I had already talked about this book in a previous thread. Now I am going to post it here chapter by chapter, with a commentary.
Chapter 1 (part 1) – Discovery
On July 17th 2022, I was on night shift duty at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station ARA monitoring room. ARA stands for “Askaryan Radio Array”, the unimaginative name of yet another Neutrino detection experiment undertaken by a consortium of mostly American universities. More on this later. The ARA monitoring room is not actually a room. It is just an area inside a fairly large Science lab section of the Amundsen-Scott main building. There, RAs (Research Assistants), like myself, sit in front of a bank of computer monitors, day and night, waiting for something to go wrong with the ARA gear, a set of 37 radio-wave detectors sunk into pits drilled into the South Pole ice crust two kilometers apart from each other over an area as large as downtown San-Francisco. That night, something had indeed gone wrong. At 2:28 am., on one of the screens, a row had turned bright red, indicating that one of the Digitization Daughter Boards (DTD) was no longer responding to SNMP requests and probably needed to be swapped. Faced with the prospect of a lonely snowmobile ride in the dead of night, I did what people do in such circumstances: I yawned, cracked all my fingers one by one, finished my mug of cold coffee, and got onto my feet.
Grabbing a spare DTD from the tech bench, I headed for the main exit airlock, donned my heavy arctic clothing and opened the outside door. The cold was fierce; wind chill at about minus 50 degrees centigrade. The weather was calm. Any hint of a storm and I would have been spared the trip into the cold arctic night. But no. No wind. I had no excuse not to go. The equipment rack with the faulty board was about 8 kilometers away; A 15 minutes snowmobile ride. After driving for a while, I was in total darkness. The lights of the Amundsen-Scott base were no longer visible behind me and the sky was cloudy; there was no Moon nor stars. The powerful headlights of the snowmobile were digging a tunnel into the darkness ahead of me, showing the perfectly straight track leading to the ARA-B-12 equipment cabinet, my destination.
Trying not to fall asleep during this most monotonous of rides, I kept moving my head from side to side to avoid letting my gaze become fixated on the track ahead. Suddenly, however, it felt as if I had indeed fallen asleep and was dreaming. The rush of air in my face was no longer cold; so much so that I started to feel hot under my heavy anorak. I released the throttle, half expecting to wake up buried in the snow beside the track under the upturned snowmobile. But no, I was not asleep. My machine slowed down gently to a stop and I hopped off, inhaling the warm surrounding air in puzzlement. The temperature must have been 15°C or so and I was getting sweaty. Having removed my overcoat and gloves, I was standing there in the light hoodie I had been wearing a few moments ago inside the building. I did not feel cold at all ! Surprisingly, the snow on the track did not seem to be melting. It felt as cold as usual to the touch; well below freezing.
It was then that I noticed the light. It looked like sunrise in the distance although of course it could not be sunrise, given the season, and it was not even in the right direction. Leaving the snowmobile behind on the track, I started walking towards the lit sky up a gentle slope. As I moved forward, everything slowly began to look as if the sun was indeed rising. But there was no sun. The snow around me just looked as it would have under a dim early morning sunlight. Turning back, I was startled when I realized that I could make out the snowmobile in the distance, although I had left it behind me in complete darkness, just a few moments ago. Rushing towards it, I suddenly found myself in the dark once more. Was it night again ? The snowmobile had become invisible. Turning around and looking up the slope, I saw the lit sky again. I ran towards it until I reached the same point as before and turned around. There it was. The snowmobile was clearly visible, sitting on the track 500 meters or so away from where I was standing. I started walking backwards, keeping the snowmobile in sight and my back to the light. As I did, the whole landscape in front of me was becoming more and more brightly lit. Soon enough, it looked as if I was standing in broad daylight. The snowmobile, now about 1 kilometer away, was perfectly visible and so was the track and every feature of the snowy and empty landscape. But it did not look as if the sun was shining either. Everything was bathed in the soft gray light of a cloudy day.
