Psst. There is something going on with the recent supposed "meteor strike" over Russian air space.
First of all, as the videos clearly show, there is a prominent contrail produced but that would require water vapour and, as everyone knows, a meteor wouldn't have any water. It would have evaporated in outer space.
Second, after the explosion, the contrail continued. Something left the scene, which is totally inconsistent with a meteor blowing up.
Third, the flash and impact is more consistent with the detonation of an atomic bomb. Indeed, if you check out any video on open air nuclear tests, they produce the same sort of fireball and resulting mushroom cloud.
Finally, why would a meteor explode? It has been travelling through space of millions of years but it only explodes as it approaches Earth?
Yes, someone has obviously been feeding dis-information to the media. Something is going on here.
As any reasonable analysis and, I am sure, countless studies will demonstrate the explosion is much more consistent with a misguided missile from North Korea. The government is just covering it up!
Wait. Stop!
It almost sounds plausible, doesn't it?
I haven't trolled the Internet looking for this story line but I am pretty sure that if I did, I would find it. Of course, it is completely made up. An act of fiction on my part.
Indeed, the science doesn't hold up. The notion that meteors or other objects in the solar system don't have water is false. Water has been measured in all sorts of different bodies.
Or the notion that you would need to have water to produce a contrail is unfounded. All sorts of particulate and material streaming off the meteor's surface as it plunged into the atmosphere would give rise to the trail of smoke and debris.
On top of which the supersonic shockwave would provide the nucleation sites for water vapour in the atmosphere to coalesce into clouds even if the meteor wasn't throwing off material.
The notion that the meteors don't blow up is plain wrong. The stresses inherent in going from 70 kilometres per second to even a moderate speed of, say, 10 kilometres per second would have shattered the incoming rock. On top of which you have a superheated surface and a core which would still be at close to absolute zero.
It is amazing that the meteor lasted as long as it did in our atmosphere.
On top of all this, meteor strikes are much more common than we would care to admit. A couple every century is a frightening prospect for us but within the solar system, that is a fairly slow rate for meteors falling. It has been much, much higher in the distant past. Just look at the moon.
Still, my little story does have all of the elements of a good conspiracy theory. An astonishing event explained through pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo with a reference to a government cover up. It is amazing how many of these sorts of conspiracy theories one can find on the web.
And from my point of view, it is amazing how many involve pseudo-science or junk science.
Take fluoride, for example. Our city council has decided to put the question to a referendum. Their reasoning is that the people should decide. As a consequence, we will be hearing a lot about articles that show that fluoride is the toxic waste product of industrial plants dumped in our water for disposal or that it causes people to become stupid or fluoride is responsible for cancer or that it comes from the Manhattan project.
None of this is true. Well, okay, the source of fluoride that gets used in some water supplies are the byproducts of industrial processes but that is just because they are a convenient source. Water fluoridation is not an economic way to dispose of industrial waste.
But the idea that fluoride makes people stupid, for example, is easy to dispute. Simply look at how much smarter we are today than, say, fifty or a hundred years ago. Or look at how much the developed nations of the world have advanced based on the intelligence of their scientists and engineers. Look at the advances in culture and the arts.
If fluoride made people less intelligent, wouldn't this effect be manifest in the collective intelligence of the developed world where water fluoridation has been a common practice? If anything, the regions of the world where water fluoridation has been practiced are much smarter.
And, yes, cancer does seem to be more prevalent now than in the past but that has nothing to do with fluoride. Simply put, we aren't dying of the other things that once killed us.
Conspiracy theories can be great fun but they shouldn't overshadow reasoned and scientifically based arguments.
