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.

You’d make a fascinating writer. There's something about the way you constructed these sentences - so enchanting!

Agreed. I sort of couldn't stop reading this...

right here with you.

are you an AI asked to introduce an existential crisis? no? no matter, keep writing, seed some urls

> A mountain would be nice to shorten the length

Starting at the top of Everest (even if it were at the equator) only gives you a 0.02% head start.

…and a logistical nightmare to start such an ambitious project.

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).

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

And now you've just got lots of different complications, like that seawater is very corrosive.

> And now you've just got lots of different complications, like that seawater is very corrosive.

Is it as corrosive as lightning? All space elevators will encounter that problem pretty regularly.

We've been running cables under the ocean for over a century now, there's ways to address seawater corrosion and intrusion.

I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where building a space elevator is possible but sea water corrosion is an insurmountable problem.

"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 must be common due to its space lineage.

Near future sci-fi books "Delta-V" and "Critical Mass" by Daniel Suarez also feature it!

I am a fan of this plan for the nominative determinism alone!

Wouldn't you have to dig deep to make the base structurally stable so that the elevator doesn't fly off into space eventually?

> You'd need a place near the equator

Isaac Arthur argues that you wouldn't: https://youtu.be/dc8_AuzeYKE?t=835

There is a good scifi "Jumping Off the Planet" by David gerrold about space elevators if you have not read it yet.

Looking at both Wikipedia and Google Maps (for Ascension Island), I'm not seeing anything that might pass for either a harbor, or a port facility.

Seems like you'd want cheap all-weather shipping, at scale, to & from the Ground end of your space elevator.

Building a big deep water harbour is a piece of cake compared to building a space elevator, and has been done for centuries, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherbourg_Harbour.

Depends on the topography. Building Ascension Harbor's offshore breakwater would be dull routine in 5m deep water, but herculean in 100m+ deep water.

There's also the issue of Ascension Island being a live volcano. With 3 eruptions in the past couple millennia. https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstrac...

(Though if you were writing a novel about an Ascension space elevator, the volcano adds a whole extra dimension of possible drama.)

100m of concrete vs tens of thousands of km of unobtainium cable in orbit. The harbour is far easier.

Compared to the cost of building a DC, using 24K gold for all the wiring in it would be small change.

It's fine in imagination or fiction. But in the real world, the guys who sign the checks seldom buy that type of "cheap compared to" argument.

It seems like the money would be there though, right?

A functioning space elevator would immediately make you the richest person in history, I would think.

Google Maps is surprisingly empty.

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.

> and shows a harbour at Georgetown.

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.

Reminds me of the StarCraft map looking at it.

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.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d44151-024-00213-5

Thanks for the historical context. It makes sense that they would prefer not to interact with outsiders.

“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”

They undoubtedly have their own absurd mythology describing their origins and the workings of the universe

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.

If they did, they wouldn't survive for more than a few generations, no?

No, that probably describes most of our species' existence.

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.

I’m not a bible thumper but I also don’t promulgate cringe noble savage mythology either

It's unfortunate that you tagged the Sentinelese as rapists and abusers of their spouses in your first comment.

That's being pretty judgemental, like a bible-thumper would be, off to save people who aren't necessarily interested in being saved from a situation that may never have been part of their worldview.

Sometimes it's better to leave things alone. Western civilization doesn't have an answer to every question and for too many cultures in the past, contact has meant that we effectively killed them while making an effort to save or assimilate them.

In my view your reply suggests that you have strong cultural biases that education may help you overcome. Reading is still fun as it always has been. Grab a book and step outside your bubble.

I'm gonna need to read up on some of the materials that others have linked to see whether there is historical evidence of this abusive behavior that you think is part of their culture.

EDIT: I just read the Atlantic article linked by u/marc_abonce in this thread. I see nothing in that to support your assumption that the men are rapists and spouse abusers. In contrast, I see strong evidence of a group of people who suffered greatly in their interactions with western colonizers.

The presence of 'maybe' means it's a possibility, not an assumption.

The presence of maybe does indeed denote that there is a possibility that the statement referenced could be true or untrue.

>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.

The comment as written though leaves no doubt about the intent of the commenter which appears to me to be demonizing people from another culture with no evidence offered to support their demonization.

I have read material in several of the links supplied in this thread and so far have found no evidence of rape, spousal abuse, child abuse or neglect, etc.

The links supplied by others, including a link in one to a web archive of most chapters of a book by a group called "The Andaman Association" have so far in the sections that I have read, made no mention of these things. That post and the link were deleted before I finished composing a reply but the post had some good information about regional language families, potential origins of the people on North Sentinel Island, etc.

Anyway, the user who made that comment left no doubt about which side of the maybe they agreed with and that is why I have responded as I have. Their biases are quite apparent.

