Google Maps Updated With Skyfall Island Japan Terrain 107
MojoKid writes "The latest in the Bond film series, Skyfall, was certainly one to remember. And not all of those memories were pleasant. The head villain's island lair was a particularly spooky place. The decaying wasteland depicted in the film was a shadow of Hashima off the coast of Nagasaki Prefecture in Japan. Due to its unique flat shape, the island is most widely known in Japan by its nickname Gunkanjima — aka 'Battleship Island.' In some circles, it's called 'Dead Island.' Google actually sent an employee to the island with a Street View backpack in order to capture its condition and a panoramic view for all to see in 360 degrees. You can take a virtual walk across the island now, and Google also used its Business Photos technology to let you peek into the abandoned buildings, complete with ancient black-and-white TVs and discarded soda bottles."
I wonder (Score:2)
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Funny)
At least he wasn't wearing a red shirt.
More than one (Score:2)
If you watch the video, there's clearly someone pointing a video cam at the Google employee with the backpack as he walks around.
So a party of at least 2? Barring supernatural options, of course.
On a side note, Gunkanjima is seriously creepy/cool. Good job Google!
40 years (Score:5, Interesting)
All it took was 40 years to transform a modern island into something that looks like Mayan ruins. If something ever happens to humanity, in only a century or two we'll have been erased from history.
Re:40 years (Score:4, Informative)
The Life After People [history.com] series covers this in detail. They use Battleship Island in one episode as an example and reference point.
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great series. They also used Chernobyl and the surrounding area to demonstrate just how quickly Nature reclaims her own. I particularly enjoyed the episode with the cats in the tower blocks.
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considering that the mayan ruins have lasted for quite a while and continue to last for quite a while and there's plenty of non concrete depending buildings.. it wouldn't be an erase for a while. even if humanity rebuilt tens of thousands of years later they would still be finding our artifacts...
the battleship island wasn't built to last without maintenance - now what would be interesting would be old pictures from when it was new to compare to what it is like today, since for example bare concrete might h
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Practically none of our modern construction is built to last without maintenance. That's why our bridges are going to hell now.
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Practically none of our modern construction is built to last without maintenance. That's why our bridges are going to hell now.
that's not as same as none though. let's say 0.001% of construction lasts in good state and 1% in state that you can tell something was there. some things are made just from plain stone for example. then there's massive landscaping projects. massive tunneling projects, massive projects of many kind. after all we're not building that many things out of cardboard and wood.
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Most of the Mayan construction wasn't built to last without maintenance, either. Much of what humans (or any life for that matter) build isn't meant to last.
The few special things that do last, like castles, temples, and pyramids, are a small fraction of the total construction. Our modern societies have built a few things that will last a while, too.
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Yes, it's got to be the traffic that forms the artificial stalactites on the lower edges of the bridge. I'm sure rain has nothing to do with it.
A puzzle for you (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a thought problem for you.
Modern humans descended from ape-like creatures on the order of 3 million years ago. Bonobos [wikipedia.org] are further back on the evolutionary scale, call it 5 million years before they become intelligent (massive guesstimate).
Suppose we leave the planet. Would the Bonobos be able to determine that another intelligent species came before them? I can think of no place on the planet that wouldn't wear down and wash away the signs of our civilization.
Suppose we leave the planet, but would like to leave a message. Where should we put it, and in what form? I can think of no place on the planet that would be safe from erosion, and any satellite orbit would decay long before 5 million years had passed. (LAGEOS 1 was predicted to remain in orbit for 8.4 million years, but may only last a couple of hundred thousand [science-frontiers.com] years.)
Now consider the reverse. Suppose there was an intelligent species on Earth before us. Where could we look for evidence? If they left a message for us; assuming that they want it found, where would it be?
Re:A puzzle for you (Score:5, Funny)
Any sci fi (syfy?) person can answer your questions. Bury a stargate either in egypt or in the antarctic.
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Re:A puzzle for you (Score:4, Funny)
exactly sure the moon takes regular hits but not that regular.
you leave an odd shaped structure on the moon, with a reinforced center with whatever data you wish to preserve.
The real reason we haven't been back is because we found the message left to us by the atlantian's that said don't go into space it is expensive.
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Suppose we leave the planet, but would like to leave a message. Where should we put it, and in what form?
Leave the message underground, in a salt dome. Form the words by mashing Twinkies together.
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Stonehenge will last, just watch out for your units of measure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zdyo4vJuCU [youtube.com]
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stonehenge will last for as long as there are people willing to put in the work to maintain it - an ever increasing amount of the (highly porus) original sandstone work has been encased, set or replaced with concrete. They closed a road permanently last week (they're taking it up and grassing it over) that runs alongside it to try and stem vibration damage from heavy traffic.
