Hypothetical scenario:
Say you’re a passenger on an airplane that’s hijacked and flown many hours off course. You land at a remote, unknown location. The hijackers take your cell phones, gadgets, and all belongings away from you. You, and several hundred other hostages, now have only the clothing and shoes that you’re wearing.
You’re kept under guard in an open-air, outdoors environment. It’s monotonous, relatively flat terrain, with no villages or other people in sight.
What are the primary clues to deducing your whereabouts on the planet? Could you deduce it down to within, say, 500x500 miles of accuracy?
**Temperature at day and night? ** (If, for instance, super hot in day, and super cold at night, suggests a desert-like climate, which could suggest the Middle East or Sahara)
**The stars, Sun and Moon **- look at the celestial bodies, guess from their positions where you are on Earth, like a sextant? The language, habits and mannerisms of the guards? (They wear ski masks so you can’t see their faces, but you could guess their language. But even if they are speaking Arabic, for instance, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the Middle East, and even if so, you could be in one of many different Middle Eastern nations.)
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Local fauna, vegetation, soil? **
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The nationalities, backgrounds and identities of your fellow hostages? ** This might give clues to the motives or agendas of the kidnappers.
Any other ideas? Again, this is to narrow it down to a fairly specific location, not just something huge and undefined like “the Middle East” or “Africa.”
You could get the latitude pretty close looking at the sky assuming you were in the same north-south hemisphere you were used to. The angle between Polaris (which someone in the group would surely recognize) and the horizon is your latitude. There are things you can do with the Southern Cross as well, but I don’t know them without looking them up. Someone who lived in the Southern Hemisphere might know. As the explorers in the 16th century learned, longitude is much harder, but would be pretty easy if you just had a watch still set to your home time. It would work even better if you knew where in your time zone you lived; that is, how much before or after local sun noon your watch read noon.
I’d say within 500 miles north-south would be easy. East west not so easy.
Put your ear to the ground.
Can you hear the sound of a nearby train?
Or vibration, from wheels on a highway?
Look for airglow, from cities, at night.
Use your sense of smell. Can you smell the Ocean?
I think you need to clarify whether we are supposed to look at skills and abilities that average passengers on a plane would have or at what’s theoretically possible. OldGuy mentions that latitude could be determined (even pinpointed with proper equipment) by looking at the locations of the stars, but I’m not sure that’s a skill many people would have. Likewise, encyclopedic knowledge of geography would also probably be pretty useful, but I doubt you’re likely to find many people like that on an average airplane.
I could tell northern or southern hemisphere from the stars. I could get a very rough latitude from the sun. Unless there is some select flora or fauna it wouldn’t help me. I would ask the guards, they might tell me. Other than that I couldn’t tell much without landmarks.
Latitude is really easy. Maybe not everyone can determine their latitude from the stars, but I’d wager that most Boy Scouts could (at least, in the northern hemisphere).
Is it necessarily true that the guards are local to the area where you are being held (or are at least nationals of the country that control the territory), or could we be talking about, say, a group of German-speaking Swiss terrorists holding people hostage in the Panama jungle or a gang of Puerto Ricans holding people hostage in Svalbard?
True, and someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of geography could take that latitude and narrow down the rest of the of the area by looking at what else is at that latitude. For example, if you determine that you are at approximately 80 degrees North, you are pretty much limited to being in Canada, Greenland, Norway, or Russia.
One strategy could be to combine latitude and climate. For example, it is typically much warmer in Europe for most latitudes than it is in North America. If you are at 50 degrees North, near a beach, and it is bitterly cold for weeks and weeks, you probably aren’t in France. Maybe you are in Newfoundland, or perhaps the Kamchatka Peninsula.
If you see a fair number of cactuses, you are probably in northern Mexico or the SW US.
If you see kangaroos, you are probably in Australia.
If you see penguins, you probably aren’t in Canada even if it is cold. Maybe you are in the Falkland Islands, Tierra del Fuego, or Antarctica proper. Polar bears would indicate the reverse and that you are probably in Alaska, northern Canada, or another of the Arctic lands.
Right, that’s the kind of select flora and fauna that might help. But something like a palm tree would only tell me I’m in a warm zone that goes all the way around the world, something I’d know from the latitude, but I wouldn’t be able to tell palm species apart to narrow it down to a more specific region. Chances are I’m seeing nothing but brush and small animals in the distance that I wouldn’t be able to specifically identify. A biologist like Colibri might recognize bird species or even specific plants that would get him a lot closer.
