[alexholehouse]

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...

[sdenton4]

According to the Ghostbusters, the Tunguska event was the biggest 'interdimensional cross-rip' of the 20th century, prior to the whole Zuul incursion.

[teddyh]

You mean the Gozer incursion. “Zuul was a minion of Gozer.”

[thesagan]

I really wonder which form the Destructor took in that scenario. The impact object itself?

[davesque]

This is my preferred explanation.

[rmsaksida]

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

[ivan_gammel]

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.

https://www.znak.com/2016-01-18/v_dele_o_gibeli_gruppy_dyatl...

[frankzinger]

Recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11828346

[Spooky23]

Perhaps the Soviets were testing a chemical agent? The US military was testing BZ and other substances at that time.

[Houshalter]

The missing tongue is the weirdest part. Otherwise it could be explained by hypothermia. Or, possibly, drugs.

[imaginenore]

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.

[somethingsimple]

> Otherwise it could be explained by hypothermia. Or, possibly, drugs.

Except for the radiation. To me that's what makes it the weirdest.

[ivan_gammel]

It can be explained by ritual killing.

[pgt]

Reads like an Erowid trip report. Too many mushrooms/acid possibly combined with some traumatic event.

[protomyth]

> 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.

[wlievens]

Can you list any good examples? I can't think of any right away

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[mirimir]

ECHELON. Parallel construction. XKeyscore. CMU relay early exploit on Tor. Equation Group HDD firmware exploits.

[xyzzy123]

Project MKUltra, Tuskagee, Operation "Green Run", "Igloo White"...

[ethbro]

M28 Davy Crockett, Project 705 / Alfa submarines, Operation Gladio, Duga radar, Project Sanguine / ZEVS, Project Azorian, SOSUS, TACAMO

Notably, most of those are answers to "How can we throw money at something to mitigate the risk of getting nuked?"

[protomyth]

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.

[stonemetal]

>I read more history

None of those are in a history book.

[protomyth]

History is not just written in history books.

[stonemetal]

If someone says they are specifically reading about history, then that suggests they are reading history books.

[nickt]

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!

[1]http://www.teslasociety.com/tunguska.htm

[taneq]

It's where he stored the stockpile of spare Hugh Jackmans. They hit critical mass.

[maxerickson]

If you are confident you can hit a 4d coordinate, just point your device out into space at your present time.

(if I got the numbers right, we are 108 years * 390 km/s = ~0.14 light years from the location of the Tunguska collision)

[bane]

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.

[ars]

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).

[kijin]

Depends on your method of travel.

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.

[ars]

> but what if time travel is not a fast-forward?

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.

[kijin]

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?

[maxerickson]

Maybe your time machine uses a bad design.

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.

[bane]

Well, maybe this is all true for your time machine, but I'm definitely using a different design.

[rollthehard6]

This was used to great effect as a weapons device in the 2000AD comic story Strontium Dog - http://www.musicbanter.com/members-journal/79558-trollhearts...

[mirimir]

Joe Haldeman gets that right in The Accidental Time Machine :)

[stouset]

Based on which reference frame?

[dmd]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_distance#Comoving_coo...

[akiselev]

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.

[kachnuv_ocasek]

Rotating frames of reference are not inertial.

[akiselev]

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?

[bashinator]

The center of the galaxy is almost certainly rotating, and is a supermassive black hole, not a point.

[ridgeguy]

Minimum Doppler shift of the cosmic background radiation integrated around the entire sky?

[semi-extrinsic]

Why not just go (a long way off) in front of a Mars rover? No harming any people, guaranteed to get noticed, no military worries.

[Terr_]

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.

[wlievens]

Loved that book, and everything else Hamilton writes

[Terr_]

I do feel like he tried a little too hard to put every character and plot into one single universe though.

Terry Pratchett gets away with it because his universe doesn't have to make sense :P

[therein]

What if your time travel lab is stationed at Mars already?

[adventureloop]

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.

[1]: http://www.starshipsofa.com/

[CaptSpify]

I love stories based on these premises. It's so much fun to take a weird mysterious event, and put a conspiracy behind it.

Why? I dunno. Some part of human nature, I guess. Also: https://www.comixology.com/Atomic-Robo-The-Shadow-From-Beyon...

[funkyy]

Maybe Tunguska event was first time travel that failed badly...

[wybiral]

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)

[bluejekyll]

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.

[wybiral]

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".

Now, where did I put all of my tin foil...

[internaut]

Berenstein Bears, are they a real life Stand Alone Complex?

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?

[funkyy]

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.

[NetStrikeForce]

Why the first? Or, in other words, the first in whose timeline?

[Confusion]

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.

[DonaldFisk]

Alien spaceship. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Spaceship_on_Venus

Science fiction, of course. Well worth watching. Made in 1960 in East Germany, with an international cast.

[powertower]

That's actually one of the theories of crop circles...

That they are signs being used to gauge how the time-line has been effected.

http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/anasazi/fringe2015c.html

[FreeFull]

I'd say crop circles are made by bored people, using planks with rope tied to them, and markers so they know which way to flatten the crops.

[bashinator]

There's no way humanity could master that kind of technology!!! /s

[467568985476]

Wow! If "a group of remote viewers" concluded that, it must be true!