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If left the the ravages of nature alone you could be right (a few million anyways) but sadly I doubt they can withstand human intervention. I believe that there were once several more pyramids, but over time people took blocks from them to build homes and other monuments. Once upon a time all of the pyramids were clad in white limestone, but all of those stones were removed for Mosques and government buildings a hundred or more years ago. And this isn't something that "used to happen in the past", This y
Re: Leave no trace (Score:2)
Good luck destroying all life. The earth has tried to do that several times in the past (K-T Event, anyone?) and utterly failed. When all it takes is a single asexual bacterium to restart the entire biome, it becomes practically impossible to destroy all life.
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As poster above mentioned, The History channel has addressed this one in the seriese "Life After People". I believe that, as per the show, the longest lasting record of our existence on earth would be Stone Mountian- due to the hardness of the rock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain [wikipedia.org]
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Interesting timeline here:
http://lifeafterpeople.wikia.com/wiki/Life_After_People [wikia.com]
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Sandstone is surprisingly resilient. Giza, Stonehenge, Castle Rock in Nottingham (that has only lost around 6% of its mass under Nottingham Castle over the last 20-someodd years as a result of extreme weather conditions and one or two earthquakes, apart from that it's survived three castles being built on top of it, two massive fires and extensive tunneling)
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Dinosaur fossils are hundreds of millions of years old, and I think we'd notice pretty damn well if we dug up some kind of dinosaur city.
With the vast amounts of artifacts of stone, metal, glass and plastic we leave behind, it's unimaginable that every single of them will be destroyed in just five million years. Some of them will luck out and stay in a protective environment.
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Our civilization would become a thin geological layer, an unusual concentration of (as another posted pointed out) radioactives, metals, and various industrial by-products. Though depressing, that would nonetheless be enough for future intelligent life to at least hypothesize that something intelligent was here.
The mere fact that many natural concentrations of minerals have been mined out should be a clue. Though, I'm sure our oversexed simian cousins would probably come up with a few convoluted hypotheses
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The Earth is over 4 billion years old.
The techtonic plates drift up and down over the mantle in 3 billion years.
There could have been a civilization that left Earth 3 billion years ago that we would never have known about.
Actually, I thought this was going to be covered in the TV series "Fringe" (when they talked about the First People), but was sorely disappointed.
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In the Fringe TV show, I was thinking that the Others were time travelers from the distant past you were trying to escape an extinction event.
Too bad. Would have made for more interesting Sci Fi than what actually happened on the show.
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My thinking was that if there was a gamma ray burst extinction event of significant magnitude, it could potentially wipe out even the single cell organisms and essentially reset the planet to "rediscover" life.
Imagine you were a time traveler who traveled 10 years in the future to find the entire planet had been wiped out... What would you do? Perhaps jump further and further in the future looking for sentient life again?
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I would leave behind GM plants and animals, stuff on the moon, scatter minerals where geology says they shouldn't be, create modified nuclear isotopes, and bury garbage EVERYWHERE.
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Mostly when they close a plant, General Motors either sells it to another industrial concern or demolishes it.
Re:A puzzle for you (Score:4, Insightful)
There are plenty of fossils from 100 million years ago. Those represent just the tiny percentage of animals that got accidentally buried somehow. We bury our dead on purpose, often with jewelry and in caskets that have metal parts, etc., embalmed, and all lined up in neat rows. I would think there would be plenty of evidence, even in 100 million years. Plus we generate an enormous quantity of artifacts, many of which are at least as durable as bone, and most of which end up in landfills, which is pretty ideal for preservation. The buildings will collapse pretty quickly, but much else will remain. Interestingly the pyramids will probably be around long after most modern buildings, since they are pretty much solid stone and in the desert.
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Most metal does not last long in the presence of oxygen, it corrodes and disappears. Even stone monuments only last 10,000 years or so, due to weathering. The reality is that after a few million years, all of the crap we dug up or built in the last 10,000 years would be fairly evenly distributed over what land mass that had not been subducted under some other continental shelf.
The interesting thing is that if you consider ALL the fossils that have been dug up, our 10,000 year experiment in technology would
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"Footfall" dealt with this somewhat. The alien invaders posses technology that they did not invent themselves, but rather deciphered from tablets (Thuktunthp) left behind by a previous species that knew they were dying out.
Bonobos are stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Bonobos [wikipedia.org] are further back on the evolutionary scale, call it 5 million years before they become intelligent (massive guesstimate).
