We'd have been walking around marvelling at st elmo's fire coming off any point-contact junction between metal or exposed metal structure, with the most fantastic skies at night.
On the other hand, would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover.
Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...
Solar flares do NOT affect the devices on the ground. All the fast-moving charged particles are completely absorbed in the upper atmosphere. And to give you some perspective, the most energetic flares can produce 10^-3 W/m^2 flux at the Earth's orbit.
The flares do affect the geomagnetic field. And a changing magnetic field induces current, but it becomes non-negligible only for very long conductors. So long-distance power transmission lines might suddenly become biased with a persistent DC voltage, and some long optical cables might start experiencing over/undervoltage problems with amplifiers.
But locally? You won't see anything unusual.
All modern telecommunications are over fibre or radio links.
Power lines might be the most vulnerable part, actually. The geomagnetic field can induce current that will bias the core of transformers, causing them to overheat. This can lead to blackouts if the networks are close to capacity, and it's suspected that the 2003 North East Blackout was at least partially caused by them.
Essentially, components that kick in when a voltage exceeds a certain limit to allow that excess voltage to shunt to ground instead of continue to build up in the circuit.
Similar devices in pneumatics or hydraulics are pressure relief valves [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_valve], and they provide similar functionality - giving a easier/lower resistance path for the high voltage/pressure, so delicate things downstream don’t fail.
I have no idea what the correlation is between particle flux (the metric reported here) and actual geomagnetic variation which induces the current (varying magnetic field causes voltage). Basically the charged particles zoom past earth, then loop back from the magnetotail towards the poles. The magnetohydrodynamics cause effects large enough to modulate the magnetic field on earths surface.
”We have this long conducting loop” is the issue. The Earth is one component of the loop.
Not necessarily?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset
Some Miyake events are also thought have lasted a year or longer. I think there could be a very bad time if an event like this lasted a year?
What solar flares do, they deform the Earth's magnetic field so that more cosmic rays (from outside the Solar System) can reach the surface. But the cosmic ray flux is not that high to begin with. And electronic devices certainly won't self-destruct if the radiation is slightly higher than normal.
After all, you experience far more cosmic ray radiation when you're flying on an airplane than during one of these events!
https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the...
An X-class flare won't do anything. But in the size of the article? Localised temporary blackouts would be entirely unsurprising.
They actually are. Protection against lightning strikes and atmospheric electricity is a part of the design for the high-voltage lines.
CMEs might cause enough additional load on the lines to cause them to trip if they are close to failure already, and this is well-recognized and can be mitigated by load-shedding early.
I sleep better, my mind is clearer, I feel like an entirely new person. I am not exaggerating when I say that I still occasionally think about how nice it is to be able to breathe clearly.
I use nose strips, and I'm addicted now too.
Ultimately, surgery is the best option in my experienced opinion, but it also has diminishing returns over time (~20 years in my case). This occurred recently for me, and I am looking to consult with an ENT again, when I feel like taking the recovery leap. With that said, I am still functioning extremely better than I ever did when I couldn't breathe 20 years ago.
Silicones are common in cooking utensils and used at temperatures way beyond what you'd need for your hygiene purpose.
Recently my allergist gave me a tip with regard to nasal congestion. First, you can use Flonase and Astepro together, apparently they work better when used together. Astepro has an antihistamine in it that can help. Second, moisturize the interior of your nasal passages with a drop of muciprocin in each nostril applied inside your nose at the tip of it, then squeeze your nose gently to distribute. This lets you use get the benefits of Flonase without drying out your nose (which can trigger congestion).
How do solar flares render pollen groundborne?
FTFA: "Solar particle storms can greatly enhance the normal production of cosmogenic isotopes like radiocarbon (14C) in the atmosphere by galactic cosmic rays. Such enhanced production, preserved in annual tree rings, serves as a clear cosmic timestamp making possible absolute dating of tree samples."
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/allergies-are-common...
Not exactly both though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle
No idea how valid that research might have been. In retrospect, it almost borders on phrenology.
