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Exploding Star May Have Damaged Life on Earth
Reedo writes "Scientists have proposed that an ancient supernova may have damaged our ozone layer, wreaking havok on terrestrial life. Previously no one had realized that a cluster of stars could have been so close to the earth during that time. But don't worry about it happening again anytime soon. The next expected supernova is nearly 500,000 light-years away and is too far from the earth to cause any damage."
fp!
Wonder if the tree huggers will protest and try to ban "ozone damaging supernovas"
I love how all the impending doom forcasts that
come from NASA and such other large organizations
are always closed with "But don't worry about
this happening for (large number) of years."
Sure, it's probably because we'll see it
coming and still not be able to do anything
about it, but I find the trend amusing none
the less.
But don't worry about it happening again anytime soon. The next expected supernova is nearly 500,000 light-years away and is too far from the earth to cause any damage."
Too bad, I was thinking of a way out of doing my math homework tonight.
and i had come to believe it was all because of the anti-time anomaly
I'm really unhappy with CNN. This theory is insultingly ludicrous.
It's preposterous to think that there could have been even ONE supernova in our vicinity (let alone "several" as stated in the article) without obvious lingering effects, i.e., a remnant special star like a neutron star or a black hole and/or some sort of nebula. "Several million years" is nothing in cosmic time--the nebulae that those stars would have left would barely have dispersed at all.
Not to mention that our position in the galaxy is somewhat peculiar. We are on the rim of a huge and empty vastness called the local bubble. The speculation (since there's a pulsar on the other side of the local bubble) is that the portion of space near us was cleared out by a big supernova some time ago (probably ~5-6 billion years ago, as our sun was almost certainly formed in its wake). How could these researchers possibly think that several supernova could have passed through without leaving similarly obvious signatures?
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
When they say "wreak havoc" on terrestrial life I wonder what the extent really could have been..
( more data! )
If there was a mass irradiation, it might give some more explanation to the mass extinction that happened at the end of the Devonian period that basically cleaned out most of the diverse sea-life ( there wasn't much on land those days )
Of course, someone please tell me if I have my time-periods wrong, I'm no geologist..
Ideas?
Note that, the article claims that the next star in that cluster expected to go supernova is 500,000 light years away.
Of course, it also claims that that star is Antares, which is actually about 600 light years away.
scientists are always proposing stuff that invariably turns out untrue. Get a load of that Newton guy, for instance.
From the article:
The next member of the gang expected to go supernova is Antares, which at almost 500,000 light-years away is too distant to rattle our planet, they say.
What kind of dope are these astronomers smoking? Antares is 500 light years away.
Still quite distant, but 500000 light years will place you well outside the Milky way. It's about as far as the Magellanic clouds.
More fodder for the pseudo-science of denying the existance of global warming.
Amazing. Global warming and Ozone depletion in 70 billion B.C. was caused by a SuperNova. Global warming in the 1970's was caused by the Chevy Nova.
Why does Michael Jordan want to see your underpants?
tcd004
So if this hadn't occurred, would we all have flying cars and eliminated world hunger and learned to all peacefully coexist by now? How far back did this set us..
--w00t
Makes you wonder if we're here to discover it happened because it happened.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
If the life is gone then how can we verify that it even existed at all?? Kind of like saying 100 unknown species of animals go extinct in the rainforest every day...
Hmm... Could mass radiation have done something to life forms today? We always hear about our odds of being a planet with life. First our distance from the sun and then the fact that it gives out lower then average radiation. Is the time frame right for creating the "missing link" or just plain skipping it? As you can tell, I'm no biologist.
How's this friend?
It's a space station!
They talk about this showing up in the marine fossil record, but what about on land? The article mentions some geological data, but is there any on-land paleontological evidence to support this? Also, they only talk about it killing plankton - does that mean that it was too far away to kill anything larger directly? Perhaps this is why we haven't run across it in any other fossil records...
I personally think this was the accident that killed off all the smart proto-plasm.
Anyone else with me on this hair brained idea?