Is a Bobobo a primitive human any more than a fish is a primitive frog? Apes are as highly evolved as we are, just in a differrent direction. Why would they become intelligent? Would a bigger brain make them better at mating while dangling from a branch? Life on Earth thrived for about 3 billion years before we came along, and unless everything else is exterminated, we're unlikely to be evolution's endpoint.
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I believe that was partly answered by Arthure C Clarke. The whole monolith on the moon thing. Just bury your wiz bang artifacts on the moon. Also I believe the sattalites can wait around forever in lagrange (sp?) points.
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We are also responsible for an extinction event that will have a very clear gap in the fossil records.
Radioactive dumps will not be very active in 5 millions years but they still will be very detectable, and as they are made from resistant materials, their artificial nature will surel
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that's easy. Look for a six sided regular polyhedron with edge length ratios of 1:4:9.
It's what I'd do.
There's no use overcomplicating the message. 1:4:9 is to me, the simplest message you can send It's so useful, yanno? The simplest tessellating shape. All hail the mighty Brick! Send it in a material that's a: resilient and b: chemically inert. Baked ceramic?
Forget Pi. I dunno, it just doesn't seem to make sense - what if a civilisation that hasn't even invented the wheel comes across this thing? They woul
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Good idea, but say that a previous civilization did just that. What would the chances be that we would have discovered it by now? We've really only explored a tiny fraction of the moon's surface in any kind of detail.
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There might be evidence such as extremely low level nuclear waste (almost inert, but by concentration it would be obvious it was not natural), evidence of mining and the release of CO2 and so forth. There might even still be stuff on the moon if they got that far. It isn't certain but it is likely.
Besides which, if we did leave for some reason I'm sure we would want to create some kind of long lasting note to future intelligent races explaining who we are and why we left. If we had interstellar travel we wo
distribute the message around the world hacked int (Score:2)
distribute the message around the world hacked into diamonds, jade, obsidian, all kinds of plastics, glass containers. short of the whole planet getting grinded they would find something. they would probably find something even without us trying to leave a trace.
what's with the everlasting impact fetish anyhow?
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Now consider the reverse. Suppose there was an intelligent species on Earth before us. Where could we look for evidence? If they left a message for us; assuming that they want it found, where would it be?
Okian Warrior has received a lot of amusing and somewhat cheeky comments, but from what I can tell, no one addressed the great question. How do we know there was no other intelligent species on Earth before us that lived 5 to 10 million years ago that matched our technology? What about further back than that?
I'm about as far on the opposite end of the spectrum as you can get when it comes to my qualifications to answer this question. Still, I'm going to take a guess that no one can completely rule out th
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Some people have made the claim that any previous civilisation would have used up all the oil, but that's not supportable. A civilisation could have gone from steam to electric fairly easily and skipped the oil step. Or there could have been a lot more oil in the ground once. Or a lot less, at the time. Really there's no solid reason why there might not have been earlier advanced civilisations.
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The biggest sign of a vanished high-tech civilization is not a presence, but an absence: a near-total absence of high-grade metal ores. Probably the best evidence that humans are the first widespread technological species on Earth is the presence of high-grade iron ore spread across virtually the entire world.
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What about leaving instructions near nuclear dump sites? You simply do not want your bonobos to dig up our old, radiating trash, thinking it valuable and wearing it as necklaces or whatever. Humans have done this [wikipedia.org], so there's no reason bonobo's wouldn't come to the same conclusion. (Ooh, shiny.)
This article [damninteresting.com] talks about the problem, and some offered solutions, but concludes that it's pretty much impossible to make something look uninteresting or uninviting enough to prevent curious bonobos from exploring it.
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"Would the Bonobos be able to determine that another intelligent species came before them?"/"Suppose there was an intelligent species on Earth before us. Where could we look for evidence?".
Easy. Look for garbage dumps.
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You'll have to build a sentinel on the moon, best in the shape of a black monolith... Drop one on earth too for good measure :-)
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Suppose we leave the planet, but would like to leave a message. Where should we put it, and in what form? I can think of no place on the planet that would be safe from erosion, and any satellite orbit would decay long before 5 million years had passed.... Where could we look for evidence? If they left a message for us; assuming that they want it found, where would it be?
On the moon.
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Almost 70 years after, bunkers from the Atlantic wall [wikipedia.org] are still there. Some have fallen from their original location, but do not show extreme erosion like we see in Gunkanjima. This means concrete can last longer than that. Perhaps there is just a quality issue here.
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Roman roads and some buildings would be better examples. Although Roman engineering has decayed, a lot of what we might consider decay was actually people afterward raiding the older buildings for materials. In other places, ruins of things like bridges were removed due to being navigational hazards.
Where humans have *not* dismantled Roman stuff, it is usually in pretty decent shape. Interestingly, in that case, the stuff actually gets buried under dirt and other sediment, more or less intact.
If people j
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Roman roads and some buildings would be better examples.
I had our modern civilization in mind, and the question of how long concrete will last
I think it is safe to say that if the Bonobos inherited the Earth and got to the point where we are today, they'd have some good evidence that there was something before.
I am not sure bonobos would be interested in that question, as it does not involves sex! :-)
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The ancient Romans had concrete, or at least something very similar to it.
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Looks like classic concrete cancer with water ingress causing the rebar to rust and expand breaking the concrete apart from the inside.
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As is only appropriate. We tend to have such an inflated view of our importance.
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We have such an inflated view of our importance that there is a popular notion that 'history is over' and that it's simply up to us to sift through the strata and write everything down.
Which is problematic, to say the least. Modern human Archeologists do more to damage the historical record than any other force on earth. If a 'site' is discovered it 'MUST' be excavated, the delicate but preserved relics within it removed and stored in modern steel-and-glass buildings.
Whenever I encounter the whooping ravi
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All it took was 40 years to transform a modern island into something that looks like Mayan ruins. If something ever happens to humanity, in only a century or two we'll have been erased from history.
My first thought was that it looks just like large sections of Detroit,MI looks right now. Seriously, it's true. I know, as I don't live too far away. Search YT & Google.
Well, four decades has been about the same length of time that Detroit and Wayne county have remained solidly under one political party's control. The government made Detroit part of their "Model Cities" program. That fomented an orgy of over-regulation and local corruption & cronyism of every sort. Allowing the labor unions to gain
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In a century or two, we will be erased from history? Just like the Mayan ruins?
Actual Google Maps link (Score:5, Informative)
So here it is: http://goo.gl/maps/56fXN [goo.gl]
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This link maybe more useful for exploring: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Hashima+island&ll=32.627828,129.738579&spn=0.011439,0.015364&hnear=Hashima+Island&t=m&z=16 [google.com]
lots of post-apocalyptic Japan on Street View (Score:2)
They also have an abandoned/destroyed village [blogspot.com] from the area around Fukushima.
Now they just need to get Ukraine to let them drive the Street View car through Pripyat...
1970's is ancient? (Score:2)
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Actually, in the 1950's, IT departments had decks of punched cards. And machines with jumper-wire panels to sort the cards in those decks into the order needed to generate a report, or print invoices or mailing labels.
When new data had to be punched into the 'database' it was entered as lines, with each line a card in a card deck.
Card punches, card sorters, big cabinets to contain the cards. Line printers that could have their jumper wires configured to transpose the data fields on cards read in the card r
I wish they do this next (Score:5, Interesting)
North Brother Island [google.com]
I see they have some pictures of spot locations, but a full street view walk around would be nice.
Somehow I found pics of this abandoned area creepier, even before I found at it was the place Typhoid Mary was locked up.
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Check out this guys blog - he covers that and many others. Fascinating stuff.
http://www.kingstonlounge.blogspot.co.uk/ [blogspot.co.uk]
SKYFALL SUCKED!! (Score:1)
that movie was awful. no new gagdets whatsoever. horrible government underwriting/fearmongering "the enemy is all around us" bla bla bla
They don't even make a vague attempt at believability anywhere in the film. The movie was another disgusting hollywood piece of poop.
just because you can get part of the population to watch (and like) your "movie" doesn't mean it ain't garbage.
If you go to the top (Score:2)
There's your problem (Score:2)
I think I see the reason for the islands extensive degradation of the structures, re-bar. Its great stuff but you have to remember that it can still rust even inside concrete if you don't stabilize it, especially in a sea air environment. And when metal rusts it has a tendency to expand, kind of like putting a glass jar full of water in the freezer, when the water turns to ice it expands and shatters the jar.
Link to the map (Score:2)
Link for the lazy or busy [goo.gl]
Photo exhibition in Paris (Score:1)
Incidently, photos of that island can currently be seen in Paris ar Polka Galerie www.polkagalerie.com
Boring... they should do Chernobyl (or Prypyat) (Score:1)
It's just a bunch of ruins. Not interesting at all.
I want to see the elephant's foot.
When they find Fort Knox (Score:2)
They will know we were around (if not anything else). I am pretty sure most of our stainless steel (eg knifes and forks etc) would survive indefinitely, and point to us, spread everywhere.
And something else. Look at the top of every electricity transmission line pole or tower, and you will see fairly large ceramic pieces. They are the dielectric, and they are built to last ages - extremely hard to destroy, very resistant to nature. Archeologists of the future would find nice patterns of those things connect
One Scottish on the rocks (Score:1)
> The decaying wasteland
For a second I thought they were talking about the location of Bond's family home in Scotland.