Some years ago in a very idle moment I was searching for a place on Earth where you could anchor an hypothetical space elevator.
You'd need a place near the equator, preferably unsettled but still politically stable. A mountain would be nice to shorten the length, but mountains are difficult.
For my internal fantasy I settled on Ascension Island, part of a British Overseas Territory, at 7.5° South.
It's not natively settled, the only people there are for work, military, spooks, space agencies for tracking and telecommunications. With the arrival of European explorers there was an ecological extinction, mostly the island seems to be barren.
And the name, of course, is perfect for a space elevator fantasy.
I was en route to St Helena and I had several days of a raging fever on Ascension, and my memories of the place on either side of my illness are suitably strange. I remember walking through a landscape of sharp, anthracite grey volcanic rock and throwing a banana peel into the sea, to watch the fish churn around it like piranha. I remember going past a rock covered in paint -- everyone who was determined to never come back added a new splash of colour. I think it was right next to 'the worst golf course in the world'. I remember leaving the barren low-lands and climbing the mountain switchbacks, into rainforest-like verdancy. A very odd place.
I once wondered if it would be more environmentally friendly to bore straight down into a mountain and then build a mile high building on the peak to create a giant rail gun. Then shoot raw materials into orbit where the actual manufacture takes place. Sadly there is too much atmosphere no matter how much I want a cannon to the moon.
This actually is a proposed idea. To launch enough satellite shields to slow down global warming. The proposal isn’t straight down but rather diagonal, increasing the length and aiming it at the right angle & velocity for orbit
At first I thought it was simply science fiction, but it’s fairly ingenious from a price point. If the physics work of course
Just anchor it to the oceanic crust. If you're unafraid to spool cable 37,000,000 meters up, you shouldn't be afraid to also spool down 50 meters or so—the maximum depth of the equatorial Sunda shelf[0] in the SEA region. Convenient to Singapore.
(Singapore itself is roughly 10% former ocean, terraformed).
"In Ascension" is really wonderful sci-fi novel set partially on Ascension Island. Recommended if you like Ted Chiang or Jeff VanderMeer style weird, meditative sci-fi.
It is much easier to build elevator right at the equator. It is possible to have base off axis adds extra length and loads. It doesn't make sense when there are plenty of places right on equator.
Quito, Ecuador is probably the best location since it is at 9350 ft. Could also attach on top of Pichincha volcano to west or main Andes to the east.
In Afrcia, Mount Kenya is nearly on the equator and goes up to 17,000 ft.
There are multiple options in Indonesia. None of them high. The mountains of Sumatra or Borneo are probably the best options but there is Lingga Island near Singapore.
The advantage of these locations is that they cover the world and are close to Africa, Americas, and Asia. They are also all safe since there is nothing to the east to be hit by broken cable.
Open Street Map has much more detail, and shows the harbour at Georgetown: https://osm.org/go/PzLP7syAF- as well as what I think might be an oil/fuel terminal for the power station further north.
There are also pipelines from a fuel storage depot in Georgetown to the RAF base (south), which has pipelines to the coast, so there must be others too.
Look closer at that harbour. Especially its scale, and facilities. There's nothing resembling a spot to tie up (say) a 500' freighter. Nor a breakwater - if a storm hit the west side of the island, then everything afloat would have to be hauled out of the water, or flee.
(Yes, obviously my original comment should have been more specific.)
For military facilities, on a military budget, there's all sorts of "wait 'till the weather and tides are right, then transfer cargo ashore via helicopters and small boats" stuff that you can do. At commercial scale, the extra costs are poison.
When they mention the Sentinelese who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean as being uncontacted they have to ignore the shipwreck in the inlet on the northwest end of the island.
I'm guessing that the mariners who found themselves on the island did not make a very good first impression as representatives of the larger outside world and that this contributed to the hostility towards outsiders that the Sentinelese exhibit.
I know there was a bible-thumper a few years back who found himself skewered while trying to help the North Sentinelese find Jesus. That seems like a predictable outcome when you consider that the inhabitants have to be closer to everything that is real and important on their island than we modern people will ever be and likely have their constructs about how the world works so they don't need someone else's Jesus to keep them grounded.
Interestingly enough, the only place where I saw any clear indication that the island was inhabited was on the north end of the island near the inlet where the ship is run aground and sunk. Just north of the tree line you can clearly see a well-worn path leading from the woods east of the wreck to the inlet.
I'll bet they keep a weather eye out for any new contraptions not of their own making.
They've encountered and traded with people from outside the island, like Anstice Justin during contact attempts between the 80s and 2000s [0]. The direct contact attempts were halted in the 90s due to ethical/health concerns for the sentinelese though, so expeditions after that point were gift-giving missions to monitor and support friendly relations.
