Slashdot Mirror
Sea Life Wiped Out by Neutron Star Collision?
Memorize writes "Scientists report in the Journal of Astrophysical Letters that a mass extinction of marine life 450 million years ago might have been caused by radiation from an exploding star, such as a collision between two neutron stars, or a neutron star collapsing into a black hole. Such an event would cause a ten-second burst of gamma radiation, and if it occurred within our galaxy, it could have wiped out many species on earth. At least if astronomers find out that an asteroid is heading our way, we can do something about it, but if there is a gamma burst, we get no warning. And if we did, would there be any way to protect the planet?"
I wonder if Ben Affleck will be able to take car... Wait, is that an Armageddon link in the blurb? Man that totally takes the fun out of it.
Better stock up on SPF 3000 and make the best of it...
I remember reading this a while back on the Wikipedia entry for the Permian Triassic Extinction Event (link), but the Wiki entry quotes specifically that an extinction like this would only happen if the star were 10 parsecs, or 30 light years away.
Dr Melott in the article claims that a star like this would have to be 6,000 light years away, or closer. (That's more than 200 times the distance previously claimed.
Keep in mind the volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi r^3, so the volume of space that this would take up is increased by a factor of 8,000,000. I'd say, that the chance of this happening to us, therefore is increased by a factor of 8 million.
As I said before, scary stuff.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
From reading the article, it didn't seem like there was any evidence of this other than speculation. They talk about using computer models to show how it would have wiped life out, but what about the evidence that brought them to this model to begin with? They could at least start with evidence in rocks or something. I wish that every time I speculated on something, that they would 200 million dollar probe. I speculate that this comment will be modded up to +5 interesting, we should launch a probe to see if this is indeed the case.
Yet another reason why the space program(s) in the whole world shout be given a high priority. Not just for technology, but ultimately for human survival in such occasion.
And if we did, would there be any way to protect the planet?"
No.
Gee, I wish all "Ask Slashdot" postings were this easy..
On the bright side, gamma ray exposure is what brought us the Hulk, and his hot cousin She-Hulk. So hey, what's few million flavors of fish, give or take?
Tinfoil hats for everyone!
Shades of Grayden
I can confirm the veracity of the theory, I've actually reproduce it through experimentation. My partner and I set up a live and a control group and did a sequenced build up until... well...
So anyways, we put Sea Monkeys in a microwave oven.
Can you recommend a good sunscreen that will protect me from a ten second gamma ray burst?
Didn't slashdot report that Black Holes don't exists
Whom am I to believe?
Nothing to see here
Dont just live on one planet. Seriously, if we had the technology to spread the species beyond our solar system, we wouldnt be taken out in one cosmic hit. Admittedly a gamma burst from coliding neutron stars would still take out a large portion of a galaxy. I seem to recall a sci fi novella about something like this. I must go look it up
Go Away! Not for Sale
I've been fascinated by these kinds of events for a while. We live in a huge cosmos, full of billions and billions of stars, the fact is that we really could at any point be wiped out by thousands of chance events at any moment, that we wouldn't even see coming, that we right now know nothing about. If our reality as we know it suddenly got deleted for whatever reason, and we had no idea that it was coming, there would be no hindsight to be twenty-twenty about. Just another reason to live life well, while we still have the chance to. Now I feel like eating ice-cream.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Since gamma rays are travelling at the speed of light - we can't possibly get any warning of them without figuring out some kind of faster-than-light transportation or message transmission.
I suppose we could make a REALLY good predictive model of when astronomical objects are likely to do this - and predict the arrival of a gamma ray burst in time to do something about it. But what could we possibly do?
It takes a good few inches of lead (or a good few feet of concrete, dirt, whatever) to significantly attenuate gamma rays - and if the ones were are talking about were powerful enough to get through the full depth of the earth's oceans and still kill things when they got there - then you'd need to wrap the earth in a few feet of lead - or hide down some amazingly deep mine-shafts.
