zone stood a few remaining trees upright branchless and burned black according to bran.com quote the energy of the explosion is estimated to have been equivalent to the explosive force as as as much as 15 megatons of TNT a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima Japan on August the 6th 1945 a thousand times Hiroshima and you've seen those photos of Hiroshima afterwards it was not pretty the explosion had been visible from over 800 km that's 500 mil away and for a day afterward the night skies over Europe remain strangely bright with people taking photographs at night without the need for a flash and reports of others in London able to read at midnight with no other light source wait why why would there be so much light afterwards tell me there was no one there to record the sound of the explosion but it has been estimated that it could have reached over 300 DBS making it one of the loudest sounds in history I recently or not so recently but heard this amazing thing that so the sun right it we can't hear the sun because obviously sound doesn't travel through a vacuum and there's a really big vacuum between us and the Sun but apparent if we could hear the sun it's so loud that if there wasn't a vacuum and we're still super far away from the Sun the entire Earth it would sound like a train is going past like everywhere you are would just be like a train going past like all the time because that's how loud the sun is imagine being closer to the Sun and then not being a vacuum you're it's so loud what is now known as the tunguska event or tunguska incident was the largest impact event on our planet in the time at the time and recorded history however can it be called an impact event if no crater has ever been found why wasn't there any sort of scientific expedition to the area until 1921 and even then not the actual sight of the explosion until 1927 well I don't know people really busy like and it's in the middle of nowhere as we said at the beginning the event does have a rational explanation if some of the finer details are still being quibbled over but let's explore some of the other theories that people have thought up over the years ah yes the good stuff and by good I mean laughable let's have a laugh off it was a UFO oh it wasn't though was it well it was a UFO to begin with an unidentified flying OB yeah fair fair play an unidentified flying object stre across the sky before exploding into a Siberian Forest as there wasn't anyone who was particularly close when it happened and no investigation was carried out for years it could not initially be confirmed what the object was but you know we're talking about alien spacecraft here not just being pedantic about what UFO stands for while the original Witnesses didn't make any mention of potential alien AC the mysterious nature of some of the details of the events plus Russia's well-renowned love of obfuscation which is a tricky word to say ended up spawning more than one theory about extraterrestrial visitors and some even saying that it was Russia's equivalent to Roswell holy a bit of a bigger exp Ros Roswell was a like military plane crashing and then they were like we the balloon but it was a military plane crashing this was 300 DB and flattened trees in an area bigger than the entirety of London London's really big and sprawling one Theory that's easy to disprove is that of a Martian spaceship coming to Earth for repairs but instead blowing up the spacecraft was powered by some sort of nuclear device thus resulting in the gigantic explosion sure cool cool cool but where are the parts of the ship well would you believe it that in 2004 Russian media was a light with claims that extraterrestrial spaceship fragments had indeed been found at the site of the tunguska event let me guess that turned out to be false what's that ah we think it's part of an Al ni part of a tra at it's just part of a tractor clearly look it's made out of iron it's all rusty and think the aliens had some rusty spacecraft come on Yuri Lavin a member of the tunguska space phenomenon Foundation had headed an expedition to the tunguska region and had found a metallic block that was widely reported as being from an extraterrestrial spaceship so was it it's not clear as while labin had it ended off a testing he didn't bother to wait for any results before making all of his statements to the Press so it hardly matters what the block was made of now now that he's already had his Moment In The Sun Also he found this block somewhere outside the normal agreed perimeter of the blast as he decided the object was headed in a different direction to where all the original eyewitnesses said it was going he also decided to conclude that this proved that an alien spaceship had actually saved the planet from an incoming meteorite by blasting said meteorite to pieces and the bit he found was part of that device broke that is some wild ass speculation like just making it up it's literally just making it up so what could this object have been well it's possible that it was space related but unfortunately originating very much from this planet Russia has had a very vigorous space program and in 1960 a test flight of aoso 5 came down right near the tusar event area to brief from that capsule is likely what Lavin found so that's a hell of a lot more interesting than some rander tractor part isn't it if he didn't plant anything himself that is and control panels and the general configuration of Parts would not be familiar or easily recognizable by non- astronauts or