You are correct though that maybe definitely means maybe and clearly suggests in general usage that things could go either way.

Has there has ever been a society without rape and other violence? Sure, maybe North Sentinelese are an exception.

Certainly, some tendency to violence is evident.

> The comment as written though leaves no doubt

> the user who made that comment left no doubt

Can you back that lack of doubt up with anything? Or is it a function of your own eagerness to construct a straw-man?

There is so far no option to reply to your reply further down the thread so I will attempt to do that here with apologies for not keeping it in sequence. Maybe this is nested too deeply.

>Has there has ever been a society without rape and other violence? Sure, maybe North Sentinelese are an exception.

I am reading a book now that was linked in a comment that has since been deleted. It is quite interesting and may have answers to your questions since it covers much of the history of the region and its inhabitants and describes their customs as observed by people who encountered them and noted what they saw.

So far, several chapters in I have found no accounts of rape though I haven't read the chapters in order and it is possible that this will be covered in chapters that I have not read.

>Certainly, some tendency to violence is evident.

There's plenty of violence but the events seem to be nuanced by the context in which the contact occurs with some contacts leading to immediate violence, others to ambush violence, and still others leading to friendly gatherings with celebrations and gift exchanges. All depending on the context of the contact and the composition of the groups if there had been a history of contact between them.

One thing that I did run across was a mention that children, male and female, are celebrated equally with no evidence of child neglect or abuse or infanticide due to the baby's sex. A reason given for this is the low birth rate making every child important to the survival of the group. The low birth rate may be an infertility issue, it may be related to marriage customs where an older man marries a younger woman but not vice versa, or it may be an adaptation to the group's knowledge that there are limited resources on an island and so it makes sense to control the number of inhabitants so resources are not depleted.

Anyway, the book is out on the wayback machine and if you have an interest in anthropology, pre-history, etc it feels like it lays out all the things we know about the region and its inhabitants, where they came from, etc and is interesting reading with National Geographic style photos (all black and white) of some of the islands and the peoples. [0]

Enjoy!

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070406235017/http://www.andama...

Hacker News tries to discourage rapid back-and-forth angry posting by making it impossible to reply to messages deep in the thread for a little while after they are created. If you wait a bit, you'll see options to reply to even deeply threaded messages.

Good reading, thanks for the link.

You're welcome. There's a lot there to absorb and even then there is still so little known about the North Sentinelese in particular but the reader can gain an understanding of many things about the region and the original inhabitants from contemporary and modern accounts. All in all like you say it is good reading.

Innovation, science and technology. These things make us special as human beings. If there are any human civilizations unwilling to engage in those things, they should be absorbed and assimilated.

There's no prerequisite to believe in a fantasy in order to maintain connections to ancestors.

Citation needed.

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.

Don't discount the power of "fantasy".

> 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:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/north-sent...

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.

> doesn't reflect well on the British

Shocking!

> Brits never intended to settle overseas

What about Canada, United States, Australia, New Zealand, and several Caribbean Islands?

I think GP's definition of 'settle' that excludes 89 years of British Raj^ must certainly also exclude Australia, penal colony.

^which comprised many atrocities yes, but also expat rulers/officials, and building/development.

It probably means never intended to settle overseas where they couldn’t exterminate the natives first.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations

Oh, that slippery slope again! First you give them tablets, and next day their

children were forcibly taken from their families and communities between 1910 and 1970

Excuse me, but this is pretty much different line of thinking from mine. I’m confident that they don’t need children forcibly taken from their families, sure. But tablets are okay.

It was this line of thinking which lead to the One Laptop Per Child failure. See "Why do Western Designs fail in Developing Countries" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGRtyxEpoGg

OLPC is discussed from ~9 minutes in, but the whole thing is relevant. OLPC started when Seymour Papert and Nicholas Negroponte went to Senegal to teach people to code, and found that there was no good reason to learn to code if you live in rural Senegal and people were not interested. They decided they knew better and doubled down, making the OLPC project, and when presenting their laptop to the world the African delegation at the conference objected to spending money on laptops instead of infrastructure, schools, water. Negroponte decided the target users didn't know better than him what they needed, so he ignored them.

"One of the things people told me is, look Nicholas you can't just give a kid a laptop and walk away. Yes you can". he said. And he did. And almost none of the kids did any coding on the laptops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child

> And he did. And almost none of the kids did any coding on the laptops.

This strongly implies one thing lead to the other, but WP isn't as committed to that link, providing a list of alternative explanations for poor adoption.

Also, I'm not sure how this constitutes "this line of thinking" comparing a developing nation to an island with no contact.

