⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️
“Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”
PAMPHLET NUMBER 9: THE MOON
The moon is a big, gray disk in the night sky that gets smaller and smaller until it looks like a clipped toenail right before disappearing completely. It comes back gradually, growing from splinter to disk again, and starts the process over.
THE EXTEMPORANEUM
a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas.
Asteroids
Space is mostly empty. For every cubic centimeter of nothing, space has about 1 atom of hydrogen. Sometimes space has more than that. A whole lot of cubic centimeters of minerals is called an asteroid, and they’re flying through space, minding their own business, until gravity shows up and sends them toward us. Thankfully, earthlings are protected from most by a complex defense grid, a wholly accidental, happenstance pinball board of gravity wells and eccentric orbits known as the solar system. The moon is part of that defense grid. More good news for us: an asteroid with earth’s name on it has to hit a very small target in a very big field — 49 billion square miles. On its way to our little planet, it is tossed and spun among our big buddies Jupiter and his gassy pals named after other gods from the Greek pantheon, and then, if it makes it that close to us without being diverted, encounters our moon.
Luna, the Greek goddess’s name that we picked for our own moon (to distinguish it from all of the other 180 moons in the solar system), is our second-to-last line of defense. Its gravity diverts some of that space debris, which is why it’s so battered and bruised. It takes the hits so we don’t have to.
Our final defense against asteroids is our dense and oxygen-rich atmosphere which is so thick it causes a lot of friction with objects that approach it too fast. I also create a lot of friction when people approach me too fast, but this part isn’t about me. Things that are too big to burn completely up get through, and when they hit the surface cause things like mass extinctions, insane YouTube videos, and mysterious Siberian explosions.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. — Carl Sagan
The Tunguska Event
One thing that got through that defense grid was the comet that struck Siberia in 1908, near an area called Tunguska. Luckily for us humans, it only killed wildlife. Unluckily for trees, it flattened about 80 million of them. The conservative estimate for how strong the explosion was is 15 megatons of TNT, which would make it 1,000 times stronger than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Humans weren’t able to match that destructive power until the US detonated a bomb with roughly the same strength in 1952. These are just abstract numbers on a screen, but let’s examine it in more human terms.
The Tunguska Event covered 770 square miles. Even a glancing blow on any major metropolitan area would vaporize millions of people. Humans had to invent bombs that use nuclear fission to match the frisson of a comet strike.
The impact of a comet on a planet is so common it’s not even worth mentioning, galactically speaking. Something much more interesting happened in the wilderness of Russia, and it’s very spooky.
The Dyatlov Pass Incident
In 1959, Igor Dyatlov asked 9 other students from Ural Polytechnical Institute to join him for a bit of a skiing expedition, a common pastime for people living in the Ural Mountains, where there isn’t much to do that doesn’t involve a) the mountains and b) snow. They were all experienced hikers and familiar with the rugged, rocky, snowy terrain. Upon returning from this expedition, they would each become Grade III mountaineers, the highest possible rating. That would put each of them in the highest skill tier of anybody in the Soviet Union. In other words, and this is important, they knew what they were doing. They also knew how grumpy the weather in the Ural Mountains could get in February, so absolutely none of what happened to them should have happened.
The facts are these: all 9 people (the tenth went back home after unrelated health issues flared up) on this routine skiing expedition died under mysterious circumstances, probably all within 24 hours of each other.
They started on their trek and were making great progress through an unnamed pass in the mountains when the weather got bad enough to make them lose their way for a bit. They realized this error and decided to just stop where they were, on the mountainside, and set up camp there. They had gained some altitude and, since that was kind of the point of the exercise, the leader of the group (after whom the pass was later named, Dyatlov), decided to stop where they were rather retreat into a wooded area 1.5km away that offered better protection against the elements. These were experienced outdoorspeople (two of them were women). They weren’t new to any of this.
The only reason we know anything about their expedition at all is because they had diaries and cameras. This is the last photo on the camera found with the bodies and, well, it’s creepy:
There’s no record of what happened to them or how they died, but 5 bodies were found after the families insisted on a search a month after they were due to arrive at their intended destination. There was one tent in the campsite, which they all shared. There was a hole cut in the tent from within, and two bodies were found a short distance away with the remains of an attempt at creating a fire. Between those bodies, under a tree, and the tent, they found three more bodies. Everybody was severely underdressed for the weather (a couple of them didn’t even have shoes on). The theory was this: something happened that made them all lose their damn minds, cut their way out of the tent, and run into the wilderness. One group of five hid under a tree and tried to make a fire. Three of that group tried to get back to the tent, but collapsed on the way. The little fire wasn’t enough to keep the other two alive and they died, too.
