How to Survive History (eBook)

Cody Cassidy (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
Bedford Square Publishers (Verlag)
978-1-83501-038-9 (ISBN)

Infos

A humorous and informative guide to surviving history's most challenging threats, from outrunning dinosaurs to making it off the Titanic alive. History is the most dangerous place on earth. From dinosaurs the size of locomotives to meteors big enough to sterilize the planet, from famines to pandemics, from tornadoes to the Chicxulub asteroid, the odds of human survival are slim but not zero - at least, not if you know where to go and what to do. In each chapter of How to Survive History, Cody Cassidy explores how to survive one of history's greatest threats: getting eaten by dinosaurs, being destroyed by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, succumbing to the lava flows of Pompeii, being devoured by the Donner Party, drowning on board the Titanic, falling prey to the Black Death, and more. Using hindsight and modern science to estimate everything from how fast you'd need to run to outpace a T. rex to the advantages of different body types in surviving the Donner Party tragedy, Cassidy gives you a detailed battle plan for survival, helping you learn about the era at the same time. History may be the most dangerous place on earth, but that doesn't mean you can't visit. You can, and you should. And with a copy of How to Survive History in your back pocket, you just might make it out alive.

Cody Cassidy is the author of Who Ate the First Oyster? and co-author of And Then You're Dead. His writing has appeared in Wired and Slate, along many other publications. He lives in San Francisco.

Textauszug

HOW TO SURVIVE

THE CHICXULUB ASTEROID

Let’s say you want to go on a camping trip with warm nights and sunny days, interesting wildlife and bright stars. So you travel back to the very, very Late Cretaceous period, for a camping trip 66.5 million years ago—back when the climate was so warm palm trees grew in the arctic and the most famous, most fearsome dinosaurs to ever live walked the earth.

You’ll see the famous tyrannosaurus hunting the triceratops. You’ll see the eighty-ton alamosaurus eating leaves forty feet above the ground. You’ll see the tank-like ankylosaurus crushing opponents with its wrecking-ball tail. And just as you settle down on one particular evening, you’ll see a brand-new star in the Northern Hemisphere sky.

The star won’t flash, flare up, or blaze across the horizon. It will appear as stationary and as twinkly as all the others. But look again a few hours later and you might think this new star seems a little brighter. Look again the next night and it will be the brightest star in the sky. Then it will outshine the planets. Then the moon. Then the sun. Then it will streak through the atmosphere, strike the earth, and unleash 100 million times more energy than the largest thermonuclear device ever detonated.

The day the Chicxulub asteroid slammed into what is now the small town on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula that bears its name is the most consequential moment in the history of life on our planet. In a prehistoric nanosecond, the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of mammals began. Not only did the impact exterminate every dinosaur save for a few ground-nesting birds, it killed every land mammal larger than a raccoon. In a flash, Earth began one of the most apocalyptic periods in its history.

Could you survive it? Maybe.

If you make your camp on the right continent, in the right environment, and you seek out the right kind of shelter, at the right altitudes, at the right times, you might stand a chance, says Charles Bardeen, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who modeled the asteroid’s fallout for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Of course, even if you are on the opposite side of the world at the time of impact—which is the only way you can hope to make it out alive—he recommends you act quickly. As soon as you hear the sonic boom (don’t worry—you’ll hear it regardless of where you are on the planet), get yourself to high ground and find underground shelter. Immediately.

You might think it’s a bit alarmist to duck and cover from the impact of a city-sized rock landing 10,000 miles away. It isn’t—but you wouldn’t be the first to make the mistake of underestimating an asteroid. The cataclysmic risk posed by asteroids wasn’t well understood until World War I. Before then, most astronomers operated under the blissful naivete that massive impacts like Chicxulub were simply not possible.

When Galileo trained his telescope on the moon in 1609 and discovered perfectly circular craters dominating its topography, astronomers began to wonder how they formed. A few, like the early nineteenth-century German astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, proposed asteroid impacts as the cause. But most rejected this theory based upon one simple, supremely confounding fact: The moon’s craters are almost perfect circles. And, as anyone who has thrown a rock into dirt can tell you, that isn’t what an impact scar should look like. Instead, the mark will be oblong, oval, and messy. (Gruithuisen probably didn’t help his cause by also claiming to have seen cows grazing upon moon grass in these craters.) Further misleading any theorists, astronomers could make out little mountains in the center of each depression. Thus, for 300 years the majority of astronomers and physicists believed at least two facts about our moon: 1) cows did not graze upon moon meadows; and 2) lunar volcanoes, rather than meteors, had pocked its face. The former fact has thus far held true even under the scrutiny of modern telescopes, but the latter began to falter when a significant difference between large explosions and thrown rocks was revealed in the years prior to World War I.

