Enormous Tunneling Machine 'Bertha' Blocked By 'The Object' 339
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."
Time to call in... (Score:5, Funny)
...The SCP Foundation.
It is... (Score:1, Funny)
Dr. Who's phone booth.
I bet it's a rectangular solid (Score:5, Funny)
I bet it's a rectangular solids whose dimensions are in the precise ratio of 1 : 4 : 9....
Maybe the machine ran into (Score:5, Funny)
... a create of unsold Windows phones?
Re: I bet it's a rectangular solid (Score:5, Funny)
And that appears to be...my God...it's full of stars!
Re:Near the waterfront? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Need 150,000 pounds of Raisin Bran (Score:5, Funny)
...and eight tanker trucks of coffee. That ought to do it.
STOP THE PROJECT NOW! (Score:3, Funny)
That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Scientific Term: BFR (Score:5, Funny)
Civil Engineers, geologists, and mining specialists encounter the BFR phenomenon on a regular basis.
It's a Big Fucking Rock.
Re:Near the waterfront? (Score:5, Funny)
Not plausible. More likely a large nugget of Adamantium.
Re:Maybe the machine ran into (Score:5, Funny)
To block a giant tunneling engine? It'd have to be old-school Nokia.
Boring? (Score:3, Funny)
It's not THAT boring.
Re:I bet it's a rectangular solid (Score:2, Funny)
All in all it will be another boring story with boring results after some digging.
Heart of the Mountain (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Doesn't sound very stable... (Score:5, Funny)
They should totally get you in on this project. I imagine they have no idea they're doing it all wrong.
Re:Alien pod (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Maybe the machine ran into (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Near the waterfront? (Score:5, Funny)
So we really have moved past "Too big to fail" then. Good to know.
Re:Maybe the machine ran into (Score:5, Funny)
Subsurface tablets....
Re:Near the waterfront? (Score:5, Funny)
... while the timid one is standing off to one side looking at its shoes.
Darn! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Near the waterfront? (Score:5, Funny)
Doesn't sound like anything a bit of dynamite couldn't handle.
How's that paradigm working out for you Mr. Coyote?
Re:Near the waterfront? (Score:5, Funny)
They got a photo [nocookie.net] of it already.
This is really interesting (Score:5, Funny)
I guess the machine isn't boring after all.
Re:Scientific Term: BFR (Score:5, Funny)
Leverite there.
'The Object' (Score:3, Funny)
Will it blend?
Re:Near the waterfront? (Score:5, Funny)
hull of a schooner
IT'S A SAILBOAT!
It's obviously bedrock (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alien Origin (Score:5, Funny)
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 [wikipedia.org], 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".