space engineers also Lavin had started his quest with the express intention of finding evidence of aliens he said quote we intend to find proof that not a meteorite but an extraterrestrial spaceship crashed with the Earth and so voila mission accomplished I guess yeah that's what you just come up with hypothesis don't be like I'm going to look for an alien spacecraft that I know is there because then you're just going to find evidence of it even if it's not really evidence if you go in I'm curious I'm curious I'd like to find out more much better attitude to have it's sort of how I answer these things like as much as I make fun of it I genuinely would like to find something where I'm like I can't explain that there's absolutely no rational way thing that explains that I'd like to find that I do have I I do have despite my making fun I like to think quite a malleable mind like I will be open to having my opinion changed I just need a weight of evidence and obviously this is not it there have been many other believers in the alien aspect to the tunguska event with the nuclear engine of a spacecraft especially being a rich breeding ground for this Theory because of the magnitude of the blast and the blast pattern of the trees some sort of nuclear explosion has regularly been touted 1908 was a wee bit early for humans to have been experimenting with nuclear bombs but maybe the Martians already had it down scientist Alexa zolotov was convinced this was the source of the explosion and visited the site to carry out tests is actual scientist doing this he's like yeah was aliens okay while officially no significant radioactivity has been found at the event area ruling out any kind of early or extraterrestrial nuclear Shenanigans zolotov has claimed he found elevated levels although no proof has ever been given bro you're a scientist you got to provide proof you know that that's how science Works another link that zolotov has to the event however is a man called Alexander Kazan the two were friends and Kazan was a well-known science fiction writer uh oh that's different from being a scientist after seeing the destruction of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and noting the similar similarities to the area around the tunguska event Kazan pens a fictional story about the Martian in the spacecraft looking to land but ultimately bowing out so that's where the whole story came from in the first place what's more difficult to work out is if Kazan wrote this in Earnest or not I've seen variously that it was all clearly supposed to be read as fiction and also that this was his actual real life theory for what happened at tunguska he was a ethologist and very interested in all things Martian so it that fact and fiction just started blurring many people who believe the Martian Theory may have read or been influenced by the stories gazans wrote and not realize they were supposed to be fiction or maybe they weren't supposed to be fiction as I said it's hard to tell what we can tell however is that no nuclear activity has been found at the site and no traces of extraterrestrial spaceships have ever been found unless it was all picked up and taken away of course as previously mentioned no real investigations were carried out until many years later plenty of time to cover up traces of ET let's face it whenever the something something spotted in the sky and unsatisfactory investigations are carried out deep in the wilderness talk of aliens is always going to pop up if you thought that was farfetched however get a load of this oh okay here we go more farfetched than aliens what was it it was Jesus Jesus came down to earth and then he decided we weren't ready for him oh my God if that's actually a theory I'm going to cry it was Nicola Tesla's death rate I don't think that's more absurd than aliens cuz Nicola Tesla at least is real bear with us here in some circles what happened in the tusar area was actually Tesla trying to demonstrate his or inspiring remote death ray by gate crashing someone's polar Expedition but overshooting somewhat and instead destroying 80 million trees bit of an oopsy there is this even within the realm of possibility probably not but let's address it anyway for a few minutes in the early years of the 20th century Nichola Tesla was all about wireless energy and the wireless transmission of power he built a large transmission tower on our area of land in Long Islands and called it Warden Cliffe from here he thought that as well as sending radio signals he could also transmit power wirelessly to anywhere on the globe unfortunately at this time Tesla was being shoved out by Financial Baggers in favor of other investors such as Marone and a financial panic in the early 1900s left him pretty much penniless there's just no way the amount of energy that you would require to do that like we said it's a thousand times more powerful than a nuclear bomb that just was not happening at this point in 1907 Tesla had made public comments about the destructive power of electrical waves telling the New York Times quote as to projecting wave energy to any particular region of the globe this can be done with my devices he went on to confirm that it could be focused very accurately providing you had the correct measurements in 1908 just before the tusker event he wrote to the editor of the New York Times again stating quote when I spoke of future warfare I meant that it should be conducted by direct application of electrical waves without the use of aerial engines or other Implements