When exactly *is* 500,000 years? let's say that the next-nearest Nova goes off somewhere in a galaxy far far away. the actual light wouldn't reach for half a million years?
I'm sure this is rocking a dead baby, but how do the "experts" signify exactly *when* things happen, and what specifically that means. Do the anomolies happen and are observed later, the event of which is estimated in reverse?
Does this mean if i put instant coffe in a microwave, i'll go backwards in time?
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
In other science news, Joe Blow invents the first Warp Drive. When asked about his shocking discovery he replied, "Just ask my wife".
Does anyone know how far away the cluster was at the time of the alleged nova? I googled around but couldn't find that figure.
Ellen
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
"500,000 light-years away and is too far from the earth to cause any damage." Thanks for the double clarification, I knew my studies astrophysics class wouldnt last!
We as voters have given up essential liberty. We hoped to purchase a little temporary safety. We in fact deserve neither
Anyway, how much of this story is influenced by the idea of evolution, and how would the story read if fallicies were found in the NDT?
I love Kimmy!
The Galactic core is closer than that, the last I checked. Andromeda is about 2 million LY away, if I recall right. Let's see.
Antares = 520 light years
CNN cites the Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association of stars which is actually about 470 light years away.
So CNN was off only by a factor of a thousand. Interesting theory, if they can get the facts right.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Researchers have always worried about there might be in fact a single cause of Mass Extinction. You can refer to this graph for the rough interval of mass extinction.
Most people believe that the meterorite impacts is responsible for the mass extinction, but now this new findings may sparks a new way of thinking - the murderer may be someone else.
If we believed that there's a cycle for Mass Extinction, there we don't have much to worry about - as it's still millions of years away. However, some people also believe that the Sixth Extinction might come earlier, because human was not present in the last 5 extinction, and that makes the great difference.
Thank you for reading my trolling. I quote as much online reference as possible, but actually my point of view are from the books I read. My apology.
I'm half expecting to see some law firm to
start a class action on behalf of the dinosaurs
descendents. Who WAS the previous owner of that
star?
So who really cares about civil liberties anyway, NOT!
Giant Super Nova passes through solar system! This time Earth saved by Mars and it's very own Moon due to the alignment at the time of this Universal specatacle. Amazing!
*SRU
Sorry, I only read the headline and thought it was about the cultural damage cause by Elvis' exploding weight and ultimately his death. Would probably have made for a more interesting read.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
I don't even want to contemplate how much energy was given off forming the elements I'm made of. Now there's hardly enough energy left over for me to get up and fetch another beer.
Please read the paper before dismissing the theory.
> But don't worry about it happening again
:-)
> anytime soon. The next expected supernova is
> nearly 500,000 light-years away and is too far > from the earth to cause any damage."
Man, you had me going there for a minute. I was getting pretty worried, but I'm glad you straightened it all out for us in the end
Trying is the First Step to Failing --Homer Simpson
"Previously no one had realized that a cluster of stars could have been so close to the earth..."
"But don't worry about it happening again [...] The next expected supernova is [...] too far from the earth to cause any damage."
gotta love how those two go together
-DrkShadow
What disappoints me most about contemporary NASA policy is how they persistently ignore the fact that we've got to get to the Devron system! You'd think they'd have figured that out by now. It's like the chicken and the egg!
Sheesh.
They know their readers just glance over the numbers. and btw 417 is a small number. when you are talking about space u have to say at least thousands (preferably millions and billions).
"If the life is gone then how can we verify that it even existed at all?? "
You are so right. And to think of it until recently i believed the lies scientists told me about dynasours roaming the earth.
Well firstly like others have pointed out, Antares is nothing like 500,000 light years away. That's a 1000-fold error and lazy journalism on CNN's part.
As for when it's going to happen, the stellar time scale is so big compared with what we're used to that it really comes down to a guess. This is figured out based on studying other stars and coming up with theories about the life cycles that they follow... and the theories are always being revised and revised and revised as more information pours in.
