[HN Gopher] Earth's magnetic field broke down 42k years ago, cau...
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Earth's magnetic field broke down 42k years ago, caused sudden
climate change
Author : T-A
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-02-22 11:43 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| chrisacky wrote:
| On the topic of "Adams Event" and Hitchhikers, I actually find
| these topics really entertaining from a literary angle. Cave-
| dwelling post-apoc isn't a type I've done. Does anyone know of
| any works themed around magnetic breakdown? I've quite liked the
| Red Rising series which I guess is similar? Bobiverse/Enders
| Game/Hell Divers etc? Recommendations welcome :)
| shireboy wrote:
| Been a while since I read them, and I don't think it was
| magnetic reversal, but Silo series involves prolonged life in
| underground silos.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(series)
| rzzzt wrote:
| The Long Dark's backstory begins with a geomagnetic phenomenon,
| the rest is "regular" survival:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/305620/The_Long_Dark/
|
| Edit: oops, skipped a few words and my eyes focused on "game".
| pugworthy wrote:
| It's driven by nuclear war, but check out Metro 2033 by Russian
| author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It takes place in the Moscow Metro
| where people live after a prolonged nuclear winter (with
| mutants). There is a subsequent video game series derived from
| the book.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Seven Eves has a breakaway civilization that survives an
| apocalyptic event by moving underground, though it's not the
| focus of the story.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| There's a Netflix series that's apparently based on a Polish
| sci-fi novel that has a similar thing, with daylight becoming
| deadly.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/05/review-airplane-passe...
| hourislate wrote:
| Interesting story, don't know if it's true or possible but it's
| certainly fascinating and terrifying at the same time.
|
| https://archive.org/details/ChanThomasTheAdamAndEveStoryTheH...
|
| There are a few good Reddit threads and some great /x threads
| concerning the book and the science.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's amazing that so much ocean life has survived these
| transitions. That means a small percentage of those creatures
| that find the ocean's surface using magnetic fields actually swim
| the wrong way and die for tens of thousands of years, until they
| are the ones going the proper way :)
| pklausler wrote:
| Wait, what? What organisms depend on a magnetic field to find
| the surface?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Not only the surface; here is one among many describing the
| magnetotactic sense.
|
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200914112224.h.
| ..
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| It's expected that earth's magnetic polarity has reversed about
| 170 times during the last 76 million years[1]. I remember hearing
| a hypothesis that Mars could have lost its atmosphere due
| magnetic polarity reversal in some TV documentary for what its
| worth.
|
| [1]NASA : https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/tour/AAmag.html
| beauzero wrote:
| We have to colonize more than one planet and become a space
| civilization. We risk too much if we don't.
| bdamm wrote:
| Perhaps we are descended from such travelers? Is our DNA an
| interstellar mix from 70k years ago? How would we know?
| zachrose wrote:
| I never understand this sentiment. I get that "we" is "the
| human species" but in practice it just means "some people." A
| magnetic pole reversal would be nobody's fault, but knowing
| that some humans survived off-planet wouldn't make me feel
| better about it.
| dTal wrote:
| I in turn don't understand this sentiment. What are you
| trying to say? That you don't care about the continued
| survival of humanity beyond your own demise? You would be
| perfectly happy for everyone to be wiped out the day after
| you die?
| postalrat wrote:
| Is it suppose to matter how you feel?
|
| Giving up the human species because zarchose will be unhappy
| he didn't survive the apocalypse seems a waste.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| If not a planet, at least floating space stations may be a
| possibility
| sosborn wrote:
| Honest question: what do we really risk in the grand scheme of
| things? Extinction? Would that negatively affect anything other
| than our egos?
|
| (For the record, I'm all for colonizing other locations)
| dTal wrote:
| It would negatively affect virtually every value system ever
| created. If human extinction isn't "bad", then nothing is
| "bad". Anyone that nihilistic clearly lacks any framework to
| assign value judgements to anything, and therefore has no
| business participating in any decision-making discussion
| (such as "should we travel to the stars").
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I think it would be a great shame if the only self-aware life
| in the observable universe dies out before it can find out
| the mechanisms behind all of this.
|
| Sometimes when I'm trying to doze off at night, I think about
| how strange our existence is. Not even the smartest people on
| this planet have any idea how or why the universe exists. We
| might never find out. We might be a simulation operated by
| higher beings, but that raises even more questions. Argh,
| what I would give to know.
| mempko wrote:
| We are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction and global
| warming. I fear we may have already run out of time.
| fy20 wrote:
| What would 'survival' look like if such an event would happen
| today. Large underground bunkers, with nuclear reactors for
| power, could be pretty self sufficient, but is there any less
| dystopian way we could survive?
|
| UV wouldn't be much of an issue for concrete buildings, but
| anything plastic would be a no-no. How could we protect against
| other types of stellar particles?
| goda90 wrote:
| Underwater habitats could probably be made with plastic still.
| Under a few hundred feet, radiation will probably drop off
| enough to not cause damage. Of course corrosion becomes a new
| problem to fight.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Under a few hundred feet, radiation will probably drop off
| enough to not cause damage.