of Destruction this is not a dream even now Wireless power plants could be constructed by which any region of the globe might be rendered uninhabitable without subjecting the population of other parts to Serious danger or inconvenience end quote so was Tesla saying that he had a remote weapon up and ready to go from Warden Cliff Tower when the tusar event occurred mere months later there was no impact crater no detailed eyewitness accounts of or what had happened and the devastation hit with a force of around 15 megatons of TNT which was within the Wheelhouse of what Tesla said his transmitter could produce ah okay so they were just at that time massively underestimating the amount of power that was released in that explosion cuz didn't we say it was like many many thousands so why there and why then tunguska death R theorist postulate that Tesla was doing Secret tests with his Wireless weapon and wanted to make a big statement to prove to everyone his idea was viable um well okay in that case it wouldn't be much of a mystery because Tesla would come out afterwards and be like bro you heard about that like asteroid or whatever that blew all those trees down 80 million trees he'll be like that was no asteroid did that from Long Island and everyone will be like God damn bro wow wow okay and that's what we' what we'd remember Tesla for instead of his electric cars around the same time as the two that was a joke that was like what are you talking about what are you talking about it's just a joke I'm joking that's just a joke we like to have fun here around the same time as the tusar event Admiral Robert Peri was trying to be the first person to reach the geographic North Pole Tesla apparently wanted to focus his Ray in the Arctic to create an event that Peri would immediately report back on then I guess Tesla would step out of the shadows and say that event of the North Pole that Perry witnessed ladies and gentlemen that was me I am Iron Man I'm not sure what kind of display he was envisioning did he want to Edge Tesla was here in the ice he could have easily killed Peri in his team and the whole idea seems a bit of an odd way to demonstrate your new toy anyway the idea goes that Tesla had miscalculated to the coordinates to aim his death rate and ended up blasting hundreds of square miles of the Siberian Forest instead so why has this given any Credence at all I don't I don't know I don't know Katy please tell me in yet another letter to his BFF the editor of the New York time several years later Tesla said that he had already made a powerful trans a transmitter powerful enough to wreak havoc wherever he wanted in the 195 letter he wrote it is perfectly practical to transmit electrical energy without wires and produce destructive effects at a distance I've already constructed a wireless transmitter which will make this possible when unavoidable it may be used to destroy property and life in a letter to a previous investor J JP Morgan in 1934 Tesla seemed again to hint that he had created some sort of transmissible weapon to quote the flying machine has completely demoralized the world so much so that in some cities as in London and Paris people are in Mortal fear from aerial bombing the new means I have perfected afford absolute protection against this and other forms of attack these new discoveries I've carried out experimentally on a limited scale create a profound impression so what do we think did Nicola Tesla as a last ditch effort to recoup interest and money from his investors and save his reputation triy to pull off a spectacular demonstration of a remote death ray or tforce weapon as he preferred to called it went to r r personally I'm in the no Camp here yes Katie you know who's also in the No No Camp here me because this was well over a 100 years ago or over 100 years ago 1934 under 100 years ago and you know what we haven't done since then done the same thing and it's been nearly a hundred years so come on it's not real Tesla never expressly mentioned or claimed credit for the tusar event maybe because he was embarrassed that it missed his Target or more likely because he had nothing to do with it at all there is nothing in the way of solid evidence to connect him to the event in any way it's mostly just coincidental wording that people have picked up on there's also no real evidence that he had a working telforce weapon in the first place so the whole thing is just one big ball of rumor there is little room for doubt when it comes to what really really caused the tunguska event which unfortunately closes the door on Tesla's death ray sorry about that it was a black hole okay now that we got the silly stuff out of the way we can hone in on the more realistic theories I mean yeah okay such as a black hole falling into the planet initially I didn't realize that a black hole could fall anywhere as this was news to me in 1973 physicists Michael P Ryan and Albert a accent outed the theory that a small black hole had hit tunguska River area and pass straight through the planet this would explain the lack of crater as the hole would be tiny the appearance of this falling black hole would allegedly match eye witness's descriptions and the event would cause trees to fall as they did this is like that'd be so cool if it was true but I don't think it's true when I said small black hole earlier this is just in terms of the size of the thing yeah it would be absolutely microscopic but it would weigh like as much as a city or something the mass of it would be enormous but wait what