The Tunguska Event
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- You'd want it to be somewhere isolated to avoid casualties, especially if there was a radiation risk (which you wouldn't know).
- You wouldn't want people to be able to analyze the immediate wreckage with any kind of high fidelity because there might be signatures of whatever you sent back (or however you sent it) that might change the course of history/technology.
- You'd want there to be fairly detailed recordings (ideally photos), and for it to persist into modern history, not just be a weird anomaly of 'the past'.
- You wouldn't want it be interpreted as some kind of military action.
To be very clear, I don't actually believe this is what happened, but I quite like the idea...
(Okay, I'm done being a crackpot now, it was fun though)
Perhaps there's a dimension beyond time, and just as information changes in space across time, the entirety of our timeline changes within this upper dimension. The timeline that we once thought was straight and obvious turns out to be wiggling around and looping through itself in this "time of times".
Now, where did I put all of my tin foil...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12064194
It is hard to point to the existence of a coordinating mechanism apart from a collective brain glitch.
But if it isn't a collective brain glitch it can only be something peculiar in the environment. If so, what?
(if I got the numbers right, we are 108 years * 390 km/s = ~0.14 light years from the location of the Tunguska collision)
We do, however, need to care about the all the stuff that's revolving around that point, because even a slight imbalance will cause the galactic center of mass (barycenter) to move away from the black hole. Things get pretty wobbly out there.
> Wilson was already moving, glide walking as fast as was safe in the low gravity, making for the rear of the Eagle II. He knew they were close, and he could see everything on this side of the spaceplane. As soon as he was past the bell-shaped rocket nozzles he forced himself to a halt. Someone else was standing there, arm held high in an almost apologetic wave. Someone in what looked like a home-made space suit.
> [...] Behind the interloper was a two-metre circle of another place. It hung above the Martian soil like some bizarre superimposed TV image, with a weird rim made up from seething diffraction patterns of light from a grey universe. An opening through space, a gateway into what looked like a rundown physics lab.
> The other side had been sealed off with thick glass. A college geek-type with a wild afro hairstyle was pressed against it, looking out at Mars, laughing and pointing at Wilson. Above him, bright Californian sunlight shone in through the physics lab’s open windows.
Terry Pratchett gets away with it because his universe doesn't have to make sense :P
Interestingly messing with momentum as you travel through time (i.e. take your momentum with you and it's lost from the old time) would be a bigger problem for physics than time travel itself.
On top of that having your gravitational influence just disappear and reappear elsewhere would be a huge problem. (Gravity is never created or destroyed, it just moves - there are never any discontinuities with gravity.) So when you travel through time your gravity would have to also influence things throughout all the time you transit.
The net result of both those things is you end up exactly where you would if you had just sat there and moved through time the natural way.
So time travel fiction that has the machine end up exactly in the same spatial location as it started are more physically accurate than those that try to talk about the change in location (and have some kind of compensator that moves it).
You may be right if you just fast-forward yourself through all of the intermediate 4D coordinates, but what if time travel is not fast-forward? Git merge timelines and oops, one million merge conflicts.
For example, constructing a wormhole might require precise knowledge of the location of both endpoints relative to a specific reference frame. Misplacing your destination by as little as 3 meters can cause you to end up in the ground and suffocate to death.
That's my point - it kind of has to be, otherwise you violate conservation of momentum, energy, and gravity.
Violating those would be a bigger deal than time travel itself.
Incidentally that's why wormholes can't actually exist - they violate all of the above.
Which is a bit tongue in cheek, but I don't see how you can speak so concretely about it without having a working time machine.
Because the laws of physics are what they are. A time machine would have to fit inside those laws.
This constrains the design of the time machine - you can't just do anything you want.
Because of that, it's possible to narrow down how a time machine would work, if it could work.
That they are signs being used to gauge how the time-line has been effected.
Why? I dunno. Some part of human nature, I guess. Also: https://www.comixology.com/Atomic-Robo-The-Shadow-From-Beyon...
> The incident involved a group of nine experienced ski hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute who had set up camp for the night on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl. Investigators later determined that the skiers had torn their tents from the inside out. They fled the campsite inadequately dressed, some of them barefoot, under heavy snowfall and at temperatures below freezing. Six victims were determined to have died from hypothermia, while others showed signs of trauma. One victim had a fractured skull and another was found with brain damage without any sign of distress to the skull. Additionally, one woman's tongue was missing.
> Soviet authorities determined that an "unknown compelling force" had caused the deaths. Access to the region was consequently blocked for hikers and adventurers for three years after the incident. Due to the lack of survivors, the chronology of events remains uncertain.
> Several explanations have been put forward, including an avalanche, infrasound-induced panic, and a military accident. Sensationalist hypotheses include a hostile encounter with a yeti or other unknown creature.
Except for the radiation. To me that's what makes it the weirdest.
Every hypothesis about this event that made any sense involves a physical attack by a group of people, likely armed. The only two groups that would mass murder people just not to be found out are 1) foreign military or 2) escaped murderers.
https://www.znak.com/2016-01-18/v_dele_o_gibeli_gruppy_dyatl...
I think that's the basic difference between a conspiracy crackpot[1] and a novelist.
1) sadly, as I read more history, a lot more of the "crackpot" than I am comfortable with was actually the truth. People do some strange things for some very odd reasons with some seriously poor logistic skills.
