Great Flood could have been from a Comet strike.

[Charlie P]

Saw the end of the TV show last night it was interesting

Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood?
The universal human myth may be the first example of disaster reporting.by Scott Carney



[blockquote]Up to 80 percent of the world"™s population may have perished.[/blockquote]
Why, then, don"™t we know about it? Masse contends that we do. Almost every culture has a legend about a great flood, and"”with a little reading between the lines"”many of them mention something like a comet on a collision course with Earth just before the disaster. The Bible describes a deluge for 40 days and 40 nights that created a flood so great that Noah was stuck in his ark for two weeks until the water subsided. In the Gilgamesh Epic, the hero of Mesopotamia saw a pillar of black smoke on the horizon before the sky went dark for a week. Afterward, a cyclone pummeled the Fertile Crescent and caused a massive flood. Myths recounted in indigenous South American cultures also tell of a great flood.
"œThese stories are all exactly what you would expect from the survivors of a celestial impact,"� Masse says, leafing through 2,000-year-old drawings by Chinese astronomers that show comets of all shapes and sizes. "œWhen a comet rounds the sun, oftentimes its tail is still being blown forward by the solar winds so that it actually precedes it. That is why so many descriptions of comets in mythology mention that they are wearing horns."� In India, he notes, a celestial fish described as "œbright as a moonbeam,"� with a horn on its head, warned of an epic flood that brought on a new age of man.
Among 175 flood myths, Masse found two of particular interest. A Hindu myth describes an alignment of the five bright planets that has happened only once in the last 5,000 years, according to computer simulations, and a Chinese story mentions that the great flood occurred at the end of the reign of Empress Nu Wa. Cross-checking historical records with astronomical data, Masse came up with a date for his event: May 10, 2807 B.C.

The rest of the story.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/nov/did-a-comet-cause-the-great-flood/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=
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[Aught Six]

That's pretty interesting. Most of earth's water most likely came from comets, but that was billions of years ago. I have to wonder what a strike within recent yearswould do. They're far less dense than say, the iron/nickel asteroid that hit the Yucatán, but I bet they still would pack a heck a wallop.

[burniegoeasily]

And volcanos.

[Aught Six]

Yeah, but the volcanoes got itfrom the comets.

[Californiadoctor]

It continues to amaze me how many people take the Noah's flood myth seriously. This "theory" that it was caused by a comet impact is particularly absurd. To cover the continents with enough water tosubmerge the highest mountains would require about five times as much water as currently exists in the oceans, which is about 1.37 times ten to the 18th power cubic meters. Let's do some calculations to see what would happen if a comet, made up of only water, and having a mass equal to five times the mass of the water in all the oceans were to strike the Earth.

1.37*10^18 cubic meters * 5 * 1000 kg/m^3 = 6.84*10^21 kg for the mass of the comet which is far larger than any known comet.

It would be travelling at about 40,000 meters per second relative to the Earth just before the collision. We can calculate its kinetic energy using the formula KE = (mass/2)*velocity squared. This gives:

KE = (1/2)*6.84*10^21 kg * 40,000^2 m/s = 5.5*10^30 joules of energy.

How much energy is that? It is equal to the energy that wouldbe released by 5,000,000,000,000,000 hydrogen bombs. Since the law of conservation of energy requires that thekinetic energy can not just vanish, it has to be converted into some other form of energy which in the case of a collision like this would be heat. 5.5*10^30 joules is enough energy to vaporize the oceans and turn the entire surface of the Earth molten.Collisions of this magnitude may have occurred early in the Earth's history over 4 billion years ago but certainly not since then.

So called "creation scientists" tend to be severly math and physics challenged and thereby seem incapable of recognizing theconsequences of their "theories" that would render them utterly impossible.

Caldoc

Cal, I am with ya for the most part, except, every religion including your beloved buddism you said you are going to become part of, all mention some great flood. I was just discussing this with a guy who sits across from me who is hindu, and they have the great flood story as well. So I seriously doubt it was a comet.

[Canuck_Buck]

the great flood was actually the introduction of the shortened pant cuff to mesopotamia fashion...

[MNJoe27]

I saw the story on History channel last night on comets as well. The way it was presented sounded very plausable to me. Especially when you take a more sensical approach to figuring that people ( 4,000 years ago according to the show) would have likely exagerated flooding as covering the earth and "larger" than what actually occurred, as they were shocked and ignorant as to the facts. I will find out when the show is on the history channel again and post it.

[Aught Six]

Cali, we got hit with a 10 km-wide asteroid made of 60% iron and 40% nickel at the End-Cretaceous. Hell, we likely took a glancing blow from Theia some 4 billion years ago. Somehow, Earth did not explode.

I would imagine that since comets are mostly composed of water and other relatively light compounds, much of the material would vaporize once it started coming through the atmosphere. Often enough, numbers alone don't complete the whole picture.

[MNJoe27]

"The cause of the Biblical Great Flood may have been a massive three-mile wide comet that crashed in the Indian Ocean, 4,800 years ago. It is believed to have decimated over 60% of Earth's population. A similar comet, crashing into the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco, could cause millions of casualties followed by a lethal mega tsunami, earthquake, torrential rains and a nuclear winter. Is the next massive impact just around the corner?"

The show Comet Catastrophy on the history channel is playing again tonight/early morning @ 2am.