Since gamma rays are electrically neutral, you can't deflect them away with magnets or anything like that.
We'd have to get out of the way - but this radiation will be expanding out equally in all directions from the source. Unless we had thousands of years of warning, we'd have to high-tail it outta here at close to the speed of light in order to get far enough away for the inverse-square law to have an effect. If we're 100 light years from the source (say) and a mile of salt water doesn't attenuate the energy enough - then we'd need to be *way* more than 200 light years away if we could carry a quarter of a mile of water as a shield, 400 light years away if we had a sixteenth of a mile of water....for any reasonable amount of shielding, we need thousands of years notice of the problem happening.
In all likelyhood, we'd just sit back and let our great, great, great grandchildren deal with the problem.
We're basically doomed unless we have some kind of science-fiction technology.
www.sjbaker.org
If it is that short - half of the Earth (population) will still survive.
wouldnt the burst only hit half the planet? the other half being shielded by earth's mass?
just a thought.
I posted the original story, and found this link after I posted it: Earthtimes story. The 10-second pulse knocked out all the ozone, which allowed gamma radiation to bathe the earth for a few years afterwards, and that's what caused the extinction. If our lives depended on saving the ozone in a hurry, I'm sure it could be done. We would need to build an enormous number of huge nuclear reactors to work as ozone generators, but it could be done. I'm sure some enterprising Slashdotter could calculate how many it would take and how long to get them operational.
A giant tinfoil hat is what's called for.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Greg Egan wrote a great book on this very subjuect.. Highly recommended reading... In fact most Greg Egan books should interest the Slashdot types. Alan
In his novel Manifold Space , Baxter describes a similar destructive event. I highly recommend it, along with its alternate-universe siblings, Manifold Time and Manifold Origin.
."
Here's the description from the back cover:
"The year is 2020. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, Reid Malenfant ventures to the far edge of the solar system, where he discovers a strange artifact left behind by an alien civilization: A gateway that functions as a kind of quantum transporter, allowing virtually instantaneous travel over the vast distances of interstellar space. What lies on the other side of the gateway? Malenfant decides to find out. Yet he will soon be faced with an impossible choice that will push him beyond terror, beyond sanity, beyond humanity itself. Meanwhile on Earth the Japanese scientist Nemoto fears her worst nightmares are coming true. Startling discoveries reveal that the Moon, Venus, even Mars once thrived with life?life that was snuffed out not just once but many times, in cycles of birth and destruction. And the next chilling cycle is set to begin again . .
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
A 10 second burst of radiation would irradiate half the earth. The other half would be unaffected, surely? If it can penetrate the earth (like neutrinos do all the time), then it'll go straight though any organisms too.
"Cats like plain crisps"
1) Send Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to break the gamma ray in half...wait...
2) Make a gigantic lead planetary Dyson sphere
3) In the immortal words of David Levinson, "Uh, hide."
4) PANIC!!!
5) Seven words: Journey to the Center of the Earth.
6) Profit!!!
7) Seriously, did you just ask what we could do? Of course there's nothing we can do, you rhetorical-question-asking moron. We hope to Darwin that we can evolve.
8) Natalie Portman naked in hot grits. (If the world was about to end in a giant gamma ray bath, that is.)
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
After the gamma ray burst, most of us might have received a fatal dose but we would probably still have a few hours or days before our organs shut down and we kicked the bucket. That would give us time to get those last things finished up and say goodbye to each other. A handful of people would probably survive, though, such as, for example, miners working in tunnels 2000 feet below the surface. Also, people on the far side of the Earth from the gamma ray burst might survive if the Earth shielded them, assuming, of course, that the 'far side' from the burst was land rather than water.
At least if astronomers find out that an asteroid is heading our way, we can do something about it
even if an astronomer did find out Armagedon was coming I dont still think Liv Tyler would let you do what your thinking... or at least what im thinking.. damn!
serenity now!