They became more hostile to expeditions after some fishermen were killed on the island and recovery teams attempted to use helicopters to rescue the bodies before the islanders could bury them.
As they should. That is how people maintain generations-long connections to ancestors and group history, whether it be an oral tradition in songs or stories or a set of written tales.
Or maybe they rape and beat their woman, suffer from high infant mortality and often die excruciating deaths after moderate injuries like a broken arm or cut.
That sounds familiar. They are also antivaxxers in a way. And after the raping they probably also don’t allow their women to go for abortions. They definitely meed an orange haired god! Let’s go for it!
If you're hoping to fill the open position vacated by bible-thumping Jesus I'm sorry to inform you that the position will apparently remain open for the forseeable future.
Perhaps your skills are more useful in Texas or in the southern US where I understand that problems like you describe are trending up.
People connect through story. The stories that connect the most people over the greatest timescales have all been myths—or developed into them over generations.
Augustus Caesar commissioned the Aeneid for this exact reason: Rome needed a founding story, a connection to the Universal History of the world that it stepped into and inherited.
The "Matter of Britain" has captivated England for a thousand years, even though its obvious Arthur and Camelot never existed in any way similar to those stories.
The Jewish people have celebrated the Passover for over 3000 years based on their connection to a story.
> the mariners who found themselves on the island did not make a very good first impression as representatives of the larger outside world and that this contributed to the hostility towards outsiders that the Sentinelese exhibit.
The bad reputation that us outsiders have probably traces all the way back to the British intrusion into the island back in the XIXth century:
Thanks for that link. It doesn't reflect well on the British. A lot of colonial powers had similar interactions with people they encountered leaving large parts of many cultures destroyed by the changes they were forced to make.
Well unlike some invaders like Mughals to Indian subcontinent, the Brits never intended to settle overseas, definitely not in India. They went everywhere to loot, destroy, and leave when there was nothing more to loot or it was too tough to maintain control.
The fact that their level of innovation is on par with (ours - 2k years) reflects poorly on them, doesn't it? What is the end game, keep living like neanderthals until sea levels rise and they all swim or paddle away?
There is no requirement that every culture evolve at the same pace and reach the same level of sophistication. Many cultures have reached a quiet, local equilibrium with their environment, having gained an understanding of everything around them and how best to utilize it for the success of the group.
Unfortunately some are extinct now because of the idea that they are somehow less advanced than they should be considering the environment that their culture occupied upon first contact with their more technologically advanced human relatives.
OT:
Gosub100, that's pretty BASIC and gave me a chuckle. It's been a long time since I thought about BASIC. The days where you would buy a computer and pick the programming language and OS that you want to use with it passed a long time ago. Maybe it's what we really need today though.
On one hand this, on the other, being born there is a live sentence. The thought that somewhere exists a kid just like I was, but his fate is to pick roots and other local equilibrium things, all his life… bitter. He’ll never learn about gosub or for-next. If I were among the people who send aid, the first thing I’d send was ‘80s-style OS tablets with infographic manuals how to make games and bulky batteries with solar panels to run these. Because parents have taken me on an “island” in the summer and there was nothing to do except to socialize with clearly criminal peers and the internet was not a thing.
Yet it was exactly this line of thinking that led to, as one example, the Stolen Generations in Australia, and similar atrocities around the world. Maybe they don’t need our saving.
Still OT but a nice segue that jogs my memories of the first PCs that I had available. A friend's Dad bought him a Compaq Deskpro that looked a lot like a portable sewing machine with QuickBASIC and my parents bought me a 128k Mac and QuickBASIC for the Mac. We jointly developed software using QuickBASIC that ran under Apple's System5? OS and various DOSes in PC land (DRDOS, OS/2, DOS2-5, Windows 286 and 3.1, etc).
I think that if you initiated your plan to send those tablets, etc that you should consider sending late 90's model tablets (there weren't many tablet style computers until the 90's I think) with period correct software since a lot of the personal computers, OSes and programming languages available for the 80's rigs required use of multiple disks due to memory and hard drive space constraints.
Far too many times I would be in the middle of an operation and be met with a prompt to load a specific disk from the set of disks for the software that I was using so that the software could perform some operation that wouldn't fit in memory on the disks that had already been read. If you passed them around to kids today they might quickly lose interest in the process. You could of course use those old school PCs to help teach them something of computer architecture and operations so that they can more easily grasp the functionality than if they were handed modern rigs with huge hard drives and zero disk space issues so that things run so quickly there is no time to teach about Disk I/O, clock speeds, etc.