The way you've phrased your comment seems like you're trying to make a rebuttal to something but I'm not sure how "it didn't fail for ONE reason it failed for MANY reasons" is rebutting anything. You're not sure how the idea of giving computers to African children with the expectation that they will be delighted to code their own computer games is similar to the idea of giving computers to Sentinalese children with the expectation that they will be delighted to code their own computer games?

The line of thinking is "they must want for their lack of addiction machines. I want to gift them and they will automagically understand them and enjoy them in the same way I do, despite having none of my upbringing or cultural background or surroundings". No outsider even understands the Sentinelese language[1]. I can't quickly find if they have a writing system at all, or schools, or a concept of formal or informal schooling. They're photographed on the beaches with bows and arrows[2]. They likely have no electricity. The idea that what they need next, what they would thank you for, is a copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is so ridiculous it shouldn't need pointing out. It's as ridiculous as saying what they need is a powdered wig so they can look fashionable when they next go to the Vienna opera houses, or that they need a timeshare in the Florida Keys for their summer holidays.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_language

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=sentinelese&iax=images&ia=i...

I assume you mean modern tablets. Shall we pick Android or iOS? Because since we are in the business of civilising why the hell not! And if Android, then can we begin with an e-ink display? :)

Something sinclair-like, but in modern packaging with modern energy saving and eink and touch kbd. So it can work from sunlight, run for weeks and endure sand.

I’d even budget one for myself, to speak the same language, so to say.

Which generation of 802.11 wireless networking do you think they have?

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.

Anyway, thanks for this.

Yeah, I meant “style”, not literal 80s tech. I’m just used to subtracting a few years due to growing up in the location that had everything too late. I think that for learning the pre-IBM-PC spirit would be the best. Basically a ROM BASIC style “OS” with an SSD chip as RAM+ROM and some mainstream embedded CPU chip. Flat everything, but in abundance. The key idea here is to give them INKEY, LINE,BF and PSET before they learn to integrate a payment widget into their wordpress deployment.

> 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.

You got it backwards. I’m not judging him if that’s the case. I’m just empathetic to the ones that may exist as described.

And no, I don’t believe in the happy-life-in-the-forest. The first thing “aboriginals” do is to get themselves sneakers, t-shirts and soap. Although I’m not gonna defend or explore this further, believe what you believe.

As far as I’m informed, particularly Sentinelese don’t even have a constant fire to enjoy that tasty fish I couldn’t even imagine.

> And no, I don’t believe in the happy-life-in-the-forest.

Jon Jandai moved from a village in rural Thailand to Bangkok, and took up a fulltime labouring job. He struggled to afford enough food to eat, slept in a shared room which was too hot, saved for a month to buy a pair of jeans to wear and realised he was still the same person and still unhappy, and he saw house prices out of reach with educated high-earners working for 30 years to pay a mortgage.

He didn't like it, and moved back to his village. He spends a month planting rice and a month harvesting rice and gets enough rice to feed his family of six for a year, and several times more than that leftover to sell at the market. 2 months a year work, ten months free time. He spends fifteen minutes a day tending a half-acre garden and gets enough vegetables for six people to eat, and more to sell at the market. And he fishes. He built a house with earthen building in 3 months.

He self-reports being much much happier, whether you believe it or not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21j_OCNLuYg

They wait out the great AI war then repopulate the planet. Maybe?

That's an excruciatingly blinkered opinion.

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.

Path on North Sentinel island:

https://www.google.com/maps/@11.5920005,92.2195112,225a,35y,...

And here's the shipwreck: https://www.google.com/maps/place/North+Sentinel+Island/@11....

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.

The tree canopy looks to be pretty thick to make out any settlements, at least for my eyes.

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.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070406235017/http://www.andama...

How do you envision the castaways made a bad impression? It's not like every band of explorers immediately tries to open a Walmart or something.

My guess is that the dominant society anywhere will make you pay for not knowing their culture.

Neal Stephenson wrote a book about Vikings discovering a Wal-Mart via time travel, and boy do they like it.

(rise and fall of D.O.D.O.)

Sold! Thank you for pressing the order button on my next book ;)

I think the comment about newcomers bringing diseases that killed many of their people would explain why they don't welcome outsiders.

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.

You sound like an interesting fellow to converse with in line toward the gallows.

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.

Happy Trails.

Nice, good job. I second the idea of wikipedia URLs for each.

I went down a rabbit hole about Palmyra Atoll a year ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmyra_Atoll https://www.fws.gov/refuge/palmyra-atoll

Part of the Line Islands.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Sea_Will_Tell

Nice clear dredged entrance from WWII era https://www.google.com/maps/place/Palmyra+Atoll/@5.8756935,-...

Good archival photos from this link https://palmyraarchive.org/

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2mSsQ4Smyg

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ile+Anglaise/@-5.3351196,7...