Alok Jha, science correspondent
Monday April 11, 2005
Next month, Nasa will launch the £138m Swift probe, which will sweep up to one sixth of the sky at a time, looking for sudden bursts. If all goes well, the probe could catch two three explosions a week.
Swift was launched almost 6 months ago.
Slashdot Link
And if we did, would there be any way to protect the planet?
I dunno, a massive pair of Blue Blockers?
bryan
The novel Aftermath by Charles Sheffield is about a supernova explosion of Alpha Centauri, and possible ways to protect the Earth. It's been a long time since I read it, but I think the solution they came up with was to build a shield between Earth and the nova- a giant metal mesh in space. Basically a one-sided Faraday cage.
/ qid=1113283784/sr=2-3/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_3/104-8393393 -6164737
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553577387
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Greg Egan has a simple solution to the neutron bombardment problem -- convert everybody into software. I think he underestimates the technical issues...
Whenever something goes wrong with the computer or something (but usually a someone) really screws up at work, we would say that the cause was gamma radiation. It came, it went, and we have no idea where it gone. Now we have proof... Go figure.
From the article:
Gamma ray bursts are thought to be caused either when two neutron stars collide or when giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives.
Then you get this:
Black holes do not exist
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/apr112005 /snt108532005410.asp
So which one is it? Do black holes exist, or do they not?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Yawn...
...no protection needed until everyone got angry. You wouldn't like earth when its angry! =D
Would radiation blanket the entire planet? The neutron stars colide at point A and send off radiation in all directions. Some of that radiation travels in a straight line towards earth and irradiates the half of the planet currently facing the collision site. However, would the other half of the planet be spared from massive irradiation? Just like the half of the planet not currently facing the sun receives little of the radiation from it at night, could the same principle apply here? Would the critters on the "day" side of the earth relative to the collisioni be the hardest hit and instantly wiped out, and the "night" side critters spared, or does gamma radiation wrap around the planet and consume everything?
So if it's just 10 seconds, surely it could only cook the side of the planet facing the event? Surely we aren't talking about an event so energetic that the radiation would pass all the way through the earth's core in enough strength to screw up both hemispheres at once?
We must be talking something that trashes the ozone layer - or the environment in some other way. It's not enough for the energy to simply kill all the critters on one half of the planet...that's a recoverable event in itself.
It must be that it depletes something important and CONSEQUENTLY all the fish die.
www.sjbaker.org
Isn't half the earth in a gamma ray shadow? These aren't neutrinos. So, granting that all life was in the oceans 450 million years ago (or is that just all life we know about?), didn't half of it survive if gamma rays were the agency of destruction? Gamma rays seem an unlikely source. What about dark energy, instead?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Nobody. Black holes suck.
I think it's great how preoccupied so many people are about these completely obscure hypothetical apocalypse events. If life has been ticking for hundreds of millions of years without a hitch you can be damn sure that the least of our worries are going to be random gamma radiation. How about the fact that we've lost almost 50% of all types of tropical, mediterranean and temperate forests as well as 30% of deserts over the past 100 years. Stop staring at the sky waiting for asteroids and mythical dragons to swoop down and annihilate the human race, the SUV in your driveway is a much more likely candidate people...
Hat
Reynolds
Wrap
"And if we did, would there be any way to protect the planet?"
Uh, no? First, how would you propose we detect a gamma ray burst, which travels at the speed of light (of course), before it gets here? Second, you're talking about a pulse of energy strong enough to destroy life on a planetary scale from 6,000 light years away! How the hell are you going to protect against that?! Tin foil can't help you now!
On a side note, this was a plot device in a book by Stephen Baxter, although I can't remember the title. Every couple million years, two stars in the center part of the galaxy would collide, and knock all life in the galaxy back to single-stage or before; species would struggle back up the evolutionary ladder, and just as they achieved spaceflight, the next stars would collide. Great book-
As per your instructions, we've launched the probe.