Antares is a red giant star that's used up all it's hydrogen, and now it's fusing together heavier and heavier elements, and starting to run out. It might die tommorrow or it might die a million years from now. All that's known at the moment is that it's very near to the end of its life cycle, and that it's massive enough such that when it dies it'll likely go out with a very big bang, probably about as bright for a while as the rest of the Galaxy put together. (We see this happen with stars in other galaxies every so often when an unknown star that couldn't be seen individually suddenly lights up out of nowhere.)
Nobody knows exactly when it'll happen, though.
Must of been a supernova that caused CNN, AOL-TW, M$, the MPAA...
Karma whorin' since 1999
like a new supernova is the ever-present worry on my mind.....
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
Oh my God, that is the most f*cked up porn story I have ever read on this site. You need some serious therapy.
THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!!!
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
This is what happens when you get science news from CNN. Antares IS NOT 500,000 ly away; it is 600 ly away. Big difference. As well, one cannot say that it is the "next expected supernova". It's a good candidate but so is Betelgeuse for that matter. Eta Carinae is much mre likely to go supernova than either of them.
---
I didn't want to leave this space blank.
We need to get the hell off this planet before the radiations from those chain reaction novas burn the life from all the planets.
It's time that we are fleeing those explosions of the Galactic Core which will, in several million years, make known space uninhabitable.
http://www.notelrac.com/essays.dir/f_and_sf.dir/do wn_in_flames.html
If a star supernovaed as it passed us, the remnants would have on average roughly the same velocity as the star group - they would also be 500,000 light years away now.
I doubt CNN made this story out of full cloth, I'm sure the theory has more to back it up than CNN reported - it's not like CNN is a scientific journal, they always trim corroborating details.
(Frankly, I think it's absurd that this comment was moderated to the top.)
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I think it could have aided life on earth by increasing the mutation rate.
http://www.b.150m.com
They talked about this very subject in Stephen Hawking's Universe. Surely I'm not the only one that saw it. Surely you're not going to call him a crackpot too? Could somebody back me up here?
Your post number (#3141592) is a substring of the infinite decimal expansion of the transcendantal number pi! And you even posted it at 03:14AM, how amazing is that! Oh and here was e's post.
best place to lay any media inaccuracies to rest.
here it is again, www.badastronomy.com
Although no-one has mentioned it on there bulletin board yet. Real astronomers visit this board, indeed a real one runs it.
That will be the day!
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
This star group the article refers to is around 500 light years away, not 500,000. Next time, CNN should assign this "reporter" to cover trends in hairstyles or sightings of Elvis or some other topic the "reporter" might be capable of understanding.
Or maybe this is just another example of Time Warner math coming from CNN's parent, the same arithmetic that shows the record studios to be losing billions of dollars due to music "piracy". The multiples are probably similar in both instances.
This all possible, yes, but it's also extremely unlikely.
First the possible. A quick, back of a napkin calculation shows that a supernovae at around 3 light years would appear roughly as bright as the sun (depending on the circumstances). A good opprtunity to work on your tan, for a few days anyway. Nothing to really worry about, but if you're skinned, slap on some SP-40.
Now, if it's much closer, you might have some problems. At ~1.5 light years, the supernova is 4 times as bright as the sun, and at ~1 light year, it's 9 times as bright. Hooray, we know what an inverse square law is.
The real problem is this: there aren't that many stars nearby. The closest, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away. And there's no chance of it ever going supernova - only comparatively massive stars manage that. Within 10 light years of us, there are only 12 stars (and that includes Sol). Of those there is only one that's ever going to go supernovae - Sirius, at a distance of 8.6 ly. And that's an exceptional case. You have to go to the 70th nearest star before you find another star in the same situation - Altair, at 16.8 ly.
Now, even with Sirius and Altair, they're going to be shining for millions of years to come. Now, what they're suggesting is that one of those really rare large stars just happened to be really close to us when it's lifetime of tens of millions of years came to a close. Right.
Time for those astronomers to come down from the mountain - the altitude seems to be having an effect.
I have to agree- it's a great day for pi on Slashdot tonight. I think any transcendental constant can be proud that its post turned out to be someone trying to pound some sense into a creationist.
