Hi!
Tunguska event
In den Worten von Arthur C. Clarke [In historischer Reihenfolge]: aus "The Hammer of God": "It came in vertically, punching a hole ten km wide through the atmosphere, generating temperatures so high that the air itself started to burn. When it hit the ground near the Gulf of Mexico, rock turned to liquid and spread outward in mountainous waves, not freezing until it had formed a crater two hundred km across. That was only the beginning of disaster: Now the real tragedy began. Nitric oxides rained from the air, turning the sea to acid. Clouds of soot from incinerated forests darkened the sky, hiding the sun for months. Worldwide, the temperature dropped precipitously, killing off most of the plants and animals that had survived the initial cataclysm. Though some species would linger on for millenniums, the reign of the great reptiles was finally over. The clock of evolution had been reset; the countdown to Man had begun. The date was, very approximately, 65 million B.C." Event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event aus "Rendezvous with Rama": "Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometers—a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. On February 12, 1947, another Russian city had a still narrower escape, when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century detonated less than four hundred kilometers from Vladivostok, with an explosion rivaling that of the newly invented uranium bomb." Events: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikhote-Alin_meteorite Und nochmal aus "The Hammer of God": "It was the size of a small house, weighed 9,000 tons and was moving at 50,000 km/ h. As it passed over the Grand Teton National Park, one alert tourist photographed the incandescent fireball and its long vapor trail. In less than two minutes, it had sliced through the Earth’s atmosphere and returned to space. The slightest change of orbit during the billions of years it had been circling the sun might have sent the asteroid crashing upon any of the world’s great cities with an explosive force five times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The date was Aug. 10, 1972." Event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Great_Daylight_Fireball aus "Rendezvous with Rama": "In those days there was nothing that men could do to protect themselves against the last random shots in the cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of the Moon. The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-first century there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice. The human race had spread from pole to pole." LG Rene