So I've always had this (entirely crackpot) idea that the Tunguska Event is actually the place and time in space/history that you'd want to test the first time-travel device to. From a 'test system' design perspective:
- 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...
Another event that took place in Russia and led to a variety of crackpot theories: the Dyatlov Pass incident. [0]
> 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.
Recent report about this case says that local police finally found an evidence that this was a murder. A witness charged in illegal possession of a gun confessed, that this gun belonged to a Mansi hunter, which participated in that massacre. The Dyatlov group accidentally discovered a holy place of Mansi tribe and took something from there. The Mansi have found that and attempted to return their possessions.
The missing tongue is not the weirdest part. Animals could have eaten it.
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.
> To be very clear, I don't actually believe this is what happened, but I quite like the idea...
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.
US military spraying SF bay with bacterial agents during Cold War without anyone knowing as a way to test the potential impact of biological attacks. At least one person died of an unlucky post-operation infection with that sprayed bacteria because the doctors couldn't figure out in time that he got sick with something that shouldn't even be there.
My guess is stories like that is what started the whole "chemtrails" thing.
ECHELON is probably the biggest (for tech) of the "oh, that couldn't be true" conspiracy theories that ended up being true. The whole release of information on it constitutes a big jolt to the head on what people will actually do.
I guess if you want to limit yourself to one delivery type. Its amazing how many old newspapers, transcripts of speeches & conversations, letters, and reports are available today that weren't in the past. Heck, scroll translations are also out there.
The world is an amazing place and people have written in many forms for a long time.
While we're on the subject of crackpot ideas - don't forget that Nikola Tesla has occasionally been blamed[1]. Not sure how big your tinfoil hat would need to be to avoid a Tunguska-level event!
I've always wondered why pondering about time travel devices with only the temporal dimension as a setting seemed to neglect the fact that things move about in the universe! Traveling backwards or forwards in time at the same point in space means that all the stuff you're interested in is likely to not be where you think you left it.
You would have to retain any momentum you have when traveling through time, so you would move more or less together with the earth.
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.
Could a time machine redirect, dissipate, or convert most of that energy into another form, such as a massive explosion in the middle of Siberia, leaving the traveler with very little momentum to worry about?
The solar system's rotation is about the center of the galaxy so that would be the natural pick for an inertial reference frame, or the supermassive black hole believed to be in the center.
The center of the galaxy isn't rotating, it's just a point, no? Picking the criteria for such a point would be difficult and tracking it even more so, but what's the alternative?
A black hole is a point. Its size is zero, regardless of its mass. Its event horizon has a size, but we don't need to care about that.
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.
Since it's well agreed that virtually every galaxy (spiral or elliptical) has a central supermassive black hole, it's fair at this point to call it part of the galaxy.
That reminds me of the novel "Pandora's Star", where two eccentric physicists surprise the first astronauts to land on mars:
> 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.
There was a short story on starshipsofa[1] with a similar premise. A research team working time travel are worried about massive energy events, so they plan their test runs to coincide with nuclear tests. I wish I could remember what it was called, it was rather good.
Maybe it was a success. Maybe we didn't send a person back, we just created an explosion in the past for the purpose of verifying that it altered history. Success! Now we just have to find Nelson Mandela and the creator of the Berenstein Bears...
(Okay, I'm done being a crackpot now, it was fun though)
How many timelines are there? Or is there just a single timeline and the act of sending this event back in time has always existed, the timelines conjoined at some quantum level.
It feels paradoxical either way to me, but maybe the multiverse is cool with there being universes that are paradoxical.
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".
Wouldnt be easier and safer for timespace to just drop an artifact in remote area and then try to retrieve it though? Killing people as an timespace event could cause changes in to the world.
And even better: suppose the cause of Tunguska was simply an asteroid. Then it would still be a great place to test the first time-travel device to, because the place is already associated with weird things. No one would be able to distinguish between readings and hypotheses of the original event and anything added by the time-travel device.
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.
You have to wonder when a large piece of space rock will hit somewhere inhabited. That said, with 3% of earth's land being urban (3% of 29% of Earth), and reasonably infrequent falling rocks, it's really not that likely to happen in any given lifetime. I suspect we're keen enough these days to be able to predict and evacuate the right areas, though. This paper references another that suggests a "Tunguska Event" is a once in 200-300 year deal:
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1994Metic..29..864Y...
