I remember being able to feel and see individual silica fibers. It was very much a 3d surface.
The waters tend to be a little deeper on the east coast, which would tend to lessen the effects of large shifts, but over a timespan of nearly 40 years it is very likely the piece had been covered over at some point.
The universe is a really weird place, where really weird stuff happens constantly.
As the saying goes, "people win the lottery every day", and there are a lot of lotteries active on this planet.
The statistical terms used are completely wrong but the intention is clear: weird shit happens.
(mainly refering to "Guards! Guards!", where they intentionally make one guards bow shot harder, to make his shot (at a dragon) a million to one chance, so it becomes a 100% shot, nice absurd logic and of course it does not work, but the chance for them surviving the stunt was one in a million..)
I still remember, from at least twenty years ago, an anti-duplication technology based on this idea. IIRC it involved embedding glitter in clear plastic and then measuring the reflections at different angles. Devilishly hard to duplicate, especially since one wouldn't know which angles would be used in a reading so the placement would have to be nearly perfect in every dimension. Unfortunately so would the alignment in a reader, which I think is what sank the idea. Still, the idea of physically embodying something so similar to a mathematical proof of work seems valid and quite appealing. "I could never in a million years make the glitter fall that way again."
P.S. Here's a modern application of a similar technique to detect tampering with a laptop. https://archive.ph/g1kDW
The thing is, if the theory is true, how do we know we are not in such a universe? We can say it is extremely unlikely because they are very rare - but we say it is “unlikely” and “rare” because we assume the global (multiverse-wide) probability distribution is similar to the local (this universe) one - but isn’t that assumption effectively equivalent to the assumption that we are not in such a universe? An argument which begins by assuming its conclusion is not much of an argument.
However, if we can’t rely on that assumption, it seems in principle impossible for us to know what the global probability distribution is - how is that not a lethal blow to the entire theory?
The odds of some group out of millions of people, on some day out of ten thousand since the incident, finding some piece of debris out of thousands, are considerably higher.
This is the multiple-endpoints fallacy. You only notice the events that happened after the fact, you never notice everything that doesn't happen.
This is why it is dumb when people say "The odds against life arising at random is astronomical."
It did happen, therefore, the convoluted path to life wasn't what the skeptic speaker thinks it was.
Multiple-endpoints fallacy and overly anthropomorphizing reality also makes a fool out of the Drake Equation, and the idea of "The Great Filter" is dumb too.
But I'm not so sure about that last. The Drake equation and Great Filter do handle the multiple-endpoints question correctly. They ask, with so many possible occurrences in the scale of the universe, why don't we see any of them?
1.3 billion cubic km of water, the tallest mountain ranges and deepest canyons. Aside from occasional glimpses of the surface, it's forever out of sight and out of mind for nearly every person on the planet.
Given what the documentary crew was up to, it seems probable the debris showed up on sonar and the dive team went down to check it out.
So it is not exactly a chance discovery in the deep Atlantic by tourists on holiday. It is well funded professionals discovering something that looks a lot like what they were looking for.
And those happen 9 times out of ten.
It explains why the two main mysteries – why the initial search was a failure, and the lack of radio and transponder data.
It's also easy to see why authorities and airline operators want to silence it, especially if they have plausible deniability to do so. There is simply less prestige lost in a failed international search-and-rescue than a national airline pilot killing innocent people for god knows what reason.
wtf... Why is there a way for one person to depressurise the cabin?
News showed that footage so many thousands of times over so many weeks, months, that I still hear the phrase in my head sometimes and I am really, really uncomfortable watching rocket launches even decades later.
