Today is the centenary of the Tunguska event, when something mysterious happened in remotest Siberia, leveling trees over hundreds of square miles, and leaving assorted caribou and bears and such dazed and befuddled. People were slow to pay attention to this marvelous occurrence. Perhaps we can forgive them, seeing as it happened so very far from fashionable and comfortable places, and anyway, just as we were getting ready to go, the whole damn World War thing started. And after that was over, half the world turned commie, and screw that for breakfast, anyway.
So, the Tunguska event. Something had a hate on for trees. Comet, asteroid, methane gas, UFOs, or the mother of all lightning strikes. (See some explanations here, at the fantastically thorough and accurate, all-encompassing and never to be sufficiently praised wikipedia.)
The impact (if it was indeed an impact) was on essentially the same latitude as St. Petersburg. And several articles have pointed out that back in the sixties, the crack young staff of the Guiness World Records figured out that if the space thingy had been stick in traffic for four hours and forty seven minutes, then it would have been the capital of Imperial Russia and seat of the Tsars that would have been tatered, rather than some bog-soaked, mosquito infested corner of Siberian hell.
Think of the implications of that one.
Three years after the Russo-Japanese War, and the abortive 1905 uprisings. But, before the rise of the Bolsheviks. Losing St. Petersburg would have really gutted the centralized Russian Empire. What effect would that have had on a) WWI, b) world Communism and c) the Moon Race?
Discuss.
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