But wait, that’s only five! What happened to the other four? They found those bodies two months later (there was a lot of snow), at the bottom of a nearby ravine. Three of them had massive injuries consistent with a car crash or other force. These folks seem to have lived a bit longer, as some were wearing the clothes of the others, leading naturally to the theory that some had died before the others and the survivors took their clothes in a futile attempt to stay warm.
So what happened? Nobody knows! There are theories. Some of those theories are more plausible than others, but even the most plausible ones seem extremely implausible because of the very nature of the disaster. Here are some theories that have been disproved:
Yeti attack. Besides the fact that yetis aren’t real, there’s no evidence of any animal activity in the area at all.
killed by the local natives, the Mansi. They’re peaceful and there’s no evidence that anybody else was there.
killed each other after a romantic dispute. Nah. They were friends, and the massive wounds were not caused by human hands. That also doesn’t explain why they fled the tent in their underwear.
I invite you to read more about the incident (or, like me, read everything you can about the incident) and come up with your own theories. The one that makes the most sense to me is this:
The Soviet military was known to be testing parachute bombs in the area. That scared the living crap out of them, and they ran for their lives in a blind panic. One of the bombs got too close and the blast mortally injured the three who ended up in the ravine. The survivors in that group didn’t survive long, but long enough to put on some of their clothes in a futile attempt to warm up.
If that weren’t spooky enough, investigators recently exhumed the remains of one of the victims, Semyon Zolotarev (also the oldest of the group, at 38). As records from the Soviet era are unreliable, they confirmed that his wounds were consistent with a big concussive force (like a parachute bomb) and that he shared no DNA relationship with Zolotarev’s known surviving relatives. That means the person who lived in the Ural Mountains area of the USSR and was going by the name Semyon Zolotarev was not that guy at all and had, at some point, replaced him. The leading theory on that mystery is that Fake Semyon knew the real Semyon during the war and stole his identity. VERY SPOOKY.
My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It’s quiet. — Neil Gaiman
Anastasia Romanov
In 1918, the Bolsheviks won a very short civil war and took over the Russian government. Because nobody ever accused the Russians of doing anything halfway, they didn’t just kill the C(t)zar, they murdered his whole family. Well, maybe.
There were immediately rumors that one of them had survived: the youngest daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. That is, until DNA tests on a mass grave known to have the remains of the royal family was tested in 2007 and conclusively proved that she was in there.
Ten women claimed to be Anastasia over the years, the most famous of whom was Anna Anderson. She had a lot of time to claim to be Anastasia, toiling in the German courts from 1938 to 1970, though they eventually decided that she didn’t have enough evidence to prove her claim — that one of the Reds who shot up and stabbed her family noticed she was still alive, took pity on her, and smuggled her out of the area.
The story of Anna Anderson isn’t spooky, it’s just sad. She was hospitalized for a suicide attempt in 1922, and her claims to be Anastasia came after. Nobody who knew the real Anastasia was convinced that Anna was her. As early as 1927, the dead Tsarina’s brother (Anastasia’s uncle) funded an investigation that concluded that this Anastasia was actually a polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska.
Anna died in 1984, never backing down from her claim and supported financially off and on during the intervening years by people who believed her, including her eventual husband, a history professor known as “Charlottesville’s best-loved eccentric.”
DNA won the day again, proving that Anna’s mitochondrial DNA matched that of a relative of Franziska Schanzkowska, and making a lot of people feel pretty dumb about it.
THE RECOMMENDATAE
A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment
One person fascinated by the story of Anna Anderson was known goddess Tori Amos, who wrote and recorded an awesome song about it that you don’t haver to listen to but you should anyway:
Is it because of Steven Spielberg that I love the mixture of suburban simplicity and High Weirdness or did our mutual upbringing in suburban environments foster a love for it in both of us? Who can know? I only know that this love also extends to a man named Simon Stâlenhag, a Swedish painter who combines weirdness and suburbia in his paintings and whose book, The Electric State, is a joy. Joy is good.
COLOPHON
Composed entirely on a notebook computer, often in coffee shops, but finished at home.
Sources:
The Kuiper belt [Wikipedia]
The Tunguska Event [Wikipedia]
The Dyatlov Pass Incident [Vice]
Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia [Wikipedia]
This week was the anniversary of my brain tumor diagnosis. I am happy to be able to write this for you, unfettered by headaches or tumors. <3