Of course, to be honest you should round up, because pi is actually closer to 3.141593 than it is to 3.141592. But post 3141593 was posted at 3:15 and not 3:14 AM, which clearly makes this one the winner.
I think 500,000 light years is a bit of bullshit. The milky way is only 100,000 across, we are only 30,000 from Galaxy center, and every star we see in the night sky is in our galaxy.
Which star exactly is it thats 500,000 light years away that they think is going to super-nova? Or is it just one of those zillions in Andromeda. Dunno which one!
Me thinks we are 2 orders of magnitude too high here.
What do we Now have to actually wait until Antares goes supernova for the next release of Master of Orion?
Or does this mean with the next release of The Master of Orion the master will actually make Antares go supernova ahead of schedule?
I havent read the article, shoot me ;-) But my guess is that they just look for the most massive star in the solar neighbourhood. The reasoning is:
1) a star can only use about 10% of the available hydrogen, before more rapid evolutionary mechanisms set is (ie before some of them go boom)
2) only 0.7% of the rest mass energy is turned into energy
3) the relation between luminosity (L) and mass (M) is:
- M proportional to L^4 (for massive stars)
Thus nuclear time scale (tn):
tn = 0.007*0.1*Mc^2/L ( = 10^10 year for the Sun)
for other massive stars:
tn = (M/Msun)/(L/Lsun) * 10^10 yr
= (M/Msun)/(M^4/Msun) *10^10yr
= M^-3 * 10^10 yr
so if one would find a 10 Msun star nearby, you could expect it to go boom in 10 million years. In other words, a cosmic 'blink of the eye'.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
...looking at the article thinking "that number of light years looks too small - i mean a year - how big can that be? ah - i'll stick a few zeroes on the end - yeah, that's done it!!"
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction, but they eat more steak.
They're really astrologers. They believe incredible things about the past, and try to predict the future (often with a flattened-out glass ball, although recently they re-potted their orbiting crystal divination tube).
They even have the physicists jumping through hoops and stretching statistics out of shape in order to make non-optical instruments fit the astrologers' wild theories.
If companies did this kind of thing, they'd be writted* out of the picture before you could blink, but this is Science (insert respectful silence) and cannot be questioned (insert shocked inhalations at `the very idea!').
* Writted (ri'-ted), v, to saturate with offensive court documents.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, it doesn't. Take as many apes as you please, put them in a dirty nuclear reactor and wind the dial up to `Max' for a few days and see if they evolve at all.
There's a reason you wear a lead coat when you go to have your insides xrayed - and the technician stands behind another lead screen - and it's not the risk of becoming too smart for your family to bear.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And here's me thinking that fossils of practically everything appear and disappear abruptly in the fossil record. Now where on earth did I get that silly idea? Oh, yes: Earnst Mayer, Stephen Gould, Niles Eldredge, Richard Goldschmidt, Roger Lewin, and let's not forget Charles Darwin. Sounds a bit like a who's who, dunnit?
Ergo: non sequitur.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
True, but you left out a pivotal part of the story: what happened to them and when is a theoretical construct.
Now that's just completely wrong. Biologists extracting blood cells from T-Rex bones can get a fairly good idea of an upper limit for the bone's age, based on home much the organic material has decayed. And it's shy at least four noughts of any figure you're likely have in mind. (-:
Of course, when people dig up fresh dinosaur bones, or extract fresh wood from within Manley sandstone, that generally presents them with a pretty big hint about the age of what they've found. But, of course, the false assumptions undergirding this assertion...
...are so important on philosophical/metaphysical grounds that inconvenient observations like those tend to just get swept under the carpet.
I think the pi in your post is a sign from the gods of science that you're making them do too many beetles, and you need to step outside of your reality bubble for a while so they can discuss things with you. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Not so much `withstood' as `denied and papered over the wounds from'.
This consists very much of closing one's eyes and crying `It *IS*, dammit!' - only it's generally done professionally and en masse (cf Wistar and similar conferences).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The next supernova is not, of course, known; they are essentially unpredicatable events. The next 'close by' supernova (i.e. detectable with neutrino observatories like SNO ) is likely to be at 10 kilo-Parsecs.. the centre of the galaxy (where most stars in our galaxy are). That is, approximately 31 000 light years.