For the third time, I turned around and this is when I really got scared. I felt my face turn hot and my scalp creep as Adrenalin rushed through my veins. Before me, in a shallow depression extending as far as the eye could see, were buildings; rows after rows of buildings, neatly aligned along a grid of compacted snow tracks. But this was impossible ! I was not even 10 kilometers away from Amundsen-Scott, one of the most isolated places on Earth. Sobral, an Argentinian base, was over 1000 kilometers away and it was the closest installation to the South Pole station. As I looked more intently at the buildings, I noticed that they looked quite old fashioned. Many of them were Quonset huts, these semi-circular hangar-like structures used by the US military during World War II. Others looked like these standardized elongated low-slung bungalows that Seabees and Army engineers had built all over the world in the 1940s and 50s to house US personnel on overseas bases. All of them looked in perfect condition; almost brand new. I was looking at a full-fledged post World-War II US military base located right here at the South pole ! But there never was such a base. Amundsen-Scott was first established in 1956 and back then it was just a few Jamseway huts (arctic hardened versions of the Quonset hut) and a flagpole; not a nicely laid out permanent base like what I was now looking at.
As I walked towards the nearest building, my head was spinning with ideas of time-travel and inter-dimensional portals. However, unlike in movies, these ideas were not exciting. They were just scary. Was I going to be stuck here ? Was I going to die ? The first building I reached appeared empty, the door locked. As I walked further on the track that ran alongside it, I passed a number of Quonset Huts and what looked like a Liquefied gas tank. Then I reached a group of interconnected bungalow-like structures built on stilts 5 of 6 feet off the packed snow ground. They looked like they might be some sort of office. As I looked up the wooden staircase leading up to the front door, I froze as I saw the door open.
This is only the first part of Chapter 1 - The rest will be posted later on in this thread.
Previous RGS threads:
incels.is
incels.is
incels.is
Chapter 1 (part 1) – Discovery
On July 17th 2022, I was on night shift duty at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station ARA monitoring room. ARA stands for “Askaryan Radio Array”, the unimaginative name of yet another Neutrino detection experiment undertaken by a consortium of mostly American universities. More on this later. The ARA monitoring room is not actually a room. It is just an area inside a fairly large Science lab section of the Amundsen-Scott main building. There, RAs (Research Assistants), like myself, sit in front of a bank of computer monitors, day and night, waiting for something to go wrong with the ARA gear, a set of 37 radio-wave detectors sunk into pits drilled into the South Pole ice crust two kilometers apart from each other over an area as large as downtown San-Francisco. That night, something had indeed gone wrong. At 2:28 am., on one of the screens, a row had turned bright red, indicating that one of the Digitization Daughter Boards (DTD) was no longer responding to SNMP requests and probably needed to be swapped. Faced with the prospect of a lonely snowmobile ride in the dead of night, I did what people do in such circumstances: I yawned, cracked all my fingers one by one, finished my mug of cold coffee, and got onto my feet.
Grabbing a spare DTD from the tech bench, I headed for the main exit airlock, donned my heavy arctic clothing and opened the outside door. The cold was fierce; wind chill at about minus 50 degrees centigrade. The weather was calm. Any hint of a storm and I would have been spared the trip into the cold arctic night. But no. No wind. I had no excuse not to go. The equipment rack with the faulty board was about 8 kilometers away; A 15 minutes snowmobile ride. After driving for a while, I was in total darkness. The lights of the Amundsen-Scott base were no longer visible behind me and the sky was cloudy; there was no Moon nor stars. The powerful headlights of the snowmobile were digging a tunnel into the darkness ahead of me, showing the perfectly straight track leading to the ARA-B-12 equipment cabinet, my destination.
Trying not to fall asleep during this most monotonous of rides, I kept moving my head from side to side to avoid letting my gaze become fixated on the track ahead. Suddenly, however, it felt as if I had indeed fallen asleep and was dreaming. The rush of air in my face was no longer cold; so much so that I started to feel hot under my heavy anorak. I released the throttle, half expecting to wake up buried in the snow beside the track under the upturned snowmobile. But no, I was not asleep. My machine slowed down gently to a stop and I hopped off, inhaling the warm surrounding air in puzzlement. The temperature must have been 15°C or so and I was getting sweaty. Having removed my overcoat and gloves, I was standing there in the light hoodie I had been wearing a few moments ago inside the building. I did not feel cold at all ! Surprisingly, the snow on the track did not seem to be melting. It felt as cold as usual to the touch; well below freezing.
