MovieChat Forums > Travelers (2016) Discussion > the 'Helios Incident'

the 'Helios Incident'

posted 8 years ago by wwoods-3
3 replies | jump to latest

It hasn't been seen yet, but there ought to be some serious interest and investigation going on regarding what happened in Ep.6. A huge amount of energy -- the equivalent of a H-bomb -- was released on US soil. Most of it went off in some sort of beam, which struck a previously-unknown asteroid. The US government, any number of foreign government, survivors who'd been near the blast site, and relatives of non-survivors will all be vigorously trying to find out WTF happened.

Study of the asteroid will quickly show that it's in an orbit that will bring it on a close pass of the Earth -- and before being hit, it was probably on an intercept course. So at least the purpose of the Incident is reasonably clear, but who knew about the rock, and since when? What did they use to divert it, and where did they get it? Who are these people, and what else are they doing??

The level of scrutiny of anything and anyone that might be connected ought to be far, far higher than 9/11 provoked. That curious matter of a US congressman being the lone survivor of a plane crash is trivial by comparison.

[–] chrisjdel 8 years ago

They'll spot the asteroid on a near miss trajectory, but since they weren't watching it before the deflection they have no way of knowing it was deflected. The X-ray beam itself was invisible to human eyes, and the people from the future would've made sure no satellites were in its path to absorb any part of it. How would anyone know a beam was fired? The laser device itself was vaporized completely.

That it was an antimatter explosion would be apparent not only to American authorities, but to every country with nuclear monitoring satellites. There's a characteristic gamma ray spike at 0.511 MeV resulting from electron-positron annihilation. You don't get that with any kind of traditional nuclear device. It's a telltale signature of antimatter reactions. The US government will have some explaining to do, to say the least. Countries like Russia and China won't be happy and will probably start antimatter production programs of their own. Lucky for the Travelers, there is no evidence left of their own involvement. The logical conclusion is that the chemical leak and fire led to containment failure.

[–] wwoods-3 8 years ago

They'll spot the asteroid on a near miss trajectory, but since they weren't watching it before the deflection they have no way of knowing it was deflected. The X-ray beam itself was invisible to human eyes, and the people from the future would've made sure no satellites were in its path to absorb any part of it. How would anyone know a beam was fired? The laser device itself was vaporized completely.

The atmosphere isn't transparent to X-rays; the beam will heat a column of air, distinct from the mushroom cloud rising vertically upward from the site. Simultaneously, this hitherto-unknown asteroid will be spotted when it incandesces on its side facing Earth. The connection between the two will be obvious.

The cloud of outgassing material from the asteroid will show that it was perturbed -- it's a well-established (theoretical) technique for diverting potential Earth-impacting rocks. Estimating the mass and speed of the material, and of the rest of the asteroid, and you can work back to the previous trajectory.

[–] chrisjdel 8 years ago

If the heating of the air is detectable by, say, weather satellites, which show an obvious line coming up from the site of the explosion then yes. But it might take a while to establish this, and I don't think they'd see the asteroid soon enough to witness the outgassing. Ejected material would have dispersed too much by the time they got telescopes pointed in that direction. It would be a fairly simple matter once they did spot it though, to backtrack and confirm the beam trace from the explosion lines up perfectly with the asteroid's position at the time (taking signal delay into account). So I guess the question is, how detectable would the heating effect be?