Sunday 6:08 PM

just got to antartica :-)

looking at the cores tmmrw

omg

exciting!! wish i was there

good luck!!!

Monday 4:38 AM

ok bear with me

found something weird

???

wtf is that?

some sort of cubic crystal? couple of mm across. we tried hitting it with a hammer and it wouldn't break

was it in one of the ice cores?

ya

there's a bunch of them actually

in the very bottom of the 5000m ice core they just finished

5km down? that's like... 2 million years ish of ice? right?

ya, we're not sure yet, but in that range

we're probaby the first ppl to ever see these. before now the deepest cores were only up to 800k years or so... these are way past that

er

not to belabor the point, but

that doesn't look natural

straight edges and all

and you found a bunch of them underneath 2 million years of ice

you're sure they're not contamination?

definitely

something weird is going on

keep me posted!!

Monday 12:04 PM

arxiv.org The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?

you seen this before? was published a while back hypothesizing about smth like this

hmm interesting

i guess it makes sense that given enough time all the obvious traces of an advanced civilization would erode away

just leaving evidence trapped in ocean sediments and ice cores and other hard to reach, well-preserved places

it's weird though, to think that

a civilization could just disappear

yeah like, assuming they're artificial

to make something like those crystals you'd need thousands of years of history right?

you'd need to invent agriculture, writing. probably have a big bronze-age collapse or two. then rebuilding, scientific triumphs, horrific genocides, great works of art...

all gone and forgotten, save some of your trash frozen at the bottom of an ice sheet

i guess we owe them our best to figure out what happened, right?

yeah

Monday 11:38 PM

we got something back from the analysis

they're DEFINITELY not natural

the crystals are some sort of apatite

but they're magnetic

and they seem to be generating some sort of suspension field

maybe superconducting? or maybe just a very clever smart magnet design?

but the important thing is there's *something* suspended inside each of the crystals

we managed to crack one of the crystals open and whatever was inside just shot off into the sky. some sort of black speck

we have no idea what it was. not opening any more in case it's smth dangerous

OMG

sorry fell asleep for a little bit and just woke up

YOU CRACKED ONE OPEN????

we were curious!!

fair..

still tho

we're not opening any more until we know what it was

do they have all one?

you think the crystal is a container, maybe?

yeah, i think so. they all have the speck in the center, you can see it if you hold the crystal against a light

get some sleep!! i'll let you know if anything happens

Tuesday 3:07 AM

so i didn't go to sleep but

i had an idea

classic

i mean me neither but still

whaddya got?

ok this is gonna sound crazy but

we're already talking ancient aliens and superconductors right

ancient *earthlings*, come on, we're serious scientists here

right...

what if the specks are negative mass?

negative mass repels positive mass, which would explain the weird suspension system, to keep it in place

and why when you broke it, it shot up into the sky--it'd probably be somewhere out in space rn flying away from the sun

ok this was not in my college physics, is that a real thing

er i mean i don't really know either

i just watched a video abt alcubierre drives

it's one of those things that's like, maybe theoretically *possible*, but we have no idea how to make it

but if you could you could do some cool stuff

how could we tell if the specks were negative mass?

hmmmm

it should affect the inertia of the whole crystal, since the speck would have negative inertia

ohhh that makes sense, and would actually explain something

the crystals move kinda weird

we have some in a box and you'd expect them to shake around a lot but instead they kind of... stick?

yeah, that makes sense, like some of the inertia of the positive mass crystal is cancelled out by the negative mass interior...

huh

ok, assuming that then

why would they make a bunch of these negative mass-containing crystal things?

maybe they were building a warp drive lol

...

i'm going to bed

same, night

miss you

Wednesday 2:48 PM

gratz on the preprint

that was fast

it's everywhere

haha yeah phil whipped it up last night

he was terrified of getting scooped like

we're the only ones who know abt this phil!!

but it's nice to be able to talk abt it

have the reporters figured out how to get to antartica yet

haha no but tons of zoom requests

that layer diagram was crazy

all the crystals are in what? like a layer of 5 years?

yeah i guess so. i don't know why, though

why would they make the crystals for 5 years and then stop?

maybe they didn't stop

maybe they left

erin... that's kinda crazy

with this kind of tech, they wouldn't just die out! do you see any silurians around nowadays?

you'd at least expect to see co2, nuclear, *something* to show why they vanished, but instead they make negative mass for 5 years and then they vanish without a trace?

all signs point to warp drive ark

ok, imagining this could be true, what would possibly cause an advanced civilization to abandon their perfectly livable home planet

homo erectus

lines up perfectly

huh... it does, actually

but why would they leave on account of some creatures barely smarter than apes?

they'd gone through an industrial revolution, they knew their own evolution. they'd know an exponential when they saw one, they saw homo sapiens coming

so they left because of some prime directive noninterference policy? that's very humane of them

or siluriane i guess

maybe...

or maybe they were scared

why would they be scared, though? this was a species capable, allegedly, of faster than light travel after all

i don't know if technology counts for as much as we'd like to think

we have our fair share of technology

but we're still at the mercy of nature to grow food, keep the climate stable

sure, but that's pretty different from, idk, "crows are going to kill us all"

is it? we already know crows are pretty smart. what if suddently they got *really* smart? sure, they wouldn't have our technology, but they could steal ours, jerry-rig it, make traps. what if they were really angry at us?

what would we do? *kill every crow on earth?* we can barely eradicate viruses that *only live in humans*. it just wouldn't be possible

we make species go extinct all the time tho

only on accident

like sure we made "beetle that can only live on sap of 13-day old cedar trees" go extinct. but *crows*? *rats*?? never

sure, the silurians had this negative mass, but we could have found that in a particle collider if we got lucky. you need a pretty high tech level before *hostile intelligent species trying to kill you* doesn't matter

but why would early humans be hostile to the silurians?

well, i can pretty easily think of why big-brained crows would be hostile to us

...fair enough

so you think they just saw what was happening and decided it was easier to leave?

seems as likely as anything else

i still think, if we're going with this wacky warp drive thing at all, that they'd choose to leave out of a sense of noninterference. maybe an intelligent species arising would be the kick in the pants we need to realize our priority should be getting off earth and leaving it to our successors

advanced species have the option to live in space or on planets, primitive species can only live on planets. hogging a planet as an advanced species is just kinda rude. like staying in preschool when you're 30

lol, true

could be both? imagine all the preschoolers started stabbing 30-year-old you with plastic forks, would definitely encourage you to move on

sans finding a frozen silurian with a wooden spear in their chest, i guess we'll never know

i guess not

gonna head to sleep, night

night