Time scales are varied, depending on who you ask, but numbers like 20-60 years are quite common. Note that these represent 'mean time to next event', not the real time or most likely time.
Its actually ~520 light years away. I've seen figures ranging from 500 to 600 but it may be a difficult one to gauge the distance because it is of variable brightness (changes in brightness from day to day as it expands and shrinks).
n d here http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980726.html
:)
More info here:
http://www.seds.org/billa/twn/antx.html
a
Still more than far enough away to not worry us. However when it does go supernova (I personally hope it already has blown up), it will be a spactacular show and will turn night into day for weeks or even months.
If you wonder what I meant by already has blown up, remember, it could have blown up already and we won't see it until the light gets here, which will be 520 or so years AFTER the actual event
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Just to be sure that this sort of thing is not allowed to happen again, perhaps we should get congress to pass some laws against it. And we really do need to look at the EPA regulations regarding this sort of thing and make sure that they are tight.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Thanks for the nod, but I think you meant havoc
Unless, of course, you've slipped into your Middle English Ultima character :)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
don't worry??? i guess the last one, by definition, wasn't 'expected', either :=)
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
To paraphrase the article a little more accurately than CNN, I hope.
There is a cluster of young bright stars, currently about 500 ly away from us. They analyse the known movements of cluster (and the Sun) and the likely rate of supernovae in the cluster over the last 5-10 million years. They conclude that there could very plausibly have been enough supernovae from that cluster to account for two things:
1. The "local bubble" a region of space about 500 ly in radius containing the Sun in which the usual interstellar gas is much hotter and thinner than usual.
2. The unusually high levels of a stable, but rare
isotope of iron in seabed sediments laid down at certain times.
The rule out various mechanisms that might have stopped the iron from the supernovae reaching the Earth.
They look, much as an afterthought at the possible biological impacts of these supernovae. These are not strong, and I would not say that the paper
really supports the idea that this is the trigger
of any mass extinctions. The closest of the supernovae would, apparently significantly reduce
ozone levels in the stratosphere (charged particles from the SN catalyse NO formation, which
destroys ozone), and this would increase levels of
UV-B at the surface, to which plankton and corals
are especially susceptible, so there might have been some extinctions there, but that seems to be all.
How do most people think that the heavier elements ended up in this system anyway? Think about it. You need a star of at least 8 solar masses to start the r-process, the rapid heavy-element formation process. There just isn't enough mass in the solar system to account for that. There must have been another close encounter billions of years ago that allowed a young star to "rip" enough material from an old supernova remnant /dense cloud to form the planets with the elements we have today.
nahtanoj
It probably should be clarified that the statement about Antares being the next probable supernova really meant "Antares is the next likely SN candidate in that cluster". For quite some time, astronomers have been keeping an eye on Eta Carinae, which is about somewhere between 7.5K and 10K light years away, but could possibly let go at any time. It will likely be quite harmless except to astronauts and orbiting spacecraft (there is some discussion regarding whether it could become a gamma ray burster), but quite spectacular to see. There just aren't any sufficiently massive stars close enough to us to really worry about supernovas anytime soon.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Uh.. we don't need a supernova "in our vicinity" to get blasted by a star. We've already seen two X-ray blasts in recent years. The most recent one was about four years ago, when I happened to be up half the night watching Aurora Borealis and noticed that the entire sky had a background glow. X-rays were blasting the upper level of the atmosphere. If the source had been a quarter of its distance closer we'd have really noticed.
Stars stop burning at iron not helium.
Alright, I'll put the catalytic converter back on my nova. Geez, who'd a thought one chevy nova would cause that much of a stir?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Dont remember the exact figure, but it is estimated that a supernova occurs somewhere between a few times a week, to one every few minutes.
Absolutely nothing is going to ha
Short version of above: once a large enough star leaves the main sequence, you can come up with an order-of-magnitude guess as to when it will blow. This guess, by the way, would likely be expressed according to observed time (i.e., our time), not absolute time.
