3088: Deposition

Deposition

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Title text: P.S. If you have time travel, come to my birthday party Saturday!

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Explanation

This explanation is incomplete: This page was created by BEDROCK INSPECTOR NO. 4 Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

A continental margin is the place on the edge of a continent where the continental crust is underwater, covered by relatively shallow coastal waters. The scene is ambiguous, but it is feasible that Ponytail is standing on the back-shore littoral zone next to the rivermouth, such that she is actually a stone's throw away from the sea. As such, the stones she throws off to the right end up embedded directly into the soft shoreline/sediments without having to risk further erosion from all the other stones and gravel also sitting in the riverbed or being tumbled down it.

The continental margin is said to be passive, which means that it is not currently undergoing subduction, where the oceanic crust slips under the continental crust, or a strike-slip fault, where one slides along the other, both of which can mechanically or thermally transform any seafloor material. Absent such occurrences, this causes piles of sediment to accumulate on the continental shelf with a minimum of additional geological disturbance.

This rock's eventual resting place in the sediment seems destined to be compressed by further overlying sedimentation and being solidified over geologic timescales into shale or other similar sedimentary rock types, presuming that the future movement of further sediment and relative local changes of sea-level and shoreline keep adding more material. As shown, 100 million years later, the sea level has gone down (and/or the bedrock has risen), re-exposing the strata. Recent erosion/quarrying has caused it to become a cliff face that eventually re-exposes the original rock that Ponytail threw into the river, apparently just at the right time and place to be discovered or uncovered by aliens/far-future-earthlings.

These beings appear to be digging with relatively primitive hand-tools that are strangely anthropocentric and relatively inefficient, given the apparent use of antigravity personal conveyors with mechanical manipulators, and have found a rock. Whether or not they fully comprehend it, this seems to be one of those left with a still visible carved message by Ponytail, saying "This bedrock inspected by No. 5". This is a parody of a typical quality control label left attached to (or hidden within) clothing, to reassure any purchaser and/or help identify which manufacturing and inspection path any newly discovered product defect had passed through.

In the title text, Ponytail has added a postscript (whether on the same stone or a separate one is unclear) suggesting that the aliens/future-earth-based-lifeforms may have access to time travel technology, and inviting them to her birthday party (next) Saturday. The invitation does not seem to give an indication when it was written, and therefore which Saturday is meant, so, even if the finders were able to time travel, it might still be non-trivial for them to attend the birthday party. This also presupposes that the future discoverers understand the concept of the seven-day week cycle and have no trouble reading the invite, both remaining legible and not requiring impractical levels of translation from "ancient English". It may also be referencing the time travel party held by Stephen Hawking, in which he held a party which he hoped time travelers would attend. Hawking released invitations to the party only the following day, so only a time traveler would be able to attend the party.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Cueball approaches Ponytail, chiselling a rock on a shoreline next to a river with shallow rolling hills in the background]

Cueball: What are you doing?

Ponytail: This river empties onto a passive continental margin.

[Cueball and Ponytail stand talking, Ponytail holding several flat rocks, in an otherwise empty and frameless panel]

Ponytail: If I chisel notes onto these rocks and throw them into the sea, they might be incorporated into some shale cliff in the distant future.

[Silhouetted scene of Ponytail as she throws multiple rocks off frame to the right, Cueball watching from behind her]

[From off-panel, sound effect of a rock hitting water:] PLOP

[Two 'bug-eyed aliens', sitting in personal 'hover-saucers' look rightwards at an exposed rock-face. A pick and shovel are left stuck in the ground, and one of the 'saucers' sports a mechanical arm currently holding a loose fragment of rock. There are three question marks above the alien on the left and two question marks next to the alien on the right]

[Panel label:] 100 million years later...

[Text originating from the held rock fragment:] This bedrock inspected by No. 5

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Discussion

--104.23.175.13 02:56, 13 May 2025 (UTC)')DROP TABLE Talk:3088:_Deposition;

well done. no notes. youtu.be/miLcaqq2Zpk 03:58, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

well, at least you tried... 104.23.160.75 04:35, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

--Stephen Hawking did about the same thing, throwing a party for time travellers. But nobody came. (also yes thats an undertale reference :D )--104.23.175.41 06:36, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

Nobody came yet...162.158.216.82 08:37, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Futurama reference? 162.158.91.54 03:56, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

[Lethal Inspection], a Futurama episoded with Inspector No 5.172.68.194.187 07:40, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

This is definitely a comic that does have "set-in-stone explanations." 162.158.155.81 06:40, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

I genuinely want to do this. Can anyone tell where I could find good locations, ones where rocks are likely to be preserved like in this comic? 162.158.134.184 07:13, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

"Deposition", as in the title, can mean either taking sworn evidence (in a legal context) or depositing material (in a geologic context). 172.68.54.179 07:49, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

This would be typical of Randall's propensity for double meanings! I think it needs to be added to the explanation. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 11:10, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