happened to this mini black hole is it just sitting in the center of the earth biting its time no no no it would just pass straight through it just whip out the other side I'm assuming through some ocean which is why there's not some big crater on the other side or like big exit wound no of course not if we believe this Theory then the black hole would have passed straight through the planet and popped out the other side in the Atlantic somewhere well wouldn't this have caused another tunguska siiz shock wave to register and yes it would which is why we can discount the black hole Theory the only seismic activity recorded in England say corresponded with the amount of time the shock waves took to travel from Impact point in Siberia if the black hole had blasted out again the seismic activity that it would create would have been a lot closer to England and would have been recorded before the tusar activity reached it this didn't happen Ergo there was no second exit blast Ergo no black hole so moving on it's a shame it would have been cool it was a nous asteroid okay now we're really done with the silly ones in this penultimate Theory an asteroid the size of a football stadium basically just glanced off the Earth's upper atmosphere before heading back out into the solar system in 2020 Daniel krenov and colleagues at the Siberian Federal University in Russia created a model showing various different bodies moving through space They concluded that a huge iron meteorite could have produced the crater's impact Point left glowing dust in the upper atmosphere and would not have left visible debris the team estimated that the asteroid would have been about 200 M across which is about half the height of the Empire State Building had it hit the ground the crater would have been about 2 miles or just over 3 km right oh my God space is scary the article I read on astronomy.com said maybe playing it down a bit it would have had C catastrophic effects on the biosphere perhaps ending modern civilization playing it down what would it done it would have killed us all absolutely everything there' be no life left a lucky Escape for us then this is a credible Theory although scientists usually go for the next one which is it was a comet explosion or asteroid explosion all right here's the actual Theory upon which most scientists agree these days although the details are not 100% solid a comet or part of a comet or asteroid or part of a larger asteroid headed for Earth exploded in the atmosphere rather than hitting the ground this is also known as a meteor air burst or super bide this accounts for witness sightings of the cylinder or tube moving through the sky the bright light into the subsequent dark smoke and fire newspaper reports at the time even referred to it as a meteorite and unusual natural occurrence so there was no real mystery even back then as the body didn't hit the ground it left no impact greater but the force of the explosion was still massively strong leaving those poor reindeer and trees with no chance while the comet theory was all the rage for as the glowing Skies it left behind could have been the residue of the comet's tail it's since been decided that as a comet is made up of ice it likely would not have lasted long enough in Earth's atmosphere to travel as far as it did our best guess at the moment is that it was a rocky or Stony asteroid I've seen size estimates from 37 to 60 M wide and speed estimates from 54,000 km per hour to 97,000 but either way this asteroid met with atmospheric friction heat and pressure and annihilated itself between 5 and 10 km above the Earth's surface this is the right one right this is the one that I feel like I definitely am familiar with not the black holes even though that was super cool definitely not the aliens and definitely not what was the other one I don't even remember but it was silly we already know that there was no impact crater but surely there would be some sign of this asteroid and well there is there are tiny and microscopic spheres all over the area in the soil and embedded in trees that have a chemical makeup not seen on Earth they are of high nickel low iron content consistent with meteorites while the comet versus asteroid debate goes back and forth we can safely assume that it was a Celestial body or even a smaller part of a larger body that came into contact with our atmosphere and exploded before it hit the ground now before we wrap up let's tie up a few loose ends we mentioned a few times that there was no scientific Expedition out to the tunguska site until many years after the incident this wasn't really for any conspiracy reasons like the Russians hiding all those traces of a UFO before letting the public loose on the area it was for a combination of reasons including the remoteness of the area and the effect that in the immediate aftermath of the impact nothing else really happens anyone venturing to the site would not have had access to any scientific tools that would have been able to give them much useful information and Russia was going through a lot at the time coming off the back of a revolution and a whole lot of political upheaval yeah like I said it's really far away and they're really busy so just like busy busy busy apparently the native aeni people were also not keen on having visitors to their lands as they saw the area as sacred they wouldn't let anyone go near the site even if they're tried with World War I starting a few years later there wasn't any interest in fun ing a trip to see what happened until 