Earth Punctured By Tiny Cosmic Missles

The Telegraph ^ | 5-12-2002 | Robert Matthews

[blam]

It's always something!

[blam]

FYI. (comments)

[galt-jw]

perhaps this explains the chemtrail spraying...ed dames said he remote viewed alien probes which were contaminated. <:=)

[billorites]

I just swept my deck. This stinks.

[PsyOp]

Ping

[irv]

Maybe these things exist so they'll probably destroy the Earth?

And reporters wonder why people don't respect them!

[medved]

Formed in the Big Bang and inside extremely dense stars, strangelets...

If these things depend on the "big bang" for their existence, we've no need to worry about them. The big bang is a bunch of BS.

[ZOOKER]

Guess I'm a little fuzzy on the math of this idea...

Lots of mass, lots of velocity --- how does this NOT generate a big crater?

[oldvike]

It's so dense and going so fast that the earth does not have the density to cause it to break up. Kinda like shooting a .22 through an apple as opposed to a brick.

[TopQuark]

made from quarks - the subatomic particles found inside protons and neutrons.

For the record: I have nothing whatever to do with that.

[marktwain]

They are so tiny and so fast that they don't have enough time to interact with ordianry matter very much, is my guess. Extremely stable, they said.

[Alas Babylon!]

The good news is that, despite their force, the impact of strangelets on an inhabited area would, probably, be less violent than that of a meteor. Prof Herrin said: "It's very hard to determine what the effect would be. There would probably be a tiny crater but it would be virtually impossible to find anything."

Ok, but what if it hits one of the inhabitants of an inhabited are?

[PatrickHenry]

Yet another catastrophe thread.

[Larry Lucido]

Ok, but what if it hits one of the inhabitants of an inhabited are?

They get a free body piercing?

[spunkets]

"Lots of mass, lots of velocity --- how does this NOT generate a big crater?"

The cross sectional area is small. It can only impart so much momentum to the stuff it knocks out of the way. The several kton TNT equivalent is distributed along a long thin string within the earth, it's not all localized at some point. The thing travels at 250 mile/sec and at 0.1diameter of a human hair there's not a lot you'd find at the surface. Maybe they'd find a long thin glassy rod of rock, extending from the entry point down twords the molten core.

[Marine Inspector]

I think one of these tiny cosmic missles took out my tire last week.

There I was driving along and bang, the back tire blows out for no reason.

It had to be one of these, what else could it have been.

[sheik yerbouty]

"The sky is falling!"

[lepton]

I had nothing to do with this. (Well not much anyway).

[Kermit]

1 million miles per hour. What's the speed of light? 186,000 miles per hour or miles per second?

[D-fendr]

Honest, teacher, a strangelet ate my homework.