> On one hand this, on the other, being born there is a live sentence. The thought that somewhere exists a kid just like I was, but his fate is to pick roots and other local equilibrium things, all his life… bitter.
You're judging the possible happiness of someone in a completely different geography and culture according to your own.
Just because you depend on wifi for your happiness, that doesn't mean everyone does.
The hypothetical kid probably has excellent, fulfilling relationships with his family and friends, probably feels satisfied with a meal of fish that you couldn't even imagine how good it tastes, is content with the sounds of nature, singing, staring into a fire and telling stories. Perhaps he can trap, kill and prepare an animal for eating and enjoys the esteem of his peers for doing so.
He doesn't owe rent. He doesn't need insurance. He doesn't worry about getting to work 5 minutes late, or working overtime, or whether the apples are "organic" or contaminated with pesticides, his parents are always home -- and probably his whole village or tribe are his family and teachers.
That kid has his own way of being happy and fulfilled and content, just as valid -- and perhaps more so -- than yours.
Ignoring the fact that our own level of "innovation" as you call it is built on centuries of brutal exploitation of land and resources and people.
And the "sea level rise" you mention is a consequence of that "innovation", and our enlightened culture keeps building houses next to the sea using energy sources that contribute to the rising sea-level.
Very little of what you buy these days is what it costs (a) to manufacture it and (b) to dispose of it. Where are those costs bourne? Slaves for (a) and the future and other-peoples-back-yards for (b).
So, I would say that their culture is sustainable, and doesn't have even one percent of our own self-inflicted, self-destructive, intractable problems.
Anyone know the story of this shipwreck? Wikipedia says that "Nineveh, an Indian merchant ship, was wrecked on a reef near the island" in 1867 - is this it?
I have my doubts because a) this shipwreck is not "near" the island, it's practically ashore on the island and b) the wreck looks reasonably intact. Wouldn't a submerged, 150-year old wooden ship have completely rotted away by now?
Thanks for doing something I should've done myself. Popping out to Google Maps gives a higher resolution view of the island and with that one can easily pick out a network of trails around the island though I haven't seen clear indications of settlements yet. I think you can even see on the east side of the island at least one man-made fish trap similar to those found in other parts of the world.
It's clear that they travel all over the island making use of the resources available. I wonder whether anyone has reported seeing them swim. Some of the trails lead to small inlets and across to small islets on the perimeter which are now isolated from the main island.
Anyway, thanks for this post. It enhances the comment above.
According to the book that I have been reading that was linked in a reply that has since been deleted, North Sentinel Island is relatively flat and has a coral base, unlike the other Andaman Islands which are remnants of an eroded and submerged island chain that existed offshore of Burma, Thailand, etc.
The vegetation also is different in that the trees are very tall and the canopy restricts light to the extent that there is not as much undergrowth on NSI as on neighboring islands so it is likely that any structures they build from the available wood are concealed under the forest canopy.
There are quite a few trails visible on Google Earth and each tails out in the forest not far off of the beaches though some are visible in areas noted on the maps as being marshes. Very interesting place but from the history documented in the book, it is pretty clear that the inhabitants wish to be left alone and that contact with outsiders has caused them and natives on neighboring islands much hardship since first contact several centuries ago.
One noteworthy thing is that it is simply not accurate to characterize them as uncontacted. It is better to describe them as isolated and vulnerable and therefore worthy of any protections we can offer even if that means to leave them to their own devices.
The book was written after the great Christmas quake and tsunami in 2004 and is partially available thru the wayback machine. [0] There's a lot to take in and some chapters don't exist there but it is a deep rabbit hole to tumble into. Very interesting stuff with a nice accounting of historical contacts with people on many of the islands out there.
They are hostile to outsiders because they have no immunity to modern diseases and in the past, each time someone tried to contact them a lot of them died.
This probably plays into their desire to remain isolated. If every time some wanderer landed on their island a lot of their people died then it makes sense that they would not welcome anyone from outside.
If I should ever find myself in a line like that I will be sure to remember to ask any observers if they are or if they know tolerance. Perhaps then we can have this conversation covering any subjects that you find interesting and in the process conjure enough of a distraction for the guards that we might make our escape to the freedom that we both no doubt deserve.
This was very interesting info and the site design is awesome.
We always dream of going to distant planets and stars but Earth itself has so many weird, beautiful, and interesting places.
I’ve added “living for an extended period of time, eg a year on Devon Island” to my list of To Do Someday list! Sure, it drops to -50C, but living there alone would be closest to being The Martian.
Is there any way to live there self sufficiently you think? Assume you have money to buy latest tech and bring it there: a few m^2 of solar cells, battery, small hut made of highly insulating material. What else?