Good point. It’s what’s theoretically possible. The average planeload of average passengers, even several hundred of them, would probably not have enough collective know-how to figure out something like this.
The guards don’t necessarily have to be local or related to the region. However, as a matter of practicality, it is slightly more reasonable to believe that Arab guards mean that one is in the Middle East, for instance.
I’ll still agree with others that “rough latitude by the stars” is fair game. LOTS of people know how to find Polaris or the fixed point in the southern hemisphere using the Southern Cross. Come to that, if you have some time, and a clear night to observe, the can just watch the stars and find the point in the sky they are turning around. The difficulty in getting more than a very rough idea of the latitude is measuring the angle of that point in the sky with no instruments.
Perhaps sunrise/sunset would be an additional clue? The Sun doesn’t set for months in certain parts of Norway, for instance, and near the Equator, the Sun often sets sooner at evening?
The many hours is the first clue you have. Is that 5 or 15? Most people will have a clue how long they have been airborne. Even if the hijackers took all time pieces. I’ll assume that the window shades are all down so you can’t see anything.
How far was the original destination? Think about that. They do not just fill up the fuel on an airplane, they give it enough to get to the destination. So, if you took off from Chicago, going to NYC, you simply cannot end up in Europe. So that gives you one circle of distance. Then, as people have said, finding Polaris (if in the northern hemisphere), may give me a very rough idea of that. So with estimated distance, and latitude, you should be able to tell if you are in Arizona, or Alabama.
You can tell hemisphere and latitude by observing the sun. If it rises on your right and sets on your left it’s Southern Hemisphere.
You already know the date. You can place a vertical stick in the ground to determine North/South direction and measure the shadow length to determine latitude - with a bit of mental math to take into account the date.
Longitude is more difficult, but considering most of the Earth’s surface is Ocean the search space is reduced a lot. You can make a fairly good guess at continent / Island using your extensive knowledge of Geography and Botany combined with the latitude.
Some latitudes will be very easy to pick a longitude to within say 15 degrees - i.e. most of the Southern hemisphere.
The Northern hemisphere is more difficult especially Russia / Siberia / Alaska / Canada. On the other hand much of it is really easy as it’s quite well populated.
The equatorial regions may be a bit challenging but it should be straight forward to pick a continent.
Finally, the only moderately difficult bits are desert - sand and stony. But if you see a kangaroo for instance it’s Australia (sadly seeing a camel is not a differentiator as Australia has a large camel population)
That’s a very complicated and low-precision way of getting the exact same information you could get more easily and precisely using Polaris or the Southern Cross.
The now notorious Mohammed Emwazi, better known as Jihadi John, has been holding (and then murdering) hostages for ISIL.
He was born in Kuwait but legally that is not his nationality.
His nationality and accent are British although, with casual racism, since he isn’t white skinned (and wearing a bowler hat, a monocle and sporting decaying teeth), at a glance many may call him “arab” or “middle Eastern” based on his ethnicity.
All of which is moving towards irrelevancy since he justifies his actions by a religion rather than a nation.
But we’re all implicitly assuming that a few dozen SDMBers can answer the OP’s question. I sense an inconsistency here.
A typical long-haul airliner contains about 300 people, not “several hundred”. Of them, at least 3 or 4 are the pilots who have a decent pile of geographical and astronomical knowledge. Even assuming they didn’t fly the plane to the mystery destination themselves they’d still have that background knowledge after they were interned with the rest of the pax.
Out of a couple hundred passengers you’re bound to have a pretty good variety of skills & knowledge. Yes, maybe half the folks are deadweight for our purposes here. But the rest won’t be. If the captives are able to communicate freely they can pool their knowledge & estimates and probably do a pretty good job.
BUT … A standard tactic with handling military prisoners is both to limit communication amongst prisoners, AND to plant spies amongst them in an attempt to obtain useful intel. So when you and 6 other folks you just met are having a furtive discussion about “where the heck are we and how do we escape?” you’re betting your life that none of the others are really in cahoots with your captors. This tends to have a chilling effect on collaboration between prisoners.
(just kidding)