It was then that I noticed the light. It looked like sunrise in the distance although of course it could not be sunrise, given the season, and it was not even in the right direction. Leaving the snowmobile behind on the track, I started walking towards the lit sky up a gentle slope. As I moved forward, everything slowly began to look as if the sun was indeed rising. But there was no sun. The snow around me just looked as it would have under a dim early morning sunlight. Turning back, I was startled when I realized that I could make out the snowmobile in the distance, although I had left it behind me in complete darkness, just a few moments ago. Rushing towards it, I suddenly found myself in the dark once more. Was it night again ? The snowmobile had become invisible. Turning around and looking up the slope, I saw the lit sky again. I ran towards it until I reached the same point as before and turned around. There it was. The snowmobile was clearly visible, sitting on the track 500 meters or so away from where I was standing. I started walking backwards, keeping the snowmobile in sight and my back to the light. As I did, the whole landscape in front of me was becoming more and more brightly lit. Soon enough, it looked as if I was standing in broad daylight. The snowmobile, now about 1 kilometer away, was perfectly visible and so was the track and every feature of the snowy and empty landscape. But it did not look as if the sun was shining either. Everything was bathed in the soft gray light of a cloudy day.
For the third time, I turned around and this is when I really got scared. I felt my face turn hot and my scalp creep as Adrenalin rushed through my veins. Before me, in a shallow depression extending as far as the eye could see, were buildings; rows after rows of buildings, neatly aligned along a grid of compacted snow tracks. But this was impossible ! I was not even 10 kilometers away from Amundsen-Scott, one of the most isolated places on Earth. Sobral, an Argentinian base, was over 1000 kilometers away and it was the closest installation to the South Pole station. As I looked more intently at the buildings, I noticed that they looked quite old fashioned. Many of them were Quonset huts, these semi-circular hangar-like structures used by the US military during World War II. Others looked like these standardized elongated low-slung bungalows that Seabees and Army engineers had built all over the world in the 1940s and 50s to house US personnel on overseas bases. All of them looked in perfect condition; almost brand new. I was looking at a full-fledged post World-War II US military base located right here at the South pole ! But there never was such a base. Amundsen-Scott was first established in 1956 and back then it was just a few Jamseway huts (arctic hardened versions of the Quonset hut) and a flagpole; not a nicely laid out permanent base like what I was now looking at.
As I walked towards the nearest building, my head was spinning with ideas of time-travel and inter-dimensional portals. However, unlike in movies, these ideas were not exciting. They were just scary. Was I going to be stuck here ? Was I going to die ? The first building I reached appeared empty, the door locked. As I walked further on the track that ran alongside it, I passed a number of Quonset Huts and what looked like a Liquefied gas tank. Then I reached a group of interconnected bungalow-like structures built on stilts 5 of 6 feet off the packed snow ground. They looked like they might be some sort of office. As I looked up the wooden staircase leading up to the front door, I froze as I saw the door open.
This is only the first part of Chapter 1 - The rest will be posted later on in this thread.
Previous RGS threads:
Real Gender Studies 101 - The Paleolithic
From around 2 millions years ago to 10 000 years ago, humans have led roughly the same lifestyle: hunting and gathering. Given the length of time we have lived that way, it is quite clear that it is that lifestyle that determined how we evolved. All of our instincts were shaped by this period...
incels.is
Real Gender Studies 102 - the Neolithic
This is the second installment in the "real gender studies" series. It follows the one below: https://incels.is/threads/real-gender-studies-101-the-paleolithic.316731/#post-7198873 At the start of the Neolithic (around 10 000 years BC), mankind shifted from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to...
incels.is
Real Gender Studies 103 - Before the cities
In the middle of the fifth millennium BC, the Middle East had become entirely dotted with farming villages and agriculture had started to spread to Europe, North Africa and the Iranian Plateau. The spread of farming was the first human large scale technological revolution. It had resulted in an...
incels.is