|
| At a few hundred feet, a structure able to hold off the water
| pressure would probably be thick enough to hold off the
| radiation if installed on the surface. In rough numbers, the
| mass of air above us now is equivalent to about 10m depth of
| seawater. A few hundred feet, call it 100m, would be like
| having ten atmospheres worth of radiation absorption above
| us. We need not go that far. Relatively thin engineered
| coatings on glass/plastic sheets would be as effective at
| blocking the extra UV.
| war1025 wrote:
| Isn't water a ridiculously effective radiation shield? I
| thought I saw a web comic once claiming that you could swim
| in a pool with radioactive waste and be just fine as long as
| you stayed X feet away, where X was on the order of a couple
| feet.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| It is one of the better ones, at nuclear plants the spent
| fuel is typically kept in what amounts to swimming pools as
| a cheap way to shield from the radiation.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It depends on the exact nature of the radiation. Note
| those pools. The dangerous radiation is blocked very
| well, but you can still _see_ the stuff in the tank
| because light passes through water. Electromagnetic
| radiation isn 't blocked by water as effectively as
| alpha/beta particles.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| True, the pictures look pretty eerie (I had a professor
| whose first career was in nuclear reactors and he liked
| to show us pics). I imagine radiation that's dangerous is
| dangerous because it can impact a human body at a high
| speed, and we're mostly water, so...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| UV radiation is moving that the speed of light. So is
| infrared light, which is blocked by water rather well.
| What is dangerous are those things that are both fast and
| heavy, particles from radioactive decay.
| occamschainsaw wrote:
| This one? https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
| war1025 wrote:
| Yup that looks like the one I had in mind.
| jarym wrote:
| I dunno, surviving the isolation of lockdown from COVID-19 is
| challenging enough (as those who have had to live through
| strict lockdowns can confirm). Humans need more than water and
| food.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Be worried, but don't assume this is an earth-ending event. How
| magnetic fields impact UV penetration is a complex process
| involving both physics and chemistry. One thing humans have
| proven very good at is modifying our atmosphere. Before we all
| retreat into caves we will try to boost our ozone layer.
| Artificial injection of ozone into the upper atmosphere is well
| within current technology. It isn't currently economical but
| would be cheaper than living like mole people.
|
| And don't worry about nuclear power. Getting sufficient solar
| power won't be a problem with all those higher-energy particles
| getting through.
| Amezarak wrote:
| I am pretty skeptical that humans simply holed up in caves
| until this was all over, as the article suggests.
|
| In fact I'm skeptical UV would be a big problem for humans at
| all. Aside from holing up in our houses and offices most of
| the day, we wear clothes.
| lowdose wrote:
| It could be that our alphabet was the key to scale.
|
| On a side note is it a coincidence Golang has exactly 27
| first class functions?
| ornornor wrote:
| And yet, so many get skin cancer when a big chunk of the
| population is vitamin D deficient through lack of exposure
| to the sun.
| api wrote:
| It would look like COVID a lot of the time: life indoors. There
| would also be a lot of protective clothing and probably an end
| to practices like sunbathing.
|
| The real disaster would be in agriculture where climate shifts
| and increased UV would play havoc. A lot of people would starve
| and there would be refugee crises and wars all over the world.
| Indoor farming or farming under plastic sheeting shields would
| become a big thing in the developed world.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Much of the evidence of this event comes from tree rings. So
| at least those trees survived the event to tell the tale.
| Agriculture would certainly change but it wouldn't be over. A
| reordering of the climate would certainly change what is
| grown where but plants would still be able grow, that least
| that was what happened last time.
| riffraff wrote:
| > an end to practices like sunbathing
|
| Thanks fo making me chuckle as I remembered the Sunblock 5000
| ads[0] in the original Robocop movie.
|
| It's interesting to see how nobody worries about the ozone
| layer anymore, but somehow we may end up in the same place.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCTSCAQzY9k
| frongpik wrote:
| It's sinking and raising of the continents that's the problem.
| There's little point in hiding in a underground bunker if that
| bunker ends up in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Yeah we'd have to live underground like mars people.
| jansan wrote:
| Let's see how Mars people like the holes that Peserverance is
| about to drill into their ceiling.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| apparently Mars people have been cracking jokes for over 20
| years wrt "Linux being used on Mars before anyone will ever
| use it on the Desktop", and now the joke isn't funny
| anymore.
|
| further some unpatched and critical vulns in systemd might
| actually prevent Peserverance from fulfilling its mission.
| I propose we send Lennart Poettering personally and at once
| (!) on a mission to sort it out.
| grishka wrote:
| Isn't Linux running on the experimental helicopter, that
| also uses an off-the-shelf Snapdragon SoC? The rover
| itself is supposed to be running a RTOS.
| imglorp wrote:
| Actually, some plastics are radiation shielding and they're off
| the shelf. First link has them by the palette it seems.
|
| https://marshield.com/borated-polyethylene-neutron-shielding
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01685...
| [deleted]
| itronitron wrote:
| previous related discussion >>
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188649
| ambentzen wrote:
| Ars has an excellent article about the paper:
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/study-blames-earths-...
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Much better read, thank you.
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