(Man I am so far into the rabbit hole now)
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
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.
Speaking of, what is it with the Russians and the dash cams? There seems to be a subculture of recording while driving and posting videos of road rage, fistfights, etc.
Apparently there was/is a scam where people would walk in front of your car and then sue you for hitting them. So everybody started putting in dash cams to be able to provide evidence against the scammers.
Insurance purposes. Russia is a strange country. It wouldn't be too uncommon to have a drunk Russian jumping onto your car angrily while you're parked at a stop-light, or someone knocking you off the road on a highway.
I once saw a small meteor falling, sometime in the early 2000s. I had no idea what it was, just a giant bright sparkling object in the sky...it was kind of terrifying.
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.
I once saw something during bright, sunny summer day - it looked like a small object that hit the atmosphere pretty much head on (as in it's velocity was perpendicular to the surface). It lasted a second or two, looked like a turbolaser shot or something
Yeah, I saw that. Looks like the shockwaves were the primary mode of injury, though I guess that will always be the primary mode of injury in a large explosion. No deaths that I could see, which is good. I remember seeing the dashcams back then
> Looks like the shockwaves were the primary mode of injury
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.
No, but most anti-earthquake measures, especially in regard to glass falling from buildings, would seem applicable. So too with codes meant for safety during hurricanes, tornadoes and other strong winds.
Well, Canada is pretty big too, but we don't get any asteroid action. Canada is like "oops, sorry, didn't see you coming. Let me rotate out of your way" and then Russia gets hit.
Meteoroids and asteroids generally come from well-known directions since the asteroid belt is relatively confined within the plane of the solar system, with inclinations less than 30 degrees on average. But due to the Oort cloud being spherical, comets can come at us from nearly any direction.
It wouldn't have to hit somewhere inhabited. If it landed in say, the Pacific Ocean you could see massive tidal waves on multiple population centers at once. Arguably a bigger threat than if something of equivalent size were to hit land.
> You have to wonder when a large piece of space rock will hit somewhere inhabited. That said, with 3% of earth's land being urban (3% of 29% of Earth), and reasonably infrequent falling rocks, it's really not that likely to happen in any given lifetime.
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 wouldn't bet on us noticing the meteor sufficiently early for an evacuation. We have mapped only a tiny portion of asteroids in our solar system and, iirc, the budget for that program keeps getting cut.
Luckily, there are new companies springing up to do work like this because it will be profitable some day. Planetary Resources is specifically looking for big rocks to do mining operations on, but is taking it into their own hands to map for unknown objects with Near Earth trajectories. That doesn't take away from how sad it is that our governments have cut the already-small budgets of important research like this. That's a crime, really.
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):
-------
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.
Perhaps I haven't explained my idea very well. I'm imagining millions of small robotic spacecraft, self-constructed by self-mining asteroids that they have found on their own. The little asteroid spacecraft would roam the solar system on huge orbits and search for potential Earth impact-bound objects. If it finds something, over the course of hundreds of years, or thousands of years, the network of small asteroid spaceships could send a probe to the offending target and adjust its orbit so as not to impact. It could then use the offending targets to create new nodes in the system. Theoretically the defense network could last as long as the sun does.
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.
That's a fun idea, and obviously a long way out, but there would have to be a lot of advances to make it possible.
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!
But those efforts are mostly focused on the big asteroids that wipe out huge areas, right? Spotting an asteroid the size of a minivan or so is really hard, but if something of that size hits a city, thousands die.
> Spotting an asteroid the size of a minivan or so is really hard
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.
The theory that the lake which is a distance from the proposed centre of the blast is an impact crater may be born out by accounts from the time which describe multiple hits at varying distances.
In sci-fi book "Monday begins on Saturday" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky there was cool, but rather unrealistic theory, according to which Tunguska event was a landing of an alien spaceship, which had reverse time arrow. They landed and then have gone to our past, finding themselves in the untouched ancient taiga, and leaving no traces in our future.
What are the economics (and physics) of creating a football-field-sized (and proportionately-weighted) synthetic meteor and studying a controlled re-entry into some part of the ocean? Would that be a useful experiment in terms of learning how to deal with potential future threats, or too risky?
- 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...