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Enormous Tunneling Machine 'Bertha' Blocked By 'The Object'
An anonymous reader sends word that 'Bertha,' the world's largest tunneling machine, which is currently boring a passage beneath Seattle's waterfront, has been forced stop. The 57.5ft diameter machine has encountered an unknown obstruction known as "the object."
"The object’s composition and provenance remain unknown almost two weeks after first contact because in a state-of-the-art tunneling machine, as it turns out, you can’t exactly poke your head out the window and look. 'What we’re focusing on now is creating conditions that will allow us to enter the chamber behind the cutter head and see what the situation is,' [said project manager Chris Dixon]. Mr. Dixon said he felt pretty confident that the blockage will turn out to be nothing more or less romantic than a giant boulder, perhaps left over from the Ice Age glaciers that scoured and crushed this corner of the continent 17,000 years ago. But the unknown is a tantalizing subject. Some residents said they believe, or want to believe, that a piece of old Seattle, buried in the pell-mell rush of city-building in the 1800s, when a mucky waterfront wetland was filled in to make room for commerce, could be Bertha’s big trouble. That theory is bolstered by the fact that the blocked tunnel section is also in the shallowest portion of the route, with the top of the machine only around 45 feet below street grade."
...The SCP Foundation.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Dr. Who's phone booth.
I bet it's a rectangular solids whose dimensions are in the precise ratio of 1 : 4 : 9....
Zoid.com
... a create of unsold Windows phones?
I'm betting on a lost anchor or random pieces of cast iron from an old ship.
I'm betting it's a fragment of the House. As we have seen, it can obstruct almost anything it puts its mind to.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...and eight tanker trucks of coffee. That ought to do it.
That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Civil Engineers, geologists, and mining specialists encounter the BFR phenomenon on a regular basis.
It's a Big Fucking Rock.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Not plausible. More likely a large nugget of Adamantium.
"'Bertha,' the world's largest tunneling machine, which is currently boring..."
It's not THAT boring.
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Clearly it is the Arkenstone. They digged too greedily and too deep.
They should totally get you in on this project. I imagine they have no idea they're doing it all wrong.
Nope. God put it there 6000 years ago to test the faithful.
So we really have moved past "Too big to fail" then. Good to know.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
... while the timid one is standing off to one side looking at its shoes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Unfortunately, they are going to find where we hide all of our dead Californians.
Doesn't sound like anything a bit of dynamite couldn't handle.
How's that paradigm working out for you Mr. Coyote?
They got a photo of it already.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I guess the machine isn't boring after all.
Will it blend?
hull of a schooner
IT'S A SAILBOAT!
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Switch to creative mode temporarily to remove it.
Clearly The Object is an interstellar vehicle with a structure of super-dense composite materials built to withstand the vagaries of near-light-speed travel for thousands of years. It crashed here long before human tribes crossed the land bridge from siberia and has remained undiscovered until now. They are best off leaving it undisturbed, if they enter it, they risk releasing biomechanoid killing machines that will destroy all of humanity.
Yes, but thousands of years? Try billions. The pilot was killed on impact and eaten by their own gut microbes, which quickly escaped and went looking for more things to eat. Failing to find a single suitable eatery, the microbes went on to destroy most existing anaerobic life, become sentient, create eateries, and re-discover their long lost progenitor's ship thus activating its homing beacon through very efficient electromagnetic induction. Unfortunately, Earth's inhabitants could no longer serve the role as gut microbes due to a gross miss calculation in scale, and were instead eaten by a transdimensional dog named Jeebus after fetching them. Within said belly they reside to this day battling his mentally corrosive digestive juice which is rich in charged retardation and litigation particles known locally therein as: Religions.
This has all happened before, and will all happen again; The process has been deemed "mostly harmless".