How long before Tom Dashle and Al Gore blame this incident on George Bush, the Republican Party, and the Rich Corporations?
that my portable y2k certified power generator hasn't sold on Ebay yet! I'm going to be ready for this one! Thanks for the news. Keep us posted.
But don't worry about it happening again anytime soon. The next expected supernova is nearly 500,000 light-years away and is too far from the earth to cause any damage."
Pssh.. we don't need no stinkin supernova to damage our ozone layer, we're doing fine on our own thank you very much.
Is this a scolding? Do you send Velokovsky to bed without his dinner?
Take for instance, the star Betelgeuse. Only about 600 light years away, and an excellent candidate to go supernova sometime (anytime) in the next 100,000 years.
All these "Observations" by Evolutionists are really like a kid saying my dog ate my homework. They keep coming up with reasons why so many lifeforms would die, when those same "reasons" would mess up some other part of the theory.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
These elements are formed as the >= 8 solar mass stars collaspe into neutron stars. The shockwaves of the collaspe initiate the formation of the elements. I don't know about the jets, but you might be right.
nahtanoj
"The next expected supernova is nearly 500,000 light-years away"
That's a neat trick, considering that the Milky Way is only about 100,000 light-years across...
This is the first time I've seen the unit used, and while I'm clever enough to figure out that "ly" means "light year", I'm having a hard time with "pc".
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
I'm an astronomer. I study supernovae. A number of years ago, I crunched the numbers on the various types of hazards posed by nearby supernovae. You can find the work at
http://a188-l009.rit.edu/richmond/answers/snrisks. txt
The bottom line is: no need to worry for anything more than about 50 parsecs = 160 light years away from us. There are zero known stars within that radius which could become supernovae, so there's no need to worry about this right now. In a few tens of millions of years, the Sun might move closer to some possible SN progenitor, but I'm not holding my breath.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
Hey, there is another magnetic pole reversal in about 1000 years. During the reversal there is a peroid of time with no magnetic pole. With no magnetic pole the ozone layer disapates. So the end of the ozone layer is going to happen whether it comes from beyond earth or from aerosol cans.
Hi there,
> First the possible. A quick, back of a napkin
> calculation shows that a supernovae at around 3
> light years would appear roughly as bright as the
> sun (depending on the circumstances).
What was your calculation? I'm interested in how you got those numbers. I presume you were comparing visual magnitudes or some such?
IAAPA (I am a professional astronomer), and there are two effects that you may have not considered.
(i) A supernove explosion produces a LOT of high energy radiation compared to the sun in quiescence. This is what can ionise the upper atmosphere in a few seconds and let the remaining radiation down to sea level. This probably increases the distance at which the supernova can do significant harm.
(ii) Star groups move relative to the Sun. I don't do proper motion studies of the local groups, but the ScoCen association may have been closer to the Solar system in the past than it is now.
I apologise if you already took this into account!
Dr Fish
I guess that explains the French...
Considering how much *real* science there is to work on--stuff that actually affects us--this kinda random theorizing is such a ridiculous waste. It's not science if you can't prove it.
anyone stopped to think that, a lot of these stars have probably already gone supernova, because, if a star is 500,000 light years away, we are seeing it 500,000 years ago. I dunno, maybe I am just thinking too hard.
Here's an analysis of the risks associated with nearby supernovae. The executive summary is that gamma rays offer the most potential for destruction, and the danger range is within about 100 ly.
The next expected supernova is nearly 500,000 light-years away and is too far from the earth to cause any damage.
Are we expecting this to happen in the near (ie: in my life time) future? And if so, doesn't that mean that it has already happened? - like 499,9xx ish years ago
Don't you love seeing the universe the way it was rather than the way it is now?
So me live in a supernova hole/bubble?
Is it possible that only in these areas of the glaxies suns have a planet system? The elements we all consist of are after all just supernova exhaustion.
Maybe there are far less planet systems than we have expected?
