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Fireballs Hitting Cities!!

Hello Everyone,

We recently had a discussion concerning the damage which might be caused by
PHAs hitting the Earth.  The question is asked, at what point did anyone
really become concerned about this?

John G. Burke's book Cosmic Debris: Meteorites in History is an excellent and
very scholarly treatise on the subject of, well, meteorites in history.  On
pages 18 and 19, Burke discusses how the French Academy of Sciences
"instructed Jean-Baptiste Le Roy to study the phenomenon of fireballs in
general and the bolide of July 1771 in particular."   Burke then relates that
Le Roy was astounded by the size of the fireball and he estimted the diameter
to be about .6 miles.  Keep in mind that Le Roy also seemed to adhere to the
atmospheric origin of fireballs (suffice it to say that at that time the
extra-terristrial origin theory was not the pre-dominant one) but he was at
least cognizant of the potential harm such a fireball might inflict.  To quote
Burke, "What city," he exclaimed "could excape a general conflagration and
total ruin, if a similar globe fell within it's walls!"

Le Roy also felt that as fireballs descended into denser air they would be
broken up and "never fall as a single globe of fire" but at least he was
considering  the potential hazards of, at that time, little understood
atmospheric phenomena.

-Walter