I think this is a fantastic scp, especially because it seems to be your first. I think it's big and interesting and pretty cool. I don't know if I need the footnotes with "Ballast?" because I just didn't need it. I already was kind of feeling that. It broke my immersion a bit. That's, however, the only thing I can really say that is worth changing, imo.
+1
Pros:
- I like the implication that every celestial object (or just planets and their satellites, or Earth and Moon only) have one of these things.
Cons:
- However, I will be nitpicking on the science.
From Wikipedia, density of basalt magma is around 2650 to 2800 kg/m3. According to your article, SCP-2705's density is nearly 4000 kg/m3.1 Therefore, SCP-2705 would be denser than magma and not be buoyant.
EDIT: Final decision is to upvote. Just asking, is it considered a living thing or an object?
Thanks for the reply! I'm glad you pulled me up on this, it made me dig a bit deeper to try to get a more accurate figure for the mantle's density. From what I understand the Earth's interior isn't totally comparable like magma at the surface, but rather malleable (and compressed) like plastic, due to the massive pressure. A graph on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_the_Earth shows density at 500km down of somewhere between 3000 and 4000 kg/m3 - close enough for argument's sake although I may revise my figure down a bit.
I love the mystery of this thing. There's no clever twist, there's no collapsible explaining why it's there, there's no translated message (barring the picture, which just raises further questions, really. Does it want to leave?). It's just a weird-ass pyramid thing living in the mantle, minding its own business.
And then there's another one on the Moon, but it's long dead? Brilliant! I have no idea why any of this exists, and I adore it for that.
I upvoted, but I have to complain about the first footnote. It's completely pointless and comes across as something you'd see in a rough draft or first report, not a final filed report. This on top of my general distaste for "Doctor's/Researcher's Notes" addenda.
Is the one in the earth pining forlornly for its dead offspring inside the moon?
Really nice scp!
This is much better geology than I usually see in Skips. In particular the sensible use of gravimeters to research the thing.
It is a little odd that the magma dwelling critter knows enough about modern digital imagery to use that particular method of encoding. Pixel based imagery has only been a thing in recent history which suggests that this thing is aware of modern society somehow. Which I guess adds a bit of creepiness but seems like something that the foundation would acknowledge if they knew about it.
I stole the message thing from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message, a real message we sent into outer space with the best hopes that it could be successfully decoded by intelligent beings receiving it. Arrange the 1's and 0's as white and black on a grid (only one grid size works) and you get a picture. Assume that whatever it is, it followed the same kind of logic as us and realised that this was a way it could transmit an intelligible message.
I couldn't think of any better way for the object to transmit something we'd be able to interpret without resorting to psychic powers/knowledge of terrestrial languages/weird for the sake of weird (eg. "on ██/██/1978 Foundation received a message recorded in 1700's-era Spanish"…).
I like this a lot!
You might want to reword the bit about the lunar tetrahedron with a more cautious analysis that suggests the same conclusions but doesn't explicitly make any assumptions. Maybe something like "The object's size appears to be similar to that of SCP-2705, although its shape is consistent with a breaching of the exterior and the interior is partially filled. Analysis of the interior's density confirms that the material may be lunar crust. Radiometric dating of the surface rock, and the undisturbed nature of the infilling material, has led Foundation analysts to believe that the anomaly suffered damage sometime before the Moon's surface had fully solidified in the Pre-Nectarian epoch."
Two complaints here, one of which barely affects my novote, but the second bothers me more so:
First, that first footnote. It just seems pointless, and I question why it's there.
Two, it seems to end before I can really get into it. It seems like you have a slow build here, which is okay depending on how you approach an article, but for something like this, it seems to end before you can really dig deep (heh) into this anomaly and explore what's going on. Certainly, the article is good enough to not fail as a result of not being long enough, but it doesn't feel fully explored to its full potential.
I think I remember this concept being proposed and not really caring for it much, but I like this. Not perfect but certainly worth an upvote.