AI Summary
5 min readIn December 2024, a telescope spotted a rock the size of a 20-story building heading our way, with odds of impact higher than any asteroid in two decades before the calculations shifted and the threat passed.
The Nineveh planisphere, cataloged as K 8538 in the British Museum, is a five-and-a-half-inch clay disk recovered from the ruins of King Ashurbanipal’s library. The library itself survived because the 612 BC fire that destroyed Nineveh baked its tablets hard rather than reducing them to dust. One side of the disk is blank; the other is divided into eight sectors filled with wedge marks, arrows, and clusters of dots. Most Assyriologists have read it as a ritual calendar or omen text copied from an older source. Rocket engineers Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell instead treated the marks as star positions and ran them backward through planetarium software. The configuration matched the sky over southern Mesopotamia on the morning of June 29, 3123 BC. Five of the eight sectors showed an object entering from Pisces, bright enough to cast shadows and descending at roughly six degrees above the horizon.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:07) **A Near-Miss in 2024** - A 20-story asteroid passes close to Earth, setting up the episode's central question about humanity's vulnerability to impacts.
- 2 (02:16) **The Discovery of Nineveh** - The lost city of the Bible is found in 1842, leading to the excavation of King Ashurbanipal's vast library.
- 3 (04:33) **The Mysterious Round Tablet** - A strange, circular tablet named K8538 sits unread for decades, as scholars argue over its meaning.
- 4 (06:37) **Rocket Scientists Solve the Puzzle** - Two aerospace engineers, Alan Bond and Mark Hempel, apply astronomical software to the tablet, concluding it is a star map.
- 5 (08:40) **Tracking the Impact Site** - Bond and Hempel trace the object's path on a map, which leads directly to a mysterious landslide in the Austrian Alps called Köfels.
- 6 (11:18) **The Mystery of Köfels** - A massive landslide moved three-quarters of a cubic mile of rock, but no earthquake or normal landslide can explain it.
- 7 (12:54) **The Scale of the Impact** - The episode calculates the force of the event, based on the object's size, speed, and shallow angle of entry.
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Show Notes
-Try QUO for free and get 20% off your first 6 months at https://www.quo.com/WHY. -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call (888) 949-9172 now. -Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at https://shopify.com/why. In 1650 BC, a city on the Dead Sea burned so completely that nothing grew there for six centuries. The destruction happened in a single morning, and the evidence left in the ground points to something falling from the sky. Three artifacts from three different countries describe the same event. A clay tablet from ancient Iraq. A bronze disk pulled from a German hillside. Melted pottery from the Jordan Valley. Scientists spent fifteen years excavating the site. What they pulled from the ground included glazed pottery, shocked quartz, diamond dust, and skeletons frozen mid-step. The same fingerprint shows up at confirmed impact sites worldwide. The story doesn't end in 1650 BC. The debris field responsible has a return date, and astronomers are watching the calendar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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