1921 meteorologist Leonid Kik took a team to the Pod camena tunguska River Basin to see if any meteoric iron could be found but the weather conditions were so hostile that they didn't even make it to the blast area Jesus you went a long way it wasn't until 1927 that he made it back 6 years later what what do you mean with the help of AI people who I guess had thought on the issue by this point Kulik assumed that a meteor again hit the region so he found a lack of crator surprising but he took loads of samples and photos in several other visits that he made over the years now there have been many research trips and studies done about the tusar event most reaching the same conclusions apart from Yuri Lavin and his recent UFO finding Mission some people have queried the state the trees were left in after the blast trees at the center of the explosion was scorched and had branches stripped off but hadn't burned down and were still standing upright while trees all around had fallen down if there had been fire as reported by eyewitnesses at the time why hadn't the whole Forest been burned down or at least the trees directly underneath the fire been burned to Ash how could they still be standing this is due to the fact that the explosion happened high above and was not caused by a physical object hitting the ground Witnesses of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima have reported a similar thing happened with trees branches were blown off but the main trunk was left standing as for the fire according to britannia.com the radiant energy from such an explosion would be enough enough to ignite forests but the subsequent blast wave would quickly overtake the fires and extinguish them thus the Tusa blast charred the forest but did not produce a sustained fire it's cool that we can figure all this stuff out afterwards right it's like that seems really crazy and then you're like yeah this happens and that happens and you're like oh yeah makes sense the tusar effect even though we basically know what caused the explosion over the tunguska river area the event in region is still referenced in popular culture as some sort of mysterious thing it's been mentioned in Doctor Who and there was an episode of the xfiles called tunguska involving black oil possible alien bacteria found in a meteorite and experiments on prisoners only the xfiles I played a game on my old Nintendo DS called secret files tunguska however I don't think I ever finished the game as it's one where you can't move on until you've done everything in a certain area I think I just got stuck at some point nowadays I'll just cheat by looking online I guess I had more Integrity back then it was you couldn't just go online everyone else remember what was that website there was a big website back in the day that I can imagine it in my mind it was like one of these cheat code websit cheat code CC and it just had like listings of cheat codes and in my mind it's like just this old website and they have like walkthroughs I think and like completion guides and stuff this was like one of the first websites that I ever went on for sure I wonder if cheat code cc is still around is it that' be amazing it's not going to look anything like it did in the '90s is it cheat code CC oh it's still a Google search recommend it is it is hey wow it does still look dated even though it's obviously more up to date than it was I can't believe that's still a thing oh that's amazing many authors have used the Tang gusar event as inspiration including the AFF forementioned Alexander kenv in 2013 a show called Siberia Ed which was filmed in the style of a reality show here's part of the synopsis from indb in 1908 an unexplained event occurred deep in the remote Siberian territory of tunguska now 100 plus years later 16 reality show participants descend on tunguska unknowing of the land's mysterious past these contestants from varied walks of life will attempt to battle the elements and each other in a quest to survive the harsh winter and claim a large cash prize what is initially met with unbridled enthusiasm quickly turns to sheare panic as a series of strange events begin to occur oh okay so it's like a documentary or like a mock reality TV show it sounds like alone you know that show where they go out in Canada Canada it's in Vancouver right Vancouver Islands I don't know that's in Canada or maybe that's America there's that weird line right because there was that thing with a war or whatever where Canada got divided and there's that I think Vancouver Island despite being called Vancouver Island is actually In America which is odd anyway all these people go to Vancouver islands and they live there with like nothing it's quite a good TV show I've watched a couple of seasons of it and then it got a bit repetitive so I stopped watching but I'll probably go back to that it's pretty wild like there was one dude who gave up on the first day cuz there was like bad it's like yeah bro you you're me in this show I'd I'd be out of that first day I wouldn't spend a night I'll be like why did I sign up for it in the first place and then the answer would of course be money the show actually sounds quite good but spoiler alert it was filmed in Canada could to happen again we live on a spinning Rock surrounded by lots of other spinning falling burning and flying things so what are the chances that another tusar event or something even worse could occur quite high as it turns out while an extinction level event such as a massive meteorite crashing into us