In article ,
Mary Shafer wrote:
Depending on whether Tunguska was a comet or an asteroid, there is a
finite probability that one or more people died from asteroid impact...

And that was only about a century ago, too. It's easy to forget that when
you go back as little as a few centuries, "recorded history" is the
history of only a modest fraction of the world... and if you go back a few
thousand, "recorded history" is small fragments of the history of a few
isolated locations.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, in these
bureaucratic days it's easy to assume that such fatalities will be
reported...

An even more modern example: Several years before Skylab itself came
down, the S-II stage of the Saturn V that launched it -- quite a bit
bigger than Skylab itself -- came down, in pieces, in central Africa.
We think it didn't kill anyone... but nobody is actually sure of that.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |