If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
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Well, at least one would know you'd have exciting times in your future.
60 million years ago is an interesting period in ant evolution. The ancestor of Titanomyrma was probably around and there are so many gaps in the preservation of insects you could see some really amazing things.
Before ending up like a fossil...
@davidtheeviloverlord @futurebird It is still something to aspire to.
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Well, at least one would know you'd have exciting times in your future.
60 million years ago is an interesting period in ant evolution. The ancestor of Titanomyrma was probably around and there are so many gaps in the preservation of insects you could see some really amazing things.
Before ending up like a fossil...
@futurebird @davidtheeviloverlord madly trying to gather the materials to carve notes in a material that will survive fossilisation
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@Moss @futurebird or the opposite...
ranjit (@ranjit@friend.camp)
@anna @futzle@old.mermaid.town there was a humorous sci fi story in which teleportation not only doesn’t send your clothes, it also doesn’t send your bones. Those show up later. So they find a way to cope. I had a comic book adaptation of this story when I was a kid! Look for “Rabbits to the Moon” by Raymond Banks, in this collection: https://archive.org/stream/A_Decade_of_Fantasy_and_Science_Fiction_1960_ed._Robert_P_Mills/A_Decade_of_Fantasy_and_Science_Fiction_1960_ed._Robert_P_Mills_djvu.txt
Friend Camp (friend.camp)
@ranjit @futurebird If the bones “show up later”, does that society have a lost and found office where you can collect your own bones?
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If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
For time travelers who were alive in the 1950s-1960s:
Traces of zirconium-90 in the teeth and bones - looks like that would be the end of the strontium-90 decay products.
There are plenty of other radioactive isotopes, of course, but strontium is special because biological processes react with it like calcium, meaning it rapidly gets incorporated into bones and teeth.
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If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
@futurebird Mercury fillings. Braces, perhaps. Hip replacement composition/technology. Spine shaping due to osteoporosis. Spaceflight osteopenia bone texture patterns.
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@futurebird Fluorine in the teeth; dental work generally. (Orthodontics leave traces! Implants on titanium posts rather more so.)
The other thing is that this kind of thing is generally very coarse; "its diet was C4 plants" has been the result for jaguar skeletal remains. (They were ritual jaguars fed on corn-fed turkeys, far as anyone can tell.) Absolute proof of time travel would take something impossible at tech level like that titanium post.
@graydon @futurebird Fluorapatite happens naturally too some places. That's how people figured out it helps.
Nitinol skeletal implants (hip, knee, etc.) would be pretty obvious. Probably some prompt fission daughter products in skeletons that supposedly died before 1945 would also be suspicious.
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@graydon @futurebird Fluorapatite happens naturally too some places. That's how people figured out it helps.
Nitinol skeletal implants (hip, knee, etc.) would be pretty obvious. Probably some prompt fission daughter products in skeletons that supposedly died before 1945 would also be suspicious.
@AMS @futurebird It does happen naturally but so far as I recall, natural occurrences are rare. And you could presumably correlate isotope traces in the bones with the environment and go "this is a surprise".
Which is very much what this kind of thing is; you need a lot of context to know if the bone isotopes are interesting and even more to know where to associate what you got with if it seems like it's most probably not local.
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If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
@futurebird Way too much fluoride in the apatite. UV-cured ceramic fillings in the teeth, perhaps. Post-WW2 nuclear testing changed the isotope ratios of some elements: the traveler might appear to be a different age from other remains in the vicinity, and results inconsistent with ratio tests on other elements. Not enough evidence of parasites during childhood.
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Yes! They found a fossil ant queen the size of a humming bird. Just a massive ant. Magnificent.
@futurebird @davidtheeviloverlord
Magnific-ant
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I assume you already know about the Baby Tooth Survey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Tooth_Survey .
@michael_w_busch @futurebird Sr-90 was my first thought too, not least because it accumulates in bones so it would be in the skeleton (and I *did* know about the baby teeth) and wouldn’t be found at all pre-1945. So my next thought was that I needed to know when the travelers were coming from, and also when the bones were found.
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@futurebird Fluorine in the teeth; dental work generally. (Orthodontics leave traces! Implants on titanium posts rather more so.)
The other thing is that this kind of thing is generally very coarse; "its diet was C4 plants" has been the result for jaguar skeletal remains. (They were ritual jaguars fed on corn-fed turkeys, far as anyone can tell.) Absolute proof of time travel would take something impossible at tech level like that titanium post.
@graydon @futurebird There are many naturally occurring fluorine sources (that’s how we figured out that it helps prevent caries) so its presence wouldn’t be at all definitive.
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For time travelers who were alive in the 1950s-1960s:
Traces of zirconium-90 in the teeth and bones - looks like that would be the end of the strontium-90 decay products.
There are plenty of other radioactive isotopes, of course, but strontium is special because biological processes react with it like calcium, meaning it rapidly gets incorporated into bones and teeth.
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If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
@futurebird Fillings in the teeth or false teeth are a common trope in science fiction for spotting time travellers. So are other surgical things like replacement hip joints.
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If a person were a time traveler how might that show up in their skeleton, eg in the isotopic analysis of their teeth?
@futurebird so the thing about carbon dating
(note: we are not experts on this, this is our lay understanding)
it's based on the observation that a living thing ceases to take carbon into itself when it dies, which means its radioactives start to be a smaller proportion of its mass compared to things that are still alive
but that only helps measure duration since death
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@futurebird so the thing about carbon dating
(note: we are not experts on this, this is our lay understanding)
it's based on the observation that a living thing ceases to take carbon into itself when it dies, which means its radioactives start to be a smaller proportion of its mass compared to things that are still alive
but that only helps measure duration since death
@futurebird there is a nuance, though, that we suspect must be part of this methodology when it's applied for-real, but don't know enough about
which is that the total isotope balance in the ecosystem is not necessarily constant over time. we have no intuition for how it would vary but suspect it's not uniform.
so if you had a time traveler who you knew just died, and they hadn't been in the present day long enough to have exchanged much mass with it, they might indeed be noticeable
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@futurebird there is a nuance, though, that we suspect must be part of this methodology when it's applied for-real, but don't know enough about
which is that the total isotope balance in the ecosystem is not necessarily constant over time. we have no intuition for how it would vary but suspect it's not uniform.
so if you had a time traveler who you knew just died, and they hadn't been in the present day long enough to have exchanged much mass with it, they might indeed be noticeable
@futurebird though you wouldn't be able to tell when they were from specifically, and there would be plenty of "regular" explanations such as them having had unusual exposure to radiation during their life
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@futurebird microplastics
@cinebox @futurebird honestly yeah microplastics and other environmental contaminants are probably the better way to do that identification
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@futurebird Individuals who lived between 1945 and about now have greater carbon-14 levels in their bodies (from the atmospheric nuclear detonations from 1945 to 1963) than anyone who lived before.
But unless more nuclear bombs get detonated, new babies born will soon have no more in them than people who died before 1945.
@mattmcirvin @futurebird let us aspire to allow the background radiation to continue to decline, sigh
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Well, at least one would know you'd have exciting times in your future.
60 million years ago is an interesting period in ant evolution. The ancestor of Titanomyrma was probably around and there are so many gaps in the preservation of insects you could see some really amazing things.
Before ending up like a fossil...
@futurebird @davidtheeviloverlord the best part is you can make sure your observations reach the present day, by carving them on a part of your own skeleton that you didn't get around to examining the fossilized version of
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@futurebird though you wouldn't be able to tell when they were from specifically, and there would be plenty of "regular" explanations such as them having had unusual exposure to radiation during their life
@futurebird on another note, we don't remember who wrote it but there was a short story once about time travelers who attempt to rob the library of Alexandria right before it burns down, but get caught by local law enforcement, who correctly deduce they're time travelers because......... they attempt to pass coins that are real gold, but all identical rather than showing individual variation in their manufacture