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Actually, the closest star to us thats about to go pop (bang!) is bettlegeise (sp?). When it does, its radiation will certainly reach earth, destroying all human and most plant life. Unfortunately, the exact moment we are aware of the blast, we also be killed. When will this happen, well, the funny part is it could be anywhere from now, until 80,000 years from now. Which is small in cosmic time, but kind of relevant for our lives -_^. The bottom line is your goose is cooked, so why bother with math homework?
Well, assuming they are speaking relativeley, even if it happened now, it would take 500,000 years for us just to see it...
"Windows and Linux can co-exist on the same machine." - Microsoft Corporation.
Perhaps the fact that Supernovae can damage life on earth lead to the old astrologers fear of supernovae, as portents of doom, in some form of race memory type thing ?
--
Don't trust me. I'm insane.
and I am a monkey's uncle! Puh-lease!
Makes you wonder if we're here to discover it happened because it happened.
It also makes you wonder if this kind of thing is common enough that it tends to take out intelligent races before they develop interstellar travel.
Or if it might make interstellar travel at sublight speeds sufficiently hazardous that there isn't much of it.
Or perhaps the cluster has made this region sufficiently dangerous that nobody has come here recently (like in the last few million years).
Any (or a combination) of these might help to explain why, as far as we can tell, no little green men have dropped in to visit.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Folks, it's not a Supernova. Supernovae emit radiation and not the smell of good ol' bullshit. It's just another Green hoax designed to sell the "ozone layer depletion" theory once again, aqnd a sign of Greens' transition to more professional psychological manipulation.
First, I'd like to say a couple of words about the "ozone layer" theory. Ozone is actually oxygene (IV) oxyde (!!!)- O=O=O. This molecule is highly unstable and deteriorates spontaneously, in pure form it's highly explosive. The UV radiation is absorbed by OXYGENE (O=O) and not ozone. Oxygene absorbs the UV photons and BECOMES ozone which than deteriorates back to oxygene, so the UV energy is converted to plain heat.
From this viewpoint, ozone itself plays NO ROLE is UV protection of the Earth PERIOD. The ozone holes are caused by an obvious fact that UV radiation necessary to create ozone is minimal in the polar areas.
So, all this Supernova BS indicates that Greens are desperate in their attempts at fishing for public support for their flawed theories since nobody listens to them in the White House any longer.
Have fun, more GOP folks in the Congress and Senate equals more Supernovae of this kind.
thought it was talking about Micheal Jackson.
Table-ized A.I.
Ahem. Have you ever considered that is the point of science? To factor in new evidence as part of a ever converging, successive approximation of the truth?
To complain about that is like griping that water is wet. It's the nature of the thing, man.
But, not to worry. Despite your preconceptions, not everything in science changes, or is likely to change. Earth's gravity still attracts towards the center of the planet. Momentum is still conserved, even when it hurts. (I.e. Stepping into the road ahead of a speeding bus.) Etc. All of that is already well pinned down by experiment, and will stay pinned down until disproven by even more experiments -- not likely to happen at this stage.
The change that worries you happens on the frontier. This is a good thing. Behind the slowly advancing frontier zones are regions of knowledge that are fairly well known, and thus pretty reliable. That should please you, if consistency is your goal.
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
Ahem. Have you ever considered that is the point of science? To factor in new evidence as part of a ever converging, successive approximation of the truth?
Absolutely. I am somewhat of a scientist myself and like to think I know a little bit about the scientific method. However, I believe that in God there already is all truth and that He has given us all the truth we need for our time on this earth. Finally, we will be taught the fullness of knowledge when we are able to bear it. I have a hard enough time with third order linear equations...
It's the nature of the thing, man.
Precicely my point. I don't trust man or his knowledge. I only trust God. Hence the motto of the USA, "In God we trust."
Earth's gravity still attracts towards the center of the planet.
OK, why? Science still doesn't fully understand gravity. Are there gravity particles? Is there another force that we don't understand, what about the GUT? God knows all these things and He will teach them to us.