Good luck sir, and Godspeed!
First, you'd need two neutron stars in the same neighbourhood, then you'd need to line them up precisely to actually hit each other. You have to realize that these things are actually pretty small because they're dense. So the odds of having two neutron stars hit each other by chance is really realy small.
Paint me skeptical. There's not much evidence of a single neutron star too close to us let alone evidence that two may have hit.
I guess I'm asking.. 'ok. where's the nearby black hole then?"
Maybe the pre-cambrian die-off was caused by massive flatulence on the part of the multi-celled organisms at the time?
This is about as likely as any other theory, except for the question as to whether methane was a by-product of life at the time.
Of course, it's just as likely as "some neutron stars somewhere colliding."
Dr. Adrivan Melott said, "A gamma ray burst originating within 6,000 light years from Earth would have a devastating effect on life. We don't know exactly when one came, but we're rather sure it did come - and left its mark."
now yes they are just 'speculating' WHEN it hit, but the effects using computer models are probably decently accurate
and since the models show that it could have helped cause such problems to ocean life (both in killing off large amounts of the ozone layer and the upper levels of ocean life) it would make sense it put it around a time that such an event DID happen.
The earth is only 10,000 years old.
*puts on tin foil hat*
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Our leaders DO NOTHING to protect us...
Is a massive global suicide pact the only solution?
I suggest you read Slashdot
The clever among us are wondering how a 10 second blast can kill so many things on the planet, when half the planet will be on the far side of the burst (a planet that would presumably absorb a great deal of the radiation). It turns out (From TFA) that the burst theoretically destroys the ozone layer, undermining our protective layer against solar radiation, until the ozone layer replenishes. The blurb is a touch misleading.
Incidentally, wasn't it just shown that black holes don't exist?
Manifold Space by Steven Baxter. It covers the same concept as outlined in their theory on the cause of the Ordovician extinction
The problem is that it dramatically depletes the ozone layer, increasing the UV exposure, not that the radiation kills everyone. Why do Slashdotters think they're smarter than everyone and that they can read a 1 paragraph summary and critique the research someone has spent years working on?
but if there is a gamma burst, we get no warning.
A positive gamma burst forecast is the factual reason for all intelligent species are already evacuated from this galaxy.
And if we did, would there be any way to protect the planet?
Yes, it is. Store all life DNA encoding to gamma resistent hardware with nanotech capabilities. The day after, start assembling live organisms to re-create biosphere.
There you are, staring at me again.
then you'd need to wrap the earth in a few feet of lead ... the earth needs a tin-foil hat?
seems a neutron star wiped out the server
Table-ized A.I.
Second, for all those posting that a 10 second gamma ray burst won't be lethal to all of us:
They don't RTFA, and they don't read all the other posts saying the same stupid thing. What do they think this is? Slashdot?
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I am sure there are many things out there we don't even know about that could wipe out all life on Earth. Who knows? Maybe even stuff we can not imagine.
Given a number of confused responses to this, let's just remind everybody: it's not the gamma rays that kill (they would only get half of the globe anyway), it's the stripping away of the ozone layer followed by intense UV radiation. That's why it's a global effect.
While that would cause huge famines and disease and kill almost all humans, it is something that our species could survive given our technology.
The existence of black holes (Wheeler's term) has never been observationally established. However, I feel that when we are finally able to collect hard data on that enigma, we'll see a lot of strange things heretofore unpredicted which totally invalidade every last theory on the macroscopic Universe, and maybe one or two from the microscopic arena. In any of these cases, I look forward with patient anticipation. (:
I for one welcome our new gamma ray emitting overlords!
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddently cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
The soultion is basically to upload our consciousness into machines and bugger off.
Simple really.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0061 057983/qid=1113285006/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/104-1964798-7291147?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Looks like you figured out how to click on a hyperlink and read the article!