In the early 1900s, astronomers like Russia’s Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov*1 began observing bomb craters and made a rather startling discovery: Large explosions differ from thrown rocks in a number of ways, but most relevantly—at least with regard to our moon’s appearance—they leave perfectly circular craters regardless of their angle of impact. As Morozov wrote in 1909 after conducting a series of experiments, asteroid impacts would “discard the surrounding dust in all directions regardless of their translational motion in the same way as artillery grenades do when falling on the loose earth.” After Morozov’s findings, the moon’s craters no longer looked like the benign remains of a remote geologic process, but the circular harbingers of the apocalypse.

Even before Morozov’s discovery, proponents of the volcanic moon theory, such as Harvard dean of science Nathaniel Shaler, were aware that an asteroid impact could be devastating. “The fall of a bolide of even ten miles in diameter . . . would have been sufficient to destroy organic life of the earth,” wrote Shaler in 1903. But most astronomers believed this was an entirely theoretical exercise, partly because, as Shaler noted in his defense of the lunar volcanism theory, the very existence of humanity proved this sort of impact could not have occurred.

Morozov’s calculations changed that. Once you know the true origins of the scars on the moon, you don’t have to be an astronomer—or even own a telescope—to arrive at the sobering conclusion that asteroid impacts occur with disturbing frequency. Shaler was, in a way, presciently incorrect. An asteroid of nearly the size he described did impact Earth and did wipe out the planet’s dominant species. Only, rather than wiping out humans, it cleared the evolutionary path for a shrew-sized placental mammal to eventually crawl, walk, and consider this camping trip to the apocalypse.

The survival of your shrew-like ancestor suggests that a fellow mammal like yourself would at least stand a chance. Unfortunately, the shrew had a number of apocalypse-friendly adaptations that humans have since lost. The shrew ate insects, burrowed away from the heat, and had fur to warm itself during the freezing decade that followed. You could replicate some of the shrew’s survival strategies: You could burrow and you could expand your diet. But evolution has robbed you of others, and your opposable thumbs might not be enough to save you when that twinkling star enters the atmosphere at around 12.5 miles per second.

At impacts of that speed, Earth’s atmosphere behaves like water. Smaller rocks—called meteors—hit the atmosphere like pebbles into a pond; they decelerate rapidly at high altitudes, either burning away in their friction with the air or decelerating to their low-altitude terminal velocity. But the mountain-sized Chicxulub asteroid hit our atmosphere like a boulder into a puddle. It maintained its velocity until impact, plunging through the entire sixty miles of atmosphere in around six seconds. As the asteroid screeched over what is now Central America, it emitted a sonic boom that reverberated across the continents.

It fell so quickly that the air itself could not escape. Under intense compression, the air heated thousands of degrees almost instantly, so that before the asteroid even impacted, much of the shallow sea that covered the Yucatán in the Late Cretaceous had already vaporized. Milliseconds later, the rock plunged through what water was left and slammed into bedrock at more than 10 miles per second. In that instant, a few near-simultaneous processes occurred.

First, the impacting meteor applied so much pressure to the soil and rock that these neither shattered nor crumbled but instead flowed like fluids. This effect actually makes it easier to visualize the formation of the crater, because the undulations of the earth almost exactly replicated the double splash of a cannonballer in a backyard swimming pool. The initial splash in all directions was followed by a delayed vertical sploosh when the cavity created by the impactor rebounded to the surface.

In a swimming pool, this entire process occurs in a few seconds. In Chicxulub, it took around ten minutes, but the difference is a function of scale, not speed. The initial wall of earth gouged outward was more than twenty miles high; the transitory cavity nearly breached Earth’s mantle, and when the cavity rebounded to form the delayed “vertical sploosh,” the earth rose at over 1,000 miles per hour to heights taller than Mount Everest. Within minutes this mountain almost entirely collapsed in a series of secondary explosions, but it left behind a smaller mound—called a crater’s “peak ring,” which is the formation that so confused those early moon gazers.

The very same moment the asteroid first struck the Yucatán and applied its pressure to the bedrock, it also converted the kinetic energy of a 7.5-billion-ton rock traveling 10 miles per second into heat. In an instant.

Why a rock hitting another rock produces heat isn’t all that intuitive, but, thermodynamically, heat is simply the movement of molecules. The jigglier the molecules, the hotter the temperature. You can jiggle molecules by any number of means, but physically hitting them works, which is why a hammer heats up after you hit a nail. But whereas a hammer swing delivers approximately 0.0001 kilojoules of energy, the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.11.2023
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Comic / Humor / Manga
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Freizeit / Hobby
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte
• ISBN-10: 1-83501-038-5 / 1835010385
• ISBN-13: 978-1-83501-038-9 / 9781835010389