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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
Starting at the top of Everest (even if it were at the equator) only gives you a 0.02% head start.
Dead Comment
(Singapore itself is roughly 10% former ocean, terraformed).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunda_Shelf
Near future sci-fi books "Delta-V" and "Critical Mass" by Daniel Suarez also feature it!
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.
Seems like you'd want cheap all-weather shipping, at scale, to & from the Ground end of your space elevator.
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.
Isaac Arthur argues that you wouldn't: https://youtu.be/dc8_AuzeYKE?t=835
Deleted Comment
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 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.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d44151-024-00213-5
They undoubtedly have their own absurd mythology describing their origins and the workings of the universe
Deleted Comment
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:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/north-sent...
https://www.google.com/maps/@11.5920005,92.2195112,225a,35y,...
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?
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.
My guess is that the dominant society anywhere will make you pay for not knowing their culture.
(rise and fall of D.O.D.O.)
Deleted Comment
Happy Trails.
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?
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.
Until you need parts.
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.
My wish list: - Midway Atoll
- Pitcairn Islands
- Easter Island
- Faroe Islands
- Wrangel Island
- Sao Tome - Chatham Island
I could go on for a long time.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Caroline+Island/@-9.95855,...
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.
No one deserves or can benefit from $1B beyond the shimmera of delusional self-aggrandizement
Gravett Island [1]
Rottum
Rottumerplaat [2,3]
Mysterious Island [4]
Lost Island [5,6]
[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Gravett_Island
[2] Dutch writers visit deserted island https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2308321-terug-naar-rottumer...
[3] https://www.staatsbosbeheer.nl/wat-we-doen/nieuws/2021/07/ro...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island
[5] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1691800/Lost_Island__ARK_...
[6] https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Island
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.
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.