Space travelers and people on space stations would probably get killed by the radiation. Earth-like planets nearby would be affected in the same way as earth. Just about the only place you wouldn't be affected would be on the far side of a barren planet or inside a hollow asteroid, but both of those are still far less hospitable places than the earth would be even after such a catastrophy.
People on earth would largely be protected from the radiation. Their problem is the stripping away of the ozone layer and the subsequent death of most food crops and resulting massive famine.
However, as a species, this probably wouldn't kill us. You'd still have a breathable atmosphere on earth, decent temperatures, and other favorable conditions compared to just about anywhere else in space. Deep sea fishing, hydroponics, UV-protected green houses, etc. would allow enough humans to survive on earth in order to repopulate the earth.
Wouldn't help.
It Earth is bathed in Gamma Rays then so would be the moon and Mars.
I wonder if Massive water (deep underwater habitat) or deep underground would be safe...
And the moral is... don't believe everything you read on slashdot. (-:
It's Bush's fault. Global warming! Save the icebergs! It's Bush's fault. Let's get a Democrat there so that the earth will cool down.
"If our lives depended on saving the ozone in a hurry, I'm sure it could be done."
You'd still have to get it up to high altitudes. Ozone is pretty toxic stuff; many exterminators use it to fumigate houses and more or less sterilize the place. It's not something you want lingering in the lower atmosphere.
And do you know what the bitch of the matter is? ... I'm gonna die. ... will make my heart stop.
It is that since the day I was born
Something, at some point in my life
And there's not a damn thing I can do about it.
Me, I'd put the sun glasses on and enjoy the light show.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I already have one of those and as they protect me from the alien mind control rays, gamma should be walk in the park :-).
What if?
What if?
What if?
I take this type of claim with a grain of salt. What physical evidence is left behind? Second the intensity of burst would have to be tremendous. Intensity is inversely proportion to the square of the distance. So after just one light year, the insensity would be reduce by factor of 10^31. With the claim of 6000 light years, it is reduce by a factor 10^39. Now 6000 light years is a big space with alot of stuff between the source and earth. With gravitational bending and absorption by other star systems, you could reduce the intensity even further. Now when reaches Earth (assuming its still of sufficient instenity) it can at best wipe out half the ozone assuming it hits nothing else in the solar system. Now, at this moment, we have pretty sizeable hole in our ozone layer and no mass extinction. I wonder if the simulation took all those into factors into consideration or did it just assume that the Earth and the source were the only two objects in the galaxy.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
For a limited time I am offering heavy gamma screen lotion. This specially formulated lotion can provide you with protection for up to 12 seconds. Our lotion has been formulated with special serpentin oils and thus is guarented to work. We offer full money back after neutron star event,if your not satisfied.
The paper is in Astrophysical Journal Letters (aka ApJL), not in the Journal of Astrophysical Letters. Why in the world would somebody feel the need to 'correct' the journal name?
Couldn't we all just crowd around inside the shadow of the moon?
No, I didn't read TFA.
I suppose it depends on your interpretation of the word "catch" in the last sentence, which was the only way I could interpret this article as saying the Swift probe was protecting anyone or anything. I just interpreted "catch" as "catching something on film", versus "catching the evil interstellar death rays and saving the world."
We all know we need tin foil hats. But can't the large array of satelites and assorted useless space junk (Hubble and soon to be the ISS) be our tin foil hats as they get knocked out of orbit?
We all know solar flares can screw up satelites. They are simplely magnetic and radiation fields.
What do we do, send a monkey to spread tin foil between the satelites so we become a giant baked potato.
