I feel like I’m toeing the line between censorship and conspiracy theories. Is there an explanation for all of fireballs/meteors that have occurred this year? The only news articles I’ve read have chalked a lot of it up to coincidence. I read that the fireballs over San Francisco and Cuba came from a different direction than the one in Russia. I just want to hear an explanation and read something that isn’t beating me over the head with religion. (Please don’t give me any responses referencing religion.)
All the astronomy sites I’ve seen have said it’s just coincidence.
As for the two newsmakers on one day, their orbital elements were very different, so they couldn’t have been related to each other. Just coincidence.
Besides, ask the question the other way around: what else could it be? Nothing humans can do could conceivably cause an increase in meteor frequency. So, maybe we’ve entered the path of a swarm of asteroids? I’m sure there’s a “bell curve” distribution of encounters per given period of time; are recent observations really outstanding, or just par for the course?
Humans are just a bit rubbish at knowing what randomness looks like. Things occur in clusters even when they’re quite random.
The events in San Francisco and Cuba weren’t particularly rare. They just got noticed more by residents, and then reported widely by the media because the incident in Russia spiked public interest in meteors.
Exactly this. “Random” does not mean “evenly spaced”. It would be astonishing if we never see clustering and coincidence of exactly this type.
Right. An expert can look at a list of “random” numbers that a person generates and spot it as false immediately because people almost never duplicate numbers when they spout “random” digits.
One of the other things my professor in college use to say is that humans when making up random numbers (this was in reference to making up fake lab data) avoided using zeros. So for example, if a person is asked to make up 2 digit numbers, 10, 20, 30… are likely to be missing
Any truth to that ?
Also, there are one billion more pairs of human eyeballs on the planet than there were just 13 years ago.
More people looking up means fewer meteors go unseen or re-enter over unpopulated areas. As long as human population increases, one would expect some level of correlation with number of meteor sightings, even if the number of meteors remained perfectly constant (which it does not, as the discussion of random makes clear).
Note to self: Be careful where you step.
I’d also like to add that the proliferation of digital cameras in recent years makes capturing these more common than was possible a few years ago. It seems like there are a lot more of meteors because people are able to capture and share video with way more people than before - so it seems like they are more common now.
Exactly…and when you combine that with more widespread access to news from all over the world, thanks to the internet, means that we more readily hear about (and see) things in other parts of the world than we used to.
Another example: the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2005. I do not remember ever seeing a tsunami before that. Then again in Japan in 2011. Lots of terrifying video of both. It’s not like tsunamis never happened prior, but they both came during an age where visual media has proliferated to the point where you have thousands of camera-people on-location everywhere so almost nothing unusual gets missed now.
Pfffft.
Ignore those fools up there.
WE’RE DOOMED! DOOOOOOOOOOOMED!!!
I blame the planet Mongo.
I’m certain that Ming is behind this.
Mongo only pawn in game of life.
(Yes, wrong Mongo, I know. 
)
Aw, Mongo straight!
^whoosh
^^whoosh
^^^whoosh
^^^^whoosh
Care to explain…?
Mongo is a planet once ruled by the Evile Inscrutable Emperor Ming in the Buck Rogers comic.
Mongo is also a character in the satiric film, Blazing Saddles.
Get a grip. 