Could the South have won the Civil War with an Incredible (Non-ASB) stroke of Luck?

That circle looks to be 800 miles across, rather than 800 square miles in area.

Well, that is true. However, an 800 square mile area would be even larger (a one square mile area is a square which is one mile long on each side, so a more accurate representation would be a square which is 800 miles long on each side), so my main point is not really affected. If anything, it is bolstered.
 
Also a good point - a 30-mile circle seems a bit more reasonable for a 30mT blast.

So yeah, uh, Rob, I take back agreement with anything you said. :p

Except a 30 mile circle is not anywhere near 800 square miles. And we know that the Tunguska blast devastated an area of 800 square miles.
 
Well, that is true. However, an 800 square mile area would be even larger (a one square mile area is a square which is one mile long on each side, so a more accurate representation would be a square which is 800 miles long on each side), so my main point is not really affected. If anything, it is bolstered.

...What? 800 square miles is a square a little less than 30 miles on a side. If they meant 640000 square miles they would have said 640000 square miles.
 
Except a 30 mile circle is not anywhere near 800 square miles. And we know that the Tunguska blast devastated an area of 800 square miles.

OK, fine. π * r * r = 800, so r = root(800 / π) = 15.958. It's a circle about 32 miles in diameter, not a square 30 miles on a side.

Methinks you need to look up how area is measured (here's a hint: one square yard =/= three square feet).
 
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Intersting thing would be seeing how religious leaders on both sides would try to interpret this:

"It was God's judgement for interfering with the divinely mandated institution of slavery."

"No, it was God's judgement for not abolishing slavery."

The fact that this meteor also does enormous damage to Richmond puts the lie to both claims. If God wanted to smote slavery defenders, it would've landed in South Carolina. If God wanted to smote abolitionists, it would've done more damage to the Unionists to have it hit New York.

It does seem like an ASB thread, though, to imagine a meteor very conveniently takes out the capital of the likely winning side of the war. How long before we start getting "What if a meteor takes out Berlin in 1939?" threads?
 
OK, fine. π * r * r = 800, so r = root(800 / π) = 15.958. It's a circle about 32 miles in diameter, not a square 30 miles on a side.

Methinks you need to look up how area is measured (here's a hint: one square yard =/= three square feet).

Well, as it happens, I just came across a map of the actual Tunguska blast area which does confirm that you are correct and I made a mistake in my calculations.:eek:

So, as Emily Litella used to say, "Never mind." :D
 
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It happened on 1908, and from
entirely natural causes. So, it could just as easily have happened a few decades earlier, in Washington DC, in such a time and place that
both most of the congress and the american president were vaporised.
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1)Something that could happen without the least intelligent interference;
2)Something that could happen without invalidating in the least
the most rigorous rule of natural law;
3)Something commonplace enough to have been known to happen even in historical times...
That something is non-ASB by definition.

Ok, maybe... but consider the following.

Impacts of that magnitude are very rare. We have exactly 1 known impact in recorded history and that impact happened over relatively sparsely inhabited land. Lets assume the Earth gets hit by a Tunguka like event every 300 years (A fairly high estimate in my opinion, but made by the late Gene Shoemaker who knew stuff). This makes it seem relatively common... but lets remember that the Earth's area is approximately 500 million square kilometers. The size of the blast was approximately 1200 square kilometers. That 1200 square kilometers would have include DC. Therefore any impact has a roughly 1 in 400,000 chance of impacting the desired spot. Now the event is significant enough that it could have changed the course of the war whenever it happened, so lets give it a time frame of 4 year window... this means the odds of an impact happening somewhere on Earth during the Civil war are roughly 1 in 75. Thus the total chance of this event happening at the right time in the right place is roughly speaking 1 in 30 million.

So is this common place enough? That I think could be debated.

--
Bill
 
Given that the North and South didn't really HATE each other that much, I could actually see the war coming to a halt and the Southerners offering all aid to their stricken Northern cousins.

Remember, this was an era where gallantry DID still exist, where a Confederate General like Lew Armistead could consider crossing over to the Union lines to have a chat with his old friend General Hancock, where Yankees and Rebels regularly traded supplies and even partied together at times.

So if a catastrophe like a meteor strike on Washington occurred, I can't see the war continuing...in fact, I would guess the Union would ask the Confederacy for help and they'd end up settling their differences over the negotiating table sometime down the road.
 
Given that the North and South didn't really HATE each other that much, I could actually see the war coming to a halt and the Southerners offering all aid to their stricken Northern cousins.

Remember, this was an era where gallantry DID still exist, where a Confederate General like Lew Armistead could consider crossing over to the Union lines to have a chat with his old friend General Hancock, where Yankees and Rebels regularly traded supplies and even partied together at times.

So if a catastrophe like a meteor strike on Washington occurred, I can't see the war continuing...in fact, I would guess the Union would ask the Confederacy for help and they'd end up settling their differences over the negotiating table sometime down the road.

That could be possible, depending on when in the war the impact occurs. The later in the war it happens, the more hatred there will be in the South that might impede such a scenario from occurring.
 
So is this common place enough? That I think could be debated.
The ASB concept is used for: " alternate history scenarios that involve time travel, magic, alien intervention, anything in the sea of time, and other such weirdness. Also alternate histories taking place in fictional universes (Star Wars, etc)" That is, ASB applies to scenarios requiring suspension of Natural law (Time travel or magic) events involving entities outside recorded human history (like gods or aliens or fictional characters - who all too often are required to have unnatural abilities by these very scenarios). From that we can infer that ASB applies to scenarios involving what is considered to be impossible. Now, when talking loosely many confuse the unlikely with the impossible. However, unless we are talking about unlikeliness of such magnitude that it would require several l times the age of the universe for it to be likely to recur, then unlikeliness is completely diverse from impossibility.
 
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Given that the North and South didn't really HATE each other that much, I could actually see the war coming to a halt and the Southerners offering all aid to their stricken Northern cousins.
That is interesting. We could even imagine a TL developing around the
dispute between factions who want to stop the war to offer help and factions who want to take advantage of the northerner weakness.
 
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