It doesn't really have anything to do with anything in the comic, though. It would be no more relevant than commenting that e.g. 'margin' can also relate to page layouts, or 'might' can relate to the amount of power someone has. The explanations are going to get very long and confusing if we start calling out all the alternative meanings of every single word used in them.172.68.229.139 13:39, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

I understand your point, but in this case I think one could view Ponytail's written message as a sworn statement of sorts, in addition to it also being a "deposition" in the rock substrate. I think Randall intended it as a double-meaning, as he does many times. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 15:26, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

It's really cool that we see these aliens in these crafts. If you look at the other times aliens have shown up in XKCD they appear to be generally the same aliens, or just a UFO, and this is an interesting synthesis of the two. 172.68.27.180 14:13, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

Related to No. 6 in https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1476:_Ceres? 172.68.3.30 10:18, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

It's also possible that the last panel is underwater, the shale hasn't been raised, and the beings aren't using antigravity. That would make it harder to use the shovel and pick, though. BunsenH (talk) 14:44, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

We also don't know that those are 'personal conveyors' - they may be an integral part of their hybrid biological-mechanical bodies.172.71.178.92 08:50, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

As (I'm fairly sure) the coiner of that particular description, here, I thought hard on how to describe that aspect. The Dalek (indeed, Davros) bio-support/utility travelling vehicle was in mind, as was The Mekon (from Dan Dare, though not sure that bit of British culture got as far as Randall's awareness as much as Doctor Who will have). Also the whole Shriner parade-cars, and how they were parodied in some of the older Loony Tunes/Merry Melodies/etc cartoons, and probably a few other actual alien-piloted 'personal flying saucers' that maybe stretched all the way from pulp-SF covers through to maybe some of Kang and Kodos's appearances in The Simpsons (or beings like them, in something else), with a bit of The Jetsons and similar 'lighter' raygun-gothic futurism probably mixed in.

I'm agnostic about whether they are merely seated in (or on) their 'personal hoverchariots' just for convenience, or else that they fulfil vital life-support functions (beyond merely being 'better than psedopods' for the bug-eyed blob-aliens to actually move around their/our planet).

But, on the whole, they are indeed personal, not being a multi-manned(/-'being'ed) vessel. And appear to (at the very least) convey their occupants around. They seem to have retractible (or, at least optional) mechanical manipulators. I speculate that they may be able to reuse some of their antigrav ability for other projected-force abilities. Yet neither mechanical nor force-ray capabilities seem sufficient to do a better job than shovel and pick (or else they've arrived at a point where these tools have been quite recently in use, which begs other questions).

To address the initial point, the comic has no obvious "this is underwater" style to it, so I'm convinced this is a dry quarry/cliff-face. Also, if it's a natural cliff, it now appears to have been eroded from the left, which would appear to be the uplands (source of a decent river/large stream), the original direction off-shore being off to the right. So geogical upheval and landscape sculpting over the next 100 million years or so has indeed made significant changes to this spot, building up significant sedimentation and wearing away the landmass that was previously upstream (which needn't have been that far, could have been a rocky isthmus with the river source being perpendicular up those visible background hills... I don't know what locations Randall might have had in mind, but I can think of both insular and peninsular locations near me that could stand in for that scene). And 100 million years is probably more than generous enough to cater for the necessary sea-level, ground-level and maybe stratum-inclination changes that would be expected to get from Ponytail's stone-throwing time to that in which 'Kang and Kodos' are hovering.

Anyway, back to the point, that was my logic for "personal conveyors", and a few other descriptive decisions, but I'm sure there's several other possible ways of looking at it if one actually spends a bit more time on it and avoids the all too brief assumptions I probably fell into. All further considered changes are welcome. 172.69.194.225 13:11, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Saying that, even with time-travel, "it would be impossible" to find the right party seems wrong to me. With sufficient time-travel ability there's always extensive "trial and error". And, with additional time-travel 'meta-usage', even that isn't necessarily a long process, as you use TT to report every one of your 'errors' back to yourself before you even try them, narrowing the window down, ultimately making the process a matter of just waiting for you to arrive from your own future to tell you where you had(/are about to have) gone back to in order to find the party, having avoided being all the yous that had found the invitation rock not yet carved (or long-since carved, and discovered already on the way to where it will wait for you to have (already, later) find it) and had to 'start' looking later(/earlier) than you might have initially decided to look before your own bootstrapped guidance. ((Depends on how the Timey-Wimey really works, but I'm hoping the universe likes Stable Time Loops, and not universe-collapsing paradoxes that wipe the whole of spacetime out in retaliation for over-incautious interference in the whole continuum. And, because if the latter could happen then I'm sure it would (it simultanously has, and will do!), I would not be able to still exist to ponder it, so either there's a very good 'STL-finder' or some other more definite Chronology Protection Principle there to filter out potentially problematic disruptions of the timestream.)) 172.69.224.61 16:56, 13 May 2025 (UTC)
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