alienation news

The day the sky fell in

In the early fifth century, rampaging Goths swept through Italy. Inviolate for 1,100 years, Rome was sacked by the hordes in 410 AD. St Augustine's apologia, the City of God, set the tone for Christians for the next 16 centuries.
But the Rome of that era came close to suffering a far worse calamity. A small metallic asteroid descended from the sky, making a hypervelocity impact in an Apennine valley just 60 miles east of the city. This bus-sized lump of cosmic detritus vaporised as it hit the ground. In doing so, it released energy equivalent to around 200 kilotonnes of TNT: around 15 times the power of the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima in 1945.