Just think: number of earth revolutions between this event and now minus the number of earth revolutions since Jesus Christ divided by number of fingers and thumbs on a human written out in base (number of fingers and thumbs on a human) is a sequence where each digit is the sum of the previous two digits.
What are the chances?
So about 13 bits of improbability.
But your hypothesis took a lot more than 13 bits to encode! It would be better compressed to say "Just think: 12350. What are the chances?"
That an elaborate explanation can be found to fit a number is not that surprising when you consider how many possible elaborate explanations there are.
See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-ga...
a topic infected by bullshit
Why jump right to the impact hypothesis?
…then proceeds to not explain anything about what that new, data-supported worst case scenario is.
The whole article is light on quantitative data, it’s a shame.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X2...
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event
[2]. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02624...
This person’s definition of “worst-case scenario” is much different than mine.
We don’t know with certainty what the universe will throw at us.
We just do the very best we sensibly can.
Why should we assume that the worst thing that could happen to us happened within the past 20K years?
The event of 774 had no significant consequences for life on Earth, but had it happened in modern times, it might have produced catastrophic damage to modern technology, particularly to communication and space-borne navigation systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774%E2%80%93775_carbon-14_spik...
Interestingly, the identification of the cause of the 775 AD event with a huge solar flare came from the same researchers as this story.
1. His intention wasn't to destroy in order to build resilience.
2. His targets weren't random.
There's an enormous chasm between when companies started mass producing things and the digitization of blueprints. More often than not it isn't even the original company, it's one of their customer's customers 50+ years after they went out of business.
Within 10-15 years, AI research automates itself and no one ever has a software engineering job ever again.
I think sometimes of how crazy it would be if we could send GPT 4.5 in the past somehow, what effect that could have, just a magical almost all knowing being from the future
But really the burden of proof is on you here since you are making extraordinary claims of AI superintelligence replacing all jobs in 10-15 years. You are making the trillion pound baby argument, so you need to back it up.
For example, the security team gave me a list of 100s of policies that need to be implemented. I was able to dump that list in and get a rollout plan over the next two months in a matter of minutes. This would easily have taken me half a day before GPT.
We have built a disposable society so people most people never have to learn how anything works. They press a switch or button and it doesn't work? Throw it away and buy a new mass-produced model. And as time goes on we only need less and less people to understand a technology to mass produce it and sell it.
what happens if there's no one left who knows about plumbing and electrical wiring?
but yeah, i dont think that's gonna happen like that
If people want to approach life by hiring out every little thing, they can certainly do so, but those choices do not make my home maintenance someone else's job.
Many of the people who designed our electrical infrastructure are still alive. Far fewer are needed to keep it running. If we must rethink our priors, I'd rather have both groups in the room while we do it.
https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S02624079230189...
That would be interesting to know, I was at the May 11th 2024 event taking photos. It was probably the strongest in the last 30 years.
There’s no doubt evidence of stronger events further back, it would be interesting to see if theirs a loose record of suggested intensities for those.
I take it most of these details will be in the happy which I’ll need to study.
Of course ours will eventually if we don’t prepare. Seems like this type of event would also doom any space settlements if it hit one.
Makes me wonder if going to the outer solar system further from the sun would be better than Mars.
I wonder if this event prompted people to think about the World around them differently in any way.
https://medium.com/@rajkumarrr/history-mystery-the-squatting...
What if radiation from the sun actually sterilized something like 90% of neolithic men? Is that possible?
This creates a selection pressure for men whose sperm just happens to be resistent to the sun's radiation to get with as many women as possible. So any groups that don't practice patriarchal polygyny are at a sudden and catastrophic disadvantage for not utilizing their men who are still fertile and get outcompeted in a generation.
Thousands of years later we're still unwinding the social ramifications of this.
nntwozz•8mo ago
"New SOCOL:14C-Ex model reveals that the Late-Glacial radiocarbon spike in 12350 BC was caused by the record-strong extreme solar storm".