Abstract
In the early morning hours of 30 June 1908 tens of thousands in central Siberia were able to observe an extraordinary natural phenomenon. A gleaming white ball rose in the heavens which moved quickly from South East to North West. It traversed the airspace over most of the Yennissey Department — a distance of over 500 kilometers — and shook the earth underneath its flight path, rattled window panes; the plaster fell off the walls. […] People thought the world was coming to an end. Shortly after the disappearance of the glowing ball, a giant pillar of fire rose over the horizon. Within a radius of 750 kilometers there were detonations. At all the meteorological stations in Europe and America, seismographers registered the tremors of the earth’s crust.1
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Peter T. Bobrowsky and Hans Rickman, eds, Comet/Asteroid Impacts and Human Society: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Heidelberg: Springer, 2007. This volume contains the most informative analysis of the Tunguska explosion.
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See George S. Levit, Biogeochemistry-Biosphere-Noosphere: The Growth of the Theoretical System of VladimirIvanovich Vernadsky, Berlin: VWB Verlag, 2001.
See Everett Bleiler, ed., Science-fiction: The Gernsback Years, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998;
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Claudia Schmölders, ‘“Sinnreiche Gedancken”: Zur Hermeneutik des Chladenius,’ Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 58.3 (January 1976), 240–64.
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© 2012 Claudia Schmölders
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Schmölders, C. (2012). Heaven on Earth: Tunguska, 30 June 1908. In: Geppert, A.C.T. (eds) Imagining Outer Space. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230361362_3
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