All of that is already well pinned down by experiment, and will stay pinned down until disproven by even more experiments
What about on another planet, or near a black hole or in another universe? Granted the latter is unlikely, but still possible. The fact is, man knows extremely little about our universe and how it works. I may agree with observations, but I don't agree in man's ideas when they so clearly contradict those of God.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
All the truth we need? Really? I don't know whether you worship Zeus, Odin, Athena, Set, Raven, Tiamat, Baal, Ashera, Quetzalcoatl, or even the new kid on the block, Yahweh, but it doesn't matter. Not one of the myriad of gods humans have revered through the ages have bothered to reveal, say, the germ theory of disease. From that follows simple sanitation, something possible even millenia ago, and which would have saved untold millions from dying agonizing deaths.
Why? Why didn't even one god see fit to proclaim this important principle? It would have given their believers a massive advantage over all the others. And, don't say, "As a test for us." Once the gods start relying on humans to work things out for themselves -- watch out! You've got that nasty science thing again. ;-)
I see. Only trust God. Hmmm.... So, you don't trust your eyes, ears, or any of your other senses? Nor, do you trust your fellow man or what they report to you in good faith? Really? Somehow, I doubt that.
The point you seem to be missing is that science is little more than formularized common sense. If Ugh the caveman touches a rock heated by his campfire and get burnt, he won't touch that rock again. To avoid getting burnt by other rocks Ugh needs to generalize, "Rocks heated by campfire burn Ugh. No touch." Already Ugh is forming a hypothesis, which he will probably test next meal time. A smarter Ugh will realize that many things heated by fire will burn him, molten fat dripping from his antelope haunch, bones, etc. Maybe Ugh will form a theory of Heat, "Fire make things hot. Hot things burn Ugh. No touch." Add some Material Science to this, and Bingo! cooking utensils: "Hot not run up stick fast, unless it start to burn. Put meat on stick. Hold over fire. Sparks no burn hand."
Ugh has become a primitive scientist. Stone him at once! 8-)
Seriously, you can't sit there wearing woven clothes, typing at a computer, belly full of food planted with mechanical seeders and harvested with a combine, and tell me that knowledge revealed by your god is all we need. Not unless you've got a set of Revealed blueprints for a technological society handed down from On High. Or maybe, up from Down Below.
OK, and how will god do this? A new set of stone tablets, numbers 3 through 30,000? Educational TV on the God Channel? Are we supposed to sit around on our buns until this happens?
Or, shouldn't we be out there struggling to learn a little more about the universe, you know, doing --horrors!-- science.
Maybe there's dozen of competing hypothesises on how gravity works and maybe we have no experiment to say which ones (if any) are correct, but that's no reason to throw up our collective hands and do nothing. Tomorrow, some bright lad or lassie may cook up a test for gravity that will help winnow the wheat from the chaff of competing theories.
Are you saying that God has indicated to you which of the many proposed Grand Unified Theories is correct? If so, has he included some experiments that we can run to verify this?
(Without a successful and repeatable test, your revealed knowledge has to fight it out with all the other revealed knowlege from all other cultures. Good Luck, you'll need it.)
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
Or you could close your eyes and shout 'tis! (-:
That must be why Stephen J Gould gets so much mileage out opf catastrophism, and why `benchmark' fossils proving Darwinism are repeatedly being proclaimed, and later silently (or at best very quietly) withdrawn.
Eohippus is no longer part of a series, Archaeopteryx is a variant on the theme `Hoatzin' and Lucy was resting several layers above a modern human skull. Sorry, where was that evidence again?
Behe's `irreducible complexity' and Dembski's `specified complexity' are merely fighting over the carcass. It's time for a completely new theory.
I don't see that evolution counts one way or the other to someone with a flat-earth POV.
Does this guy count as a creationist in your eyes? His `wild' theory of specie development is a mathematical certainty when compared with Darwinism.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Well, no. All that needs to happen, and it often does without specifically evil intent, is for papers to go unpublished often enough. And evidently they do.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I recommend extending your education before pontificating. (-:
I'm not talking about C14, I'm talking about meat, bone and blood cells.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Actually, you do, and even that isn't enough to genetically break even (this extinction mutagenesis link cites deliberately accelerated examples but nicely explains the principle).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing