Huge Star Quake Rocks Milky Way

SJrX writes "The BBC is reporting that scientists have detected "the biggest explosion observed by humans within [the past 400 years]". The explosion luckily occured about 50,000 light years away form us, on the far side of the Milky Way, as the article goes on to say that had the explosion been within 10 light years of us, it "would possibly have triggered a mass extinction.""

Comments

Equation constraints

[BWJones]

Of course the existence of magnetars will place constraints on estimations of life on other planets like the Drake equation, and it might be useful to map out these sources of potential periodic radiation bursts to limit/make more efficient radio/laser surveys of the sky.

Re:Equation constraints

[mbrother]

I don't know all the details myself, but the article focuses on SWIFT, which is designed to monitor the whole sky for bright gamma ray bursts. It just went up itself in November, although there are other satelites up with similar (but worse) capability). Gamma ray bursts go off about once a day, give or take, and spacecraft like SWIFT detect them, point toward them and localize them, then relay that information to ground-based telescopes for follow-up at other wavelenghts. So some of your analysis is right, but some of your assumptions are wrong.

It's funny that gamma ray bursts were first discovered by the military who wanted to watch for nuclear weapons. This was in the early 1970s, maybe a bit earlier. They went batshit when these previously unknown bursts started setting off alarms on a regular basis.

Re:Equation constraints

[Fulcrum of Evil]

We know that in our experience, something man-made, such as a car does not just appear, but is the product of intelligent design and purposeful construction, all arising out of a thing we call mind.

Well duh, man made things are made by man.

why is it BELIEVED that even a singe cell 'appeared' out of seemingly nowhere?

It isn't. A single cell is thought to be the product of about 1-2B years of evolution, starting with much simpler organisms.

Indeed, as you say, life could be common in the universe, but why can it not be attributed to a mind that has made it happen in many places.

So aliens are seeding life though the universe? Who made them? When you get down to it, someone has to be the first and, new evidence notwithstanding, it may as well be us.

Why is it so hard to admit that the order and information content of the "natural" world is the product of a mind just as the products of our modern technological world are conceived in the minds of their creators?

That's a religious argument and has no place in science. Specifically, it allows no new understanding or predictions. Save your ID stuff for philosophy.

Re:Equation constraints

[Ohreally_factor]

Why is it so hard to admit that the order and information content of the "natural" world is the product of a mind just as the products of our modern technological world are conceived in the minds of their creators? All of science would still be just as fascinating and useful if that BELIEF were accepted as the cause for the origin of the order, design and laws that scientists seek to explore.

Because what you are describing is metaphysics, not science. I generally have no problem with you or anyone holding whatever metaphysical beliefs you want. It's when you attempt to substitute the metaphysics for science or impose the metaphysics on science that I have a problem.

Your stated metaphysical belief is sufficiently vague as to not conflict with science. You do not seem to be trying to impose your metaphysical beliefs on others. However, we've seen time and again, through out history into the present what happens when scientific development challenges metaphysical notions of those with political power, especially when that power is based on those metaphysical notions.

Furthermore, if you rely on supernatural explanations, why bother doing science? Why attempt to understand the physical world when the supernatural world trumps it? (I realize that your stated beliefs are more akin to that of the Deists, many of whom compared the universe to a clockwork that had been set into motion by some "Mind" and left to run on it's own. By seeking to understand the universe, one was also seeking to understand the mind that created it.)

Anyway, as I said, I don't have a problem with your personal metaphysical beliefs, but I think they're totally extracurricular to science.

Re:Equation constraints

[Anonymous Coward]

What is relevant however is that the device contains an incredible amount of INFORMATION, which CANNOT, according information theory arise from randomness, but only from another source of information.

This is, of course, nonsense. "Random" processes can generate information in any meaningful sense of the term.

10^99 monkeys will NOT ever type the works of Shakespeare in the known or conjectured time the Universe has been in existence.

This is totally irrelevant to evolution, because the random processes of evolution are quite biased in favor of certain outcomes. That's the whole POINT of evolution. Try doing a function optimization by generating random numbers until you get to the maximum. Then try it using a genetic algorithm, which applies not just the random process of mutation, but also of recombination or crossover (combining features of different solutions), and most particularly of natural selection, which discards suboptimal solutions.

I always thought that science is what we KNOW, not what we believe!

Incorrect. You never "prove" anything in science, you merely amass more support in favor of one theory than another, thus strengthening your relative belief in one theory. Bayesian probability is a natural framework in which to understand the scientific method.

Why should believing in a Creator stifle science?

"What causes lightning?" "The gods are angry." "Oh."

Believing in a creator need not stifle science, but it can, as soon as you introduce ineffable supernatural causes, because they, by definition, preclude further investigation.

Evolution can explain certain aspects of our Cosmos reasonably well, but has severe problems with others. The origin of information is one of them.

Only in your made-up fantasy version of information theory and evolution. Real evolution has no problem with real information theory.

One of the goals of information science is to come up with a self-programming computer, but sofar no one has even developed a workable theory how that might be accomplished without supplying the needed information externally first.

For a sufficiently vague definition of "supplying the needed information externally" that is true, but trivial and irrelevant. Obviously, nobody is ever going to design a computer without, well, DESIGNING it. But so what? What does that have to do with whether evolution can produce the complexity we see in living organisms?

Re:Equation constraints

[Anonymous Coward]

If something takes billions of years in evolution, it has one of two features. It either takes literally quadrillions of generations of conserved mutations, or it takes a handful of mutations each with odds of billions-to-trillions-to-one against. Given the small size of even the largest genomes, the first is demonstrably false.

I fail to see how the first is "demonstrably false". Please demonstrate it.

In any case, the odds of any particular mutation is always incredibly small, but that doesn't mean mutations don't happen. (It's like claiming that nobody can win the lottery because the odds are millions against. But somebody wins, even if any particular number is unlikely.)

In point of fact, the evidence indicates that multicellular organisms appear to have arisen from unicellular life independently in each of the kingdoms, and several times in some phyla. This suggests that multicellular life isn't all that unlikely, but conditions are no longer suitable for it.

Give Me The Stars

[Doc Ruby]

Let's say 50Kly is as far away as this starquake can be (obviously not). And they happen on a 10ly granularity. That's something like 1 in 50K^3/10, or 1.25E13 to 1 against it happening in 400 years. Staring down the barrels of nuclear and Greenhouse extinction in the next century, I'll take those odds.

Re:Pffft...

[salvorHardin]

I thought it was just that it was the biggest such explosion recorded by humans within the last 400 years.

Re:Faintly heard by SETI

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I am sure that is a reference to something, I just don't know or remember what it is.

Re:Pffft...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is my favorite kind of slashdot post...

Ahem! Correction!

Except...there's nothing to correct. The disconnect was in the ultra-rigid interpretation. Next time, I might suggest trying to understand what they were attempting to communicate instead of intentionally misunderstanding it. Nitpicking doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what you were doing.

No, it won't

[Einer2]

From what I know, magnetars radiate most of their energy on an extremely short timescale, of order tens of thousands of years or so. Considering how rare they are, the number of stars that are irradiated by SGR flares must be pretty small, and so any additional term in the Drake equation would be very, very close to unity.

If anyone wants to cruise for mod points, you could do an order-of-magnitude estimate of the fraction of irradiated stars using the age and total volume of the Milky Way, the mean time between SGR flares of this magnitude (call it a decade to a century), and the radius of OMG-We're-All-Gonna-Die that was specified in the article.

Of course, the supernova explosion that led to a magnetar's formation would would have already done quite a bit of damage to the surrounding area, so they aren't likely to have any meaningful impact on any planetary systems around them anyway.

Re:No, it won't

[Esion Modnar]

the supernova explosion that led to a magnetar's formation would would have already done quite a bit of damage to the surrounding area

Put another way, it would be like worrying about being deafened by the shock wave of a nuclear bomb going off a mile away.

Re:Gee...

[metamatic]

That was my thought too, why do people always talk about the mass extinction of humanity like it's some kind of cataclysmically bad thing?

It couldn't have been "The Empire"

[Port-0]

We know that's in a different galaxy... far far away...

Re:Science by Press Release

[kaalamaadan]

Assuming this is correct, the BBC journalist seems to have taken an off-hand comment and put it into an unreleated and meaningless context.

Perhaps. But "Earth" seems much more immediate than "any planets within a few light years of it". Just like in "Earthly" disasters, irrespective of the fact that 200,000 people died, people are much more shocked when they think that ~300 of their countrymen are missing. In the words of Ursula K Le Guin, this is "making a molehill out of a mountain.".

A scary theory

[Mostly a lurker]

Briefly, I think it is quite probable that the characteristics that allow a species to become dominant and develop advanced technology ensure the species' destruction once the technology becomes sufficiently advanced.

A short post cannot contain much detail. As far as humans are concerned we see

• A period of struggle for survival. During this period, gradual development of some basic technologies helped. However, a willingness to band together in groups and fight and kill or enslave humans in other groups (as well as animals) to gain access to critical resources was probably most important.
• To ensure cohesion of an individual group and optimise its effectiveness as a fighting force, dominant leaders who could dicate to the rest of the group were necessary. As a practical matter, the leader was normally an individual who was single minded in his pursuit of power and totally amoral in the methods used to achieve it. This was combined with more positive strengths such as physical prowess and general intelligence to allow him (usually, occasionally her) to win and maintain his position.
• Once technology reached a certain point, both
  1. the instinct to band together in groups and seek conflict with other groups, and
  2. the tendency to allow amoral, power-mad individuals to gain leadership of the groups
  became counter productive. However, they are built into our genetic makeup and few would be willing to even consider genetic engineering to eliminate these traits.
• Technology tends to develop at an exponential rate. While initial developments occurred over a very long time period, once technology reaches a certain level, progress becomes very rapid. There is insufficient time for scientists to educate the population as whole as to the dangers of new technologies before the amoral leaders have already started misusing them.
• It is inevitable that power crazed individuals, eventually possessing enormous power, will clash with each other: destroying the rest of us in the process. There is no way of predicting how the end will come, but quite likely in a totally different way to that any of us currently imagine -- and I guess it might happen in less than 50 years.

Re:This is old news.

[l0b0]

Dude, this joke is getting old. ...did I just say that?