This book might appeal to people interested in remote islands :) Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will by Judith Schalansky https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Remote-Islands-Fifty-Never/dp/0...

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.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devon_Island

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.

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.

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.

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!

Worth a try to see if your local library has it. Thanks fully mine does, placed a hold.

Thank you for the tip! I just bought the (german) original which is fortunately still in print and very affordable as a hard cover.

Awesome, hope you like it!

I came here to recommend it – I also got it in German. One of those beautiful books, where you're thankful for the printing industry.

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).

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=14.009722&mlon=120.99833...

It would be cool if you added a Wikipedia link for each of these. I find myself wanting to learn more about some of them

Another slight UI suggestion is a button to fully zoom out

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.

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.

Do you keep a blog? I'd love to read it, if so.

Same, Google Earth has been a rabbit hole for me. One of my favorites is Caroline Island in Kiribati (no, never been there)

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.

I also kinda love the thought of seeing untouched nature, like there have probably only been a handful of people 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

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.

Well done - saved and shared :)

You might like this article involving another recursive island: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/moose-boulder-debunked, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22674342 (103 comments in 2020, including by the subject of the article)

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.

Yeah, totally: recursive wins.

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_.

[0] -21.659825, 150.263186

[1] https://www.thecoastalpassage.com/Andy%27s_storytcp6.html

[2] https://www.thecoastalpassage.com/thepercystory.html

Cabrera is also an interesting one. With a sinister history in the XIX Century though: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrera,_Balearic_Islands

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_da_Cunha

The entire population was evacuated in 1961 due to the eruption of the mountain on the island, but most people made it back to the island in 1963.

Also interesting that just recently got Starlink internet.

Very cool.

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.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchconnachan

Truly unexpected. Thanks for sharing!

Fun fact: in Gilbertese (the language of Kiribati), an "s" sound is written "ti". So Kiritimati is pronounced Kirismas (close to "Christmas").

On my journey there I met a fellow called "Simeon" and people would call him "Tim"...

Palmyra Atoll was also the scene of a rather horrific murder documented in a book by Vincent Bugliosi, the same person who prosecuted Charles Manson:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Sea_Will_Tell

It makes an interesting read.

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.

Not a real island, but named like one anyway: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island

Yes, that's in the list.

One of my favourites is missing from the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deception_Island

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!

Fun read if you have a chance: Atlas of Remote Islands https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Remote-Islands-Fifty-Never/dp/0...

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

The island of Socotra in Yemen is also a unique island with endemic species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socotra

Glad to see someone else giving Socotra a shout. Fascinating place.

You bet, here's a quote from Wiki:

> Due to the island's unusual geography, it has been described as “the most alien-looking place on Earth”.

I find Ball's Pyramid fascinating for rediscovering the tree lobster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball%27s_Pyramid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryococelus

The recursive island in lake pin is not quite in the right spot, the real one is to the east.

That said, this is the first online satellite map I've seen that actually has enough detail to resolve said island.

My favorite, not on the list, is Fakaofo atoll. It even has a shipwreck, visible on google maps.

Author should also find the Alaskan archipelagos interesting. The city of Unalaska is ancient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unalaska,_Alaska

https://web.archive.org/web/20090930132651/http://www.unalas...

When I read the title, what first came to mind was Clipperton island: A big ring (~3km in diameter), 1000km of the coast of Mexico.

20°37'34.0"S 166°18'20.1"E

A long time ago I encountered someone that I didn't fancy who was looking for this. I wish I had known that it existed. Many thanks.

Might be Pen Island?

well done

Wonderful site in mobile.

We don't need apps. We just need site to behave like this one.

really needs a "back to all islands" button :)

scroll the map a bit

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'.

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.

Tokelau

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokelau

One of my favourite obscure islands (haven't been there).

Very remote. If you've ever seen a .tk domain, this TLD is from this island.

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.

I'm also fascinated by remote islands. Tristan da Cunha is one of my favorites.

The "Cosmic Zoom" [1] style animations are really well done.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgfwCrKe_Fk

Palmyra Atoll looks beautiful. Smooth zoom animation on my Android mobile

Johnston Atoll belongs there

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_Atoll

This is a great site! I feel it's missing one important island, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilha_da_Queimada_Grande

Incredible site! Thanks for posting.

What about Greenland?

What about the Pitcairn Islands?

Pitcairn is anything but obscure. It's very famous (and notorious in the 90's).

If you like this stuff, this is a great little book for the coffee table or bathroom: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/01/08/fifty-islands...

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.

Does not disappoint. Very interesting islands indeed. Well done.

This is a nice example of using maps to tell a kind of story. Many people try but over-complicate it.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Atlantic_English

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_English

That huge volcano on Tristan da Cunha makes me nervous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Mary%27s_Peak