Comet Nearly Killed Us All One Hundred Years Ago

I suspect that this happens more often than many of us are comfortable with. Sometimes, too much information is entirely too much.

From someone who probably too much time comes the story of how we — meaning the entire planet — nearly escaped death as late as 1883.

The story of a comet wiping out the dinosaurs is far enough back in the dawn of time that we don't really think about it much anymore. Oh, it appears in books and magazines every now and again, but hey, that was tens of millions of years ago, so what's the big deal now?

Closer to our own time was the mystery-shrouded event in Siberia, called "the Tunguska event." Just little more than 100 years ago, in 1908, a huge extraterrestrial object, which most people think was a comet or an asteroid, went to ground in Tunguska, Siberia. Scientists have estimated that the result of the collision was about a thousand times more powerful than an atomic bomb. Of course, it was in Siberia, so not a whole lot of people were around at the time (and those who were … soon weren't.) And hey, this was Russia, so not a whole lot of news coverage made it out of the country anyway.

Now, however, comes word that a massive comet did a near-miss in August of 1883 and the only witness we know about was a Mexican astronomer who just happened to be in the right(?) place at the right time.

See, this guy named Jose Bonilla wrote about his observations of 450 huge things zooming across his view of the Sun. The French astronomy journal L'Astronomie published Bonilla's account, but it didn't gain much traction with the public at large.

A new study in Technology Review, however, has concluded, after further technological review, that Bonilla saw the huge bits and pieces of a comet that came very close to Earth, perhaps as 373 miles away.

The study quotes the size of the these observed fragments as anywhere from 164 feet across to 2.5 miles wide. Now that's a big range, and it all adds up to nearly an original weight of a billion tons — which is about what that dinosaur-killing comet weighed.

Of course, the comet didn't come close enough to make a whole lot of difference, and it certainly didn't strike the planet or wipe out any species. But it could have, and that's the point. 

Anyone know Bruce Willis's mobile number?