@futurebird I’m just imagining a time traveler skeleton showing up, like maybe the secret to time travel is to abandon soft tissue

@bruce

I'm late to the party but shrimp was the first thing from the sea that started to taste good to me

I love it hot in stews and things like that. The occasional order of popcorn shrimp. I'll still give shrimp cocktail a miss

@bodhipaksa @futurebird @CStamp I think that's right. Zaius denied the valves were what Taylor said they were, an interesting kind of doublethink.

@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)

@futurebird

Microplastics?

I do remember one science fiction story where a human fossil was obviously a time traveller, because:

A) a human skeleton was found in Cretaceous rock, 60 odd million years before anything human evolved

B) the scientist studying the fossil compared an x-ray of the unique pattern of bumps inside the skull, and found a modern human who matched 100%...himself.

@davidtheeviloverlord

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...

@catmisgivings
My favorite way to prepare shrimp is lightly sautéed with butter, garlic, and course ground black pepper. But I'll eat it no matter how it's prepared. Please don't overcook it, though.

@futurebird

Was that the (as far as we know) biggest ant ever?

@futurebird radioactivity and microplastics? those’ll last forever

@davidtheeviloverlord

Yes! They found a fossil ant queen the size of a humming bird. Just a massive ant. Magnificent.

@davidtheeviloverlord @futurebird It is still something to aspire to.

@futurebird @davidtheeviloverlord madly trying to gather the materials to carve notes in a material that will survive fossilisation

@ranjit @futurebird If the bones “show up later”, does that society have a lost and found office where you can collect your own bones?

@futurebird

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.

@futurebird Mercury fillings. Braces, perhaps. Hip replacement composition/technology. Spine shaping due to osteoporosis. Spaceflight osteopenia bone texture patterns.

@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.

@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.

@futurebird @davidtheeviloverlord

Magnific-ant

@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.