"the idea of two neutron stars running into each other is pretty silly too" Not at all. There is a very well-developed theory on this. 3/4 of the stars in our galaxy have a companion or more. For some of these, the two stars are massive enough to both collapse to neutron stars when they run out of nuclear energy. Since they're gravitationally bound, they will continue to orbit each other. However, the movement of these two stars will cause them to spiral inward because they will emit gravitational radiation and lose energy. In fact, the best confirmation of general relativity to date has been to measure the orbital decay time of a pair of neutron stars (yes, we have found a few of these) and check the results against Einstein. Whether black holes exist or not, it's irrelevant to this question. It's all about neutron stars.
Jack and Patrick are huddled around a LARGE MONITOR displaying an OKUDAGRAM showing the contraction of the universe. Lauren luxuriates on the couch nearby, studying a PADD displaying a PICTURE of NOG that she called up from his personnel file.
JACK
The fact is that the universe is going to stop expanding and collapse in on itself. We've got to do something before it's too late.
Patrick's upset, but Lauren is more interested in Nog's picture.
PATRICK
How much time do we have left?
JACK
Sixty trillion years, seventy at the most.
PATRICK
(despondent)
Oh, no.
The moral of the story: don't worry about what you can't solve, and isn't even going to hurt you anyway.
Only half the Earth will get irradiated! WOW! We're all saved! Mod me up for being so original and insightful.
In Korea, only kills old people
Mod Parent UP!!!!!!!!
Will I feel the pain before I die? if not, I am not worrying it that much.
It's a trap!
The consensus among professional astronomers is still overwhelmingly in support of the existence of black holes.
/ ) PSR J0737-3039 in 2003-4 using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia provides astronomers with an even better testbed.
Your second point about two neutron stars being unlikely to run into each other is not correct. Extensive studies of binary neutron star systems such as PSR B1913+16 and PSR B1534+12 provide stringent checks on general relativity. Each of these systems has two neutron stars orbiting each other with one of the pair also being detectable as a pulsar. Each component in the system is spiralling in towards the other.
The recent discovery of the first known binary pulsar system (see http://www.atnf.csiro.au/news/press/double_pulsar
In this system the two pulsars orbit each other every 2.4 hours, making them some of the fastest-moving stars known. As they orbit they lose orbital energy through gravitational radiation. They move closer together. The rate at which this happens can be determined and inital studies suggest the two pulsars will coalesce in about 85 million years. This system is about 1,600-2,00 light years or 550 parsecs distant from us. I can assure you that astronomers are actively observing and studying this system as it is allows them to test theories of gravity with incredible precision.
Neutron star collisions do/will occur and will produce strong gravity waves and most likely high fluxes of gamma rays.
There are now long-term projects monitoring pulse arrival times from pulsars across the sky with the aim of detecting gravity waves.
I dont think scientists can see above their field and so they say everything about anything. Living in Italy I can see with my eyes that his shape is incompatible with actual science. When Jesus washed feets at last supper he probaly tried to put us in the right road but it was too late:our egoism prevented our understanding and is impeding it also now. Personally I can dream earth living eternally in God unity and every country having his shape and his reason in a n-dimensional universe but there things don't happen but are. It dont seem umanity to be ready to this:people still like too much killing each other as soon as any power tell them: you can do it without problems because they are weaker than us. But regarding neutron star collision it is evident that we are not alone in this universe,we are simply the most stupids,so we just need not to deserve it.
No. Humans are not a gene's way to make more genes.
They might be "an idea's way to make more ideas", since what humans do is mainly governed by culture, not genes. But even that is simplistic, since the actual contents of ideas matters. Some are morals, beliefs or scientific theories, all of which can utterly change the trans mission patterns of ideas, and human dynamics in general.
In case this happens the burst is about ten seconds, which means that only half the earth will suffer the direct radiation. The other half will suffer varying grades of radiation depending on the filtering by the earth itself. There will certainly be immediate effects of radiation poisioning, but also secondary effects since the plant life will be highly affected. A drop in oxygen levels will probably occur which will cause additional extinctions of larger animals (including humans).