only happens extremely rarely smaller things make it through all the time according to the raw Museum's Greenwich website the real risk is possibly from the small more frequent asteroids we expect a 10 meter meteorite to hit every year causing a 100 meter crater maybe only one in 10 would hit a populated area but considering the average density of englands that once a decade strike could still kill 12 people so statistically it's really not worth worrying about I mean I feel bad for those 12 people but it's not going to be statistically in February 2013 a mini tusar event took place again over Russia oh I've heard of this one this time in chinska Blast area this was where like people had like dash cams at this point right so there's like film there's like videos of this thing like ripping through the sky pretty cool we have lots of photographic uh and video evidence of it this time and you can clearly see the meteor enter the Earth's atmosphere before exploding with an intense light that was apparently brighter than the sun it was about a third the size of the tunguska meteor and released about 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb while no deaths were reported over 7,000 buildings were damaged with over 1,400 people sustaining injuries relating to the indirect effects caused by the shock wave perhaps the most concerning aspect of this event is that no one knew it was coming because of its relatively small size and the fact that it was headed our way during the day the sun disguised it somewhat and at the time it was not picked up by any observatories on the ground luckily it exploded away from a highly populated area and Humanity Got Away unscathed again so how are we doing 10 years after this last surprise attack surely we can blast anything that threatens us out of the sky right no sh it's only been 10 years we hav't like magically built space lasers because of this no one even died and even if it did hit a city the death toll would be in the millions and it would be terrible but I mean what are you going to do about it planetary astronomer Professor Alan fit Simmons says technology has come a long way in terms of how you can detect asteroids even as small as choin whoa wow okay never mind I take it back in 10 years but 10 years in science terms oh I guess it's a really long time cuz like science goes far I was thinking like science moves quite slowly but it doesn't really does it like 10 years ago was backwards we didn't even have chat GPT we didn't have chat GPD this time last year the past was the worst but there's still a chance that one could sneak through and it's quite likely that the next significant asteroid that we have will be unannounced well thanks for that Alan that makes me feel so much better mate thank you there are also other political factors in play now that weren't such hot potatoes in 2013 such as a war in Ukraine and ongoing tensions between the US and China regarding spy balloons and other unidentified flying objects an unannounced meteor making a cameo appearance could be cause for all kinds of flash responses but there are systems being put in place which might help us avoid a collision with a neear object or Neo or another meteor air burst in 2022 NASA and John's Hopkins Applied Physics laboratory tested their DART program which stands for double asteroid redirection test and basically involved crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if it could change its course and it worked this is useful for larger asteroids that we know are there though not the smaller ones such as those which have got through so far if you're wondering why these last two events have happened in Russia and not anywhere else it's not a coincidence Russia's big it's because Russia is so big exactly the tusar area in chabin are over 1500 miles or 2400 Square uh or 2400 km apart so not exactly right next to each other there may have been loads of smaller asteroids that burst over the ocean and nobody ever knew NASA is also working on a near Earth object surveyor a Space Telescope which is aiming to be completed by 2028 this will be tasked with looking out for potentially dangerous asteroids and comets though again the chedin meteor was much smaller than the stuff the telescope will be concentrating on so I suppose we're all just hanging on by the skin of our teeth in the end while it's always fun to speculate the tusar event has been satisfactorily explained for a long time and we just have to cross our fingers and hope that it doesn't happen again the TRU is out there and in this case at least it definitely wasn't aliens it's never aliens and also whether it happens again it's definitely happening again it's going to happen again it happens many times like it's only been 10 years since the last one and it's going to happen we just have to hope it doesn't hit some like mega super populated city or something all right well thanks for being here hope you enjoyed the episode and I'll see you next time

Channel: Decoding the Unknown

Views: 332,333

Keywords: big bang in tuguska space and astronomy, big bang in tuguska history, big bang in tuguska full documentaries, big bang in tuguska full documentary, big bang in tuguska explosion, big bang in tuguska space documentary, big bang in tuguska planet documentary, big bang in tuguska documentary, big bang in tuguska science documentary, big bang in tuguska astronomy documentary, big bang in tuguska planet

Id: -haXsKn8M1Y

Length: 36min 55sec (2215 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2023