Yes, of course. The California Insititute of Abnormalarts. I love that place.

God damn, that's at least five of them now. It's going to take forever to update the joke. ;)

Seriously, though... it's an awesome shape. One of the usual representations of the propagation of time in a spacelike direction is concentric spheres - which, along with the pythagorean theorem, is pretty bitchin' in terms of reconstructing the lorentz transformations. Hawking's writing tends to prefer to drop a dimension (or two) of space and emphasize the temporal direction, which results in cones...

...the dipolar anchors would look like a sphere whose skin is a little over or under half the thickness of the total volume, and doesn't really get at the whole disentanglement-and-reconstruction thing, so I prefer to turn it sideways, in a direction which probably doesn't exist as a proper direction, timelines being more personal than sidereal...

...so, the entire map is an expanding sphere, a sudden sideways turn which fosters a dual-emitter point at the anchors, a sideways turn back, and a 500ly ping-pong game... all within the same outer sphere of spacetime's propagation from a moment.

I find that a very interesting shape.

A trip with jd is much more interesting than my regular programming. No doubt about that.

Especially in the euphamistic sense. :)

Without snowball earth, we would not be here. What will the next major episode (fireball earth?) bring us? I'm betting you could figure it out, at least mathematically.

Well, there's a couple factors - including whether bees' effects from the cretacean end of the timewar wipe them out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder

...if they go, life largely becomes aquatic again, with faint monocellular remnants, such as the thermophiles of yellowstone's pools. We, incidentally, are done for.

After that, if we assume this reckless catastrophe goes well, there's a few issues - the pre/cambrian inversion gets the most attention, but outside of the grafting of present moments on alternative histories, is also the most neutral. The other two are glacial soot deposition (which has already annihlated a few islands in the pacific) and "the really big one"... UHI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island

If we were just inverting the atmosphere to pre-precambrian states, it might not be so bad... but instead, the natural carbon-sink base has been replaced by areas devoid of life whose additional properties raise them to 120-170F... in temperate climates.

That's a bad double-mix.

Carbonaceously-lasing atmosphere, otoh, is extreme, but neutral. It can be used to invert the pre/cambrian and turn the atmosphere into a thermal laser... or, it can be used to recreate the pre/cambrian, and massively-layered biotic systems can create temperate climates and abundant life (and three-foot-long dragonflies); drop me in the sahara, and I will have a cool oasis with unlimited food and water.

Keep the double-whammy war technique, and, well, much will die, most of it human at first - the UHI death rate is already pretty noteable. When the north coast of, say, alaska tops 150F, the only life left on the planet, or the surface of the oceans, will be single-celled, and only a specialized few.

This would bring a certain peace and an end to human suffering; I'm just not sure it's the ideal form.

Conversely, a little counterterraforming that anyone can do (if you're willing to get arrested for ripping up the street, lol), and we could be living in paradise - literally, a rich garden with unlimited food and water, and the natural biotic climate control systems.

It's... a probability fork whose ends are growing farther and farther apart.