Wozaworld wrote:*Enter religious loophole comment*
....God works in mysterious ways
...which exactly mimic the expected effects of him not existing at all. The sneaky or nonexistent bugger
Regarding the impact theory for the Younger Dryas, I will repeat that I'm not saying it couldn't have happened, merely that in an ongoing discussion it is not currently carrying the day. I have no issue with the possibility, but as explained it doesn't make Hancock right because even if it occurred it doesn't mean it's going to happen again soon, despite his fanciful imaginings that the impact would be somehow related to the Earth's axial precession. As a side note, it's disingenuous to suggest that we should be paying more attention to Hancock's 'hypothesis and concern' as though he's the only person warning us of the danger of cosmic impacts. For as long as I can remember real scientists have been pointing out these dangers, as evidenced by the Tunguska event, the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter, the discovery of the Chicxulub crater etc. NASA has been in the near Earth asteroid tracking business for a long time - they started the NEAT program in 1996, and whilst Hancock's 'Fingerprints of the Gods' did come out in 1995, I'm pretty sure NASA didn't get a whole new program up and running in a year because they were so impressed with Hancock's doom-mongering. In fact the US Congress' 'Spaceguard Survey Report' in 1992 gave NASA the goal of detecting 90% of near-Earth asteroids larger than 1km in the following 10 years. Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter in 1994, and made a lot of people take the threat a lot more seriously. It's really not the case that Hancock is bravely shouting about a danger that everyone else ignores - you don't have to sell me, or many, many other people, on the idea that cosmic impacts occur and are very bad news. The only thing Hancock adds to the mix is the idea that we are somehow more at risk just about now, and that's just bunkum invented to sell books.
As for whether the impact itself ever occurred, as I say I'm on the fence, but there are a couple of points to address. Firstly you say that it wasn't supposed to be a comet impact, but the comet's tail. Comet tails are made up of gas and dust. Yes, there are likely to be small chunks of blown off ice or rock in there (small enough to be vapourised in our upper atmosphere) but mainly it's empty space. We passed through the tail of Halley's comet in 1910 and despite a lot of doom-mongerers predictions we did just fine. But Hancock claims (on his own website) that "
the tell-tale traces of multiple impacts by the fragments of a giant comet have been found. Some of these fragments, were TWO KILOMETRES or more in diameter and they hit the earth like a blast from a cosmic scatter-gun around 12,800 years ago". Now, comet Tempel Tuttle was about 1.8km across, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was about 1.4km across (before it broke up), whilst comet Halley is maybe 15km across. Yes, there are bigger ones, but by anybody's standard if you're getting hit by multiple 2km fragments then you're not just in the comet's tail. Fragments that size would be held together by gravity against any normal outgassing anyway so wouldn't just drift off in the tail. The only way you would get multiple fragments of this size is if the whole comet broke up under tidal forces a la Shoemaker-Levy 9, in which case once again you're getting hit by comet nucleus, not tail. Ignoring Hancock, even the most conservative estimates require a cluster of comet fragments airbursting across a wide area, and yet no plausible theory as to how this cluster formed or why they were all airbursts has been suggested.
Secondly, you say it's absurd to expect to find an impact site because we haven't looked everywhere yet. Well, a 2km fragment isn't going to vapourise before impact, and Hancock claims that these hits occurred "
across this huge “fingerprint” spanning North America, Central America, parts of South America, most of Europe and parts of the Middle East as well", so where are the holes? Again, I'm not saying an impact couldn't have happened, but it's certainly not 'absurd' to want some evidence of it if Hancock's version is right.
There's so much more that could be addressed, but time is short so I'll just mention one final thing. You say "Yet we have quite considerable detail of the Roman Empire to which isn't far back from the initial dating of the Pyramids" when asking why information has been lost. The Roman Empire lasted from 27BCE to 476CE. The great pyramids of Giza were built around 2550BCE. You can see where I'm going with this. Add in the improvements in writing technology that occurred between those two dates and it's hardly surprising that we know a lot more about Rome than the pyramids.
Overall I'm open-minded about possibility of the impact itself (with a little more evidence it would be a good explanation for the climate change), but Hancock's version of it and the mythology he wants to hang off it is a crock...
Apologies by the way if this is more reply than wanted - I find these things fascinating (the moreso when the genuinely exciting science intersects with humanities tendency to take an interesting idea just run with it until they're standing in the tall grass of whacko-land) and like to dig around for something true. The handbag pictures for example are interesting and hard to explain at first sight...