It's not clear that anyone ever lived there in a self sufficient manner:
An outpost was established at Dundas Harbour in 1924, and it was leased to Hudson's Bay Company nine years later. The collapse of fur prices led to the dispersal of 52 Baffin Island Inuit families on the island in 1934. It was considered a disaster due to wind conditions and the much colder climate, and the Inuit chose to leave in 1936. Dundas Harbour was populated again in the late 1940s, but it was closed again in 1951. Only the ruins of a few buildings remain today.
The fur trapping may have been sustained by barrels of pickled fish and the Inuit families that remained left within 24 months following economic collapse.
Today, with a cash injection, training for Mars, Moon, Asteroids, it's been attempted a few times (see Wikipedia).
You'd want energy storage for the long dark, well insulated greenhouses for the short growing season, small animals for company and perhaps heat and food, it's a tough environment.
A big challenge to living there indefinitely with no resupply is growing food during the dark times. You might get by with enough wind turbines to power artifical grow lights.
A related, really excellent book: Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky. I see that the hardcover is now $66, which is unfortunate because that's the way to read it. It's beautiful!
Regarding Tristan da Cunha. I've been meaning to read “Three years in Tristan da Cunha by Katherine Mary Barrow”, see https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/8213. It's a first-hand account, written in a diary format with dated entries, providing a look at life in this remote British settlement during the early 1900s.
I love it. This is so my thing! I've spent hours and hours on the map virtually, hopping around weird random islands and atolls.
I'm obsessed with weird Islands, and I've been to many: in the Caribbean, Mauritius, Cannarys, Madeiras, Malta, Antarctica, Svalbard, and many across SE Asia.
If I were a billionaire, I'd be on my boat headed there just to see what it's like. There's nothing there, but it looks amazing from above. I've seen a few videos of people visiting it, but I still want to go there.
Try millionaire. If you were a billionaire your whole conscience would have been snuffed into lifelessness from all the economic exploitation you've engaged in to get there, and thus you wouldn't be able to find any deep meaning in the experience
No one deserves or can benefit from $1B beyond the shimmera of delusional self-aggrandizement
Here's a question I have that maybe one of the random experts we have on HN can answer:
In Castaway, Tom Hanks estimates that for the searchers to find him, they'd have to be searching an area the size of Texas. I think later Helen Hunt says he was even farther out of their search zone than he thought.
But let's just say it's the size of Texas or even twice the size of Texas. Are there so many tiny islands in that part of the Pacific that you can't just do a quick fly-by of all of them to see if someone has written HELP on the beach?
Are there islands that size that we're on any maps in 2000? Seems unlikely with satellite imagery.
Parts of the Pacific are littered with uninhabited atolls. Even a few decades ago, it was plausible to find yourself on one unlikely to be visited for many years.
An issue with satellite imagery is that it is focused on areas where people want to take pictures. Vast regions of the Pacific rarely if ever have satellite photographs taken at sufficient resolution to see anything a castaway does for the simple reason that nothing is there that would incentivize anyone to expend the cost of taking a picture. I used to have a global model of satellite imagery coverage based on actual imagery catalogs and much of the Pacific was barren.
Well, I enjoyed my last 20 minutes perusing such hidden gems as "christmas island", "just room enough island", and my personal favorite - "the world's most recursive island" in Canada.
That's great, thanks for the read. I feel like there should be a bounty for finding Moose Boulder now (at the end of the story the adventurer is headed back at some point just to be sure he didn't miss it on his first go-round where he was undoubtedly pre-occupied with being terribly lost). I'm sure that bounty would never be claimed... but never say never.
The wikipedia page for the Tristan da Cuhna island is really interesting. It is amazing that a small population was able to survive there over such a large period of time with just occasional ship access (sometimes years apart).
These isolated populations have higher incidence of genetic diseases. From the Wikipedia page you cited:
There are instances of health problems attributed to endogamy, including glaucoma. In addition, there is a very high (42%) incidence of asthma among the population, and research by Noe Zamel of the University of Toronto has led to discoveries about the genetic nature of the disease. Three of the original settlers of the island had asthma.
Thank you for this. I too am a lover of islands. It seems like a strange thing to be fascinated with, but glad to see there there are others out there!
Inchconnachan is one of the more interesting desert islands I came across while living in Scotland. My introduction to its local inhabitants, expat Antipodeans like myself, was wildly unexpected.
A fascinating story is Middle Percy Island [0] off the coast of Far North Queensland. A family friend knew the man that acquired the island in 2001 for $10, under murky circumstances to say the least [1]. I believe the family of the original caretaker successfully got a court to intervene, but I'm not sure what the state of any of it is today. Most of the saga is chronicled here [2].