Notably, most of those are answers to "How can we throw money at something to mitigate the risk of getting nuked?"
None of those are in a history book.
The world is an amazing place and people have written in many forms for a long time.
My guess is stories like that is what started the whole "chemtrails" thing.
Science fiction, of course. Well worth watching. Made in 1960 in East Germany, with an international cast.
https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/astero...
Most descriptions speak of a single explosion, something comparable to a nuclear weapon. That isn't an appropriate model. It wasn't a single event at a fixed spot, nor was it a series of events. It was more of a continuous release of energy over a great distance. The rock exploded not at a particular altitude, but dissipated its energy into the atmosphere over a period of time/distance, a line rather than a point. Square-area/volume principals therefore do not apply directly. With that understanding it turns out it was probably a much smaller rock than previously though.
The trees were not knocked over all at once. I think of it more as them being blown down in series as if by the wake of a passing boat, that boat being an exploding rock. So you cannot take the total damage area and calculate a single point for the explosion.
Old model: http://www.sandia.gov/videos2007/2007-6514Pfire.hv1.2.mpg
New model: http://www.sandia.gov/videos2007/2007-6514Pfire.hv1.1.mpg
Looks like 15th century China had an event that probably had a number of casualties (though apparently modern researchers dispute the details). Wasn't aware of that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1490_Ch%27ing-yang_event
Edit: here's the startup pitch I added to our last YC application in the "other ideas" section (I wonder why it didn't get funded):
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4) Planetary defense network to protect from asteroid impact. Build small satellites to search for and redirect dangerous asteroids. Rather than last-minute warning systems or explosion/impact-based protection, it would work by slowly gravitationally changing dangerous asteroid orbits so that they will not hit Earth. Build it so that it’s gravitationally self-sufficient and can use captured asteroids to deflect incoming dangers. This is similar to the recent work at Planetary Resources in Seattle - while they prospect for minerals we would direct asteroid orbits. In February of 2016, NASA announced the creation of the Planetary Defense Office to coordinate these efforts globally. Now is the right time to start working on this.
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-s-new-planeta...
Its really not; as I understand, our current technology is sufficient to find things much smaller than that at the distance of the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt.
The problem, at any size, is that we scan very little of the sky, not that its hard to find objects of any size that would be dangerous.
Also planetary defense needs constant maintenance, so what if there is some crisis, and a prolonged downgrade of civilization?
I do agree that the law of unintended consequences might mean that building such a system would instead ensure the destruction of the Earth rather than save it. But it's an idea.
Not all asteroids are made of the same stuff, so the robots would have to know many possible materials that the robots could be made of and how to process the raw materials into those refined materials and how to actually build the equipment to do that refining. That means that they would also have to know many ways to build refining equipment depending on what materials are available. It's a lot of variables and very difficult.
For instance, how can they create circuit boards if silicon and carbon and copper aren't available?
I think it makes more sense to build a robot factory in one location (a low gravity moon for instance) and send out the first few thousand robots to known asteroids. They could attach and shift orbits to where they crash on the other side of that moon where robots go and harvest raw materials to bring back to the factory.
Your current proposal is like telling 100 people to go to 100 specific locations on earth and build a bicycle with what is at that location. One guy in the desert might end up with a bike made of glass fired from the sand. Someone in the jungle might end up with one made with ivy and bamboo. While it's theoretically possible, it would be easier to send them out and tell all 100 to bring back all the materials they find to a central location and build bicycles out of the pile of stuff. The large amount of materials would render bicycles that are made of the best possible materials for each part.
P.S. If you're working at a startup that's pitching long-shot ideas like this, I really want to join you guys!
https://www.lsst.org/science/solar-system/potentially-hazard...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Synoptic_Survey_Telescop...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
Something extra interesting about this is the number of videos that recorded it due to the prevalence of car dash cams. This helped scientists quickly reconstruct what happened and is amazing footage to have of such a rare event.
Not the shockwaves, but things damaged/knocked over by the waves. If you were standing in a field, the shockwave would do nothing to you. It was harmless. But if you are standing beside a poorly-designed glass building, pieces are going to fall off that building. This was Russia. I would expect that other countries, with different building practices, might suffer far fewer casualties.
If that's the case then the poles would have a smaller cross-sectional area than equatorial regions.
Maybe the poles would be a good place to build evacuation shelters. Getting there in a hurry could be an issue.
For days I looked for any information in the news about it and never found anything reported. I never quite knew what it was, and nobody else really believed by description, until all the dashcam videos about this incident showed up on the internet.
Suppose the probability was close to 1 for this century instead of a long line of zeros with a 1 at the end.
Why would that be the case?
I'm not going to say it explicitly here but you should be able to figure it out. If you do, probably better not to elaborate. Merely reply with 'ZOG' or 'Oh Shit' and never get a good night's sleep ever again! ;-)
I recommend reading that as it includes some great quotes from witnesses and a better overall structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
When people were first investigating the Tunguska event, they believed it to be caused by an asteroid...
They were probably right.
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/s12210-015-0403-8
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229759371_Lake_Chek...
Some argument against Cheko being an impact crater, referenced in the above work:
http://www.univie.ac.at/geochemistry/koeberl/publikation_lis...
Data from the Italian team that investigated Cheko:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/60%C2%B055'00.0%22N+101%C2...