First Recorded Human Fatality Due To Meteorite

Megalith

Megalith

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A meteorite has reportedly killed someone. I thought that getting hit by one was supposed to give you superpowers.

Indian officials say a meteorite struck the campus of a private engineering college on Saturday, killing one person. If scientists confirm the explosion was due to a meteorite, it would be the first recorded human fatality due to a falling space rock. According to local reports, a bus driver was killed on Saturday when a meteorite landed in the area where he was walking, damaging the window panes of nearby buses and buildings. Three other people were injured.
 
Megalith said:
A meteorite has reportedly killed someone. I thought that getting hit by one was supposed to give you superpowers.

Indian officials say a meteorite struck the campus of a private engineering college on Saturday, killing one person. If scientists confirm the explosion was due to a meteorite, it would be the first recorded human fatality due to a falling space rock. According to local reports, a bus driver was killed on Saturday when a meteorite landed in the area where he was walking, damaging the window panes of nearby buses and buildings. Three other people were injured.
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Surprised it wasn't someone in China, but India sounds about right. RIP, you probably didn't deserve it, mate.
 
In the book Contact (was not in the movie), Carl Sagan talks about in our current society that a lowly rock could hurdle through space for millions of years and find itself striking Earth. If the strike was big enough and in just the right location, it could trigger a full out nuclear destruction of most of the complex living organisms on this planet.

A rock flying through space. Could trigger a self induced extinction level event.

Oh, and I'm sure Tunguska killed at least 1 person.....just no one else was around to put it into the official record.
 
With my dad (who's a meteorite nerd), we were (I was acting the photographer) one of the first people on the scene of the Sołtmany meteorite fall site.
Since it fell onto a man made structure, it earned the 'hammer' title, which boosted its price 10-50 fold.
I remember holding some pieces in my hand and felt like an astronaut. It was quite heavy and I kept thinking: my God, I got to hold matter from another world. I may now die in peace :D
It fell about 20-30 metres from a woman who was making the morning coffee in her kitchen. It hit one of their farm buildings, making a nice hole in the edge of the roof and shattering on impact with a concrete slab below and surrounding/reinforcing it.
If she had been outside that moment, she would have been probably killed or seriously injured by the speeding little fragments flying like machine gun bullets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sołtmany_(meteorite)
The tunguska blast was so immense it simply had to hurt someone simply due to the massive shockwave.
 
In other news, 6 billion Dinosaur Ghosts gathered to laugh and have a party over the human lost. One was heard saying "ONE loss and they are shitting all over themselves. Ha!!!"
 
westrock2000 said:
In the book Contact (was not in the movie), Carl Sagan talks about in our current society that a lowly rock could hurdle through space for millions of years and find itself striking Earth. If the strike was big enough and in just the right location, it could trigger a full out nuclear destruction of most of the complex living organisms on this planet.

A rock flying through space. Could trigger a self induced extinction level event.

Oh, and I'm sure Tunguska killed at least 1 person.....just no one else was around to put it into the official record.
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Given its location that very well could be true that nobody died, it was out in the middle of a forest. Might have been dead animals by the 1000s but no people.
 
basically a burning object with about 0.08 newton grams of force times the speed it is moving at per pebble sized rock... that hits a person they die. plan and simple. the highest speed is something on the nature of 70 klicks per second. that continues to accelerate 9.8 meters per second while falling through the air. it is only fifty clicks to the ionosphere so that is really not significant one second or three that piece of rock

50,000 * 0.01 = 500 grams or 1 pound of force for every gram of weight. basically if the rock is five pounds it hit with 2,500 pounds of force or the muzzle energy of a high power rifle at point blank range. If it is one ouch it is like getting hit with a sub machine bullet or hand gun... so if it was the size of a penny it would be like getting shot point blank. if it was soda can size it would take a limb off... people survive the first not the second. My guess is that the building got hit and the guy got hit with debris from the building. That building getting hit with a rock of say fifty pounds would be like a bomb going off. Each fragment flying off would still be meteoric ore but at a fraction of the energy. Pretty much a direct hit from anything bigger than your fist will punch a two to five foot deep hole in the ground on the far side of you... pretty much ruining your day.
 
Really living up to the "wrong place at the wrong time" mentality.
 
If the rock hits (and kills) a person before hitting the ground; wouldn't it be death by meteor and not meteorite?
 
Sure, if you want to get all semantics on us ;)

Or since the person is "on the ground" and the meteor is "on the person", then by the commutative property is the meteor on the ground/a meteorite?
 
Xrave said:
Sure, if you want to get all semantics on us ;)

Or since the person is "on the ground" and the meteor is "on the person", then by the commutative property is the meteor on the ground/a meteorite?
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I guess it would be.. but what if the person is in the middle of a jump? ;)
 
Clearly, there is only way to prevent this in the future. We must lower the odds of a meteorite colliding with a human being. Which means we need to remove a lot of humans from the planet. 95% of Americans agree we need to have some common sense reform on meteor to human collision odds.
 
So if I buy a meteorite off the black/gray market, I can bludgeon someone with it an let people assume it was a meteorite. Cool.
 
I seen this one that hit a car on the news it went right though the car like it was paper just demolished it.
 
jpm100 said:
So if I buy a meteorite off the black/gray market, I can bludgeon someone with it an let people assume it was a meteorite. Cool.
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I doubt you could hit someone hard enough to make it appear that a meteorite traveling at several hundred mph actually killed them.
 
westrock2000 said:
Clearly, there is only way to prevent this in the future. We must lower the odds of a meteorite colliding with a human being. Which means we need to remove a lot of humans from the planet. 95% of Americans agree we need to have some common sense reform on meteor to human collision odds.
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Nah, it's time to ban the universe. :D
 
Engineering...would be so much better if it was a physics or astronomy student. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
 
One of the reasons why it's starting to get doubted
 
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