Everything else aside, seems like owning an island is _hard_.
I went to Paris around 1992 to visit an ancient library where they had centuries old maps of obscure, remote and 'lost' islands. The experience of searching through the old Atlasses and roaming the buildings was almost as interesting as hunting down the maps of the remote islands themselves. This was all pre-internet. Years later I used early versions of online and Google maps and researched the islands again.
A Dutch writer[1] wrote 5 books on obscure remote islands[2] he was fascinated by. Later he made lots of documentairies[3] visiting the islands. There must be translations and subtitles by now but I didn't search for them.
Later Dutch and British documentairy makers followed in Büch's footsteps and visited almost all of these remote islands. I collected at least 200 hours of these.
Noteworthy are Ben Fogle and Floortje Dessing, even some by David Attenborough.
Since I build the first public internet provider I got involved in building cheap fiber optic submarine cables to several of these remote islands. I developed a technique orders of magnitudes cheaper than regular submarine cables because island can't afford the hunderds of millions they cost. My techniques only cost around a million or less. Only Starlink and it successors can compete with my cheap solutions but only just, as they also cost several millions per island to sustain.
The island books have the Dutch word 'eiland' in the title so you can find all 5 if you search the wikipedia page.
You can then download the books with the 5 ISBN codes from Anna's Archive. The books are mostly based on historical library materials, not on actual visits.
Also, the Diomede islands are not the only ones in close proximity but on opposite sides of the International Date Line. Samoa (UTC+13) and American Samoa (UTC-11) are even more extreme, being 24 hours apart, i.e. in the "same" time zone but on different days.
Vulcan point in the Taal Crater is my favorite recursive island. It’s an island in a lake on an island in a lake on a big island in the ocean (the Philippines).
Another very interesting one, the only Hawaiian island no one can visit. Barely inhabited, funded by a wealthy family, with weird military connections. Also had a weird WW2 death https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau
A dear friend sent me this years ago and, more than any other book (maybe tied with https://ldngraffiti.co.uk/media/street-fonts) it has brought me and many visitors great joy and inspiration.
Adding a fact to Midway island: it is part of the Hawaiian archipelago, and all the islands in the chain both before it and after it are part of the Hawaiian state, but Midway is not. It is considered an 'insular area'.
In the notes about St Tristan de Cunha, “youngest English accent” does that mean the most recently split from England accents? Does that exclude Antarctic English?
Tristan's isolation is also the reason it has the world's youngest English accent, which is notably distinct from standard British English.
Scientists did live on it for a period of time and there's photographs of the building structures and an old tractor.
The lagoon is full of sharks.
And in 1974, a couple was murdered on their sailing yacht and they captured the murderer who sailed, docked and repainted the vessel in Hawaii. One of the victims remains were years later discussed on the island which led to the murder trial.
Another cool island, which I discovered when watching episode #89 of SV Delos on Youtube, is Salomon Atoll in the Chagos Archipelago. It is a British Indian Ocean Territory, and near the Diego Garcia military facility run by USGOV.
When I was a kid, we had an old Reader’s Digest atlas with historical world maps on the endpapers (Australia was connected to Antarctica on this map). There was an island in the southern Indian Ocean labeled “Los Romeros” which I decided must be the floating island from Doctor Doolittle and I became obsessed with it, finding an island in approximately the same location now named Kerguellen Island. I used to dream of creating a Utopian colony there with its own constructed language, university and socialist economy.
If you look at the Wikipedia article for Kerguellen Island, you will see that I never fulfilled that dream.
Here's a really interesting sort-of-blog about a trip across the Indian Ocean in 2002. Kerguellen Island is one of the stops. https://www.farvoyager.com/siov/
Is Ailsa Craig "obscure"? Every Glaswegian, many Irish, aficionados of curling the world over would know of it. It's probably been passed by more people than most of the others.
Like Bass Rock on the east coast the temptation to use it as a prison was too much to resist.
I discovered a natural, tropical island which really exists, has good height above water and is available for purchase but is not visible on Google Maps satellite view.
You'd need a place near the equator, preferably unsettled but still politically stable. A mountain would be nice to shorten the length, but mountains are difficult.
For my internal fantasy I settled on Ascension Island, part of a British Overseas Territory, at 7.5° South.
It's not natively settled, the only people there are for work, military, spooks, space agencies for tracking and telecommunications. With the arrival of European explorers there was an ecological extinction, mostly the island seems to be barren.
And the name, of course, is perfect for a space elevator fantasy.