The only safe place would be to relocate to the Andromeda galaxy.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
this is something along the lines dr doom, an expert remote viewer, says will hit us soon....dubbed 'the kill shot'
Considering that I can actually remember back to my middle school and high school years (a long time ago) and how I was also able to find this educator's guide off NASA's site (http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/sunearthday/2003/ed ucators_guide2003/pdf/rwaves_acts.pdf), I honestly don't understand what the big deal is. I was always taught that X-Rays and gamma rays are completely blocked by our atmosphere, so why would this type of scenario put us in danger exactly? Also, how in the hell did the gamma radiation supposedly break through our atmosphere 400+ million years ago? So where exactly is the danger of this gamma radiation coming from?
si vis pacem, para bellum..."if you wish peace, prepare for war"
Let's send Steven Seagal! He'll take care of anything in his path without changing his facial expression and in the end, victory shall be ours :|
If the 6,000 LY limit is justifiable, I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out... at least not without some much more definitive research.
6,000 Light Years is practically next door on the galactic scale. It's certainly not infeasible (for someone qualified) to simply look at a survey of what's in our local space and determine immediately if we're at risk based on anything that looks unstable. (I'm not a professional astronomer, so someone's welcome to correct me if they know otherwise.)
The most obvious potential threat that's relatively close is probably Eta Carinae, which is about as massive as it's possible to get, and it's been hypothesised in the past that there's a small chance we might be at risk from a sudden gamma ray burst from it. But it's still about 8,000 light years away and there's still not enough known about it to have any accurate idea of when it's going to blow itself apart, either tommorrow or millions of years from now.
If there's still a reasonable chance that it could happen at some point in the future, this doesn't mean that there's any chance at all of it happening tommorrow. Stars orbit move a lot relative to each other sa they orbit the galactic centre. Our Sun does that in about 226 million years, but in the space of hundreds of thousands of years, galactic material barely moves relative to each other at all. It's feasible that at some time in the next few million years or more we will be close to something dangerous for some period of time. If we're not close enough to it now, though, the chance of that happening is still zero.
This is all dependent on that 6,000 Light Year limit being correct, of course. Clearly it's still all subject to change as we learn more about the Universe, which we still know next-to-nothing about. I don't think there's much point worrying about the great unknown, though, at least until we know enough to know that there's actually a risk. Otherwise it would just lead to paranoia.
it would just turn half the planet into people that you wouldn't like them if they were angry.
I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy at the bottom of some deep mineshafts. The radiation would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep. And in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in dwelling space could easily be provided.
I say we start building these shelters now, and since you can't know of a gamma ray burst in advance (it travels at light speed), we would have to keep them populated permanently. In order to rebuild modern society after a gamma ray burst, we would have to ensure that enough programmers are among the survivors. And with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that the survivors could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.
The thing I find most interesting is that all these events that have occured through time have been to make the planet stronger. I'm a string believer that humans are just another animal. We will exist until we become extinct either through natural catastrophe or self made distaster. The planet will live on until such time as it is sucked into the sun. The sun will move on until it dies out or collides with another.
The fact is that we're nothing on the grand scale. I do believe we should fight for our survival, but it also depresses me that when we're all dead and our bodies progress from ferterlizer to oil, the planet may not actually recover completely from the damage that we've done. Someday, a new race of animals with "intelligence" enough to learn to engineer etc... will look for oar and other basic supplies and dig up our garbage. It just seems embarressing.
As for the human race, we'll survive for a while longer. I figure we have at least 1,000 more years of ruining the planet before we have used all our natural resources up and will have to live like something out of a bad Kevin Costner movie.
Wasn't Swift launched last year? Could the author perhaps offer a little more about the topic other than just the basic idea? "We could all die in 10 seconds! The sky is falling!" Paranoid silly article. Give us more to chew on.
Yes, the possibility is real. Yes it could have happened in the past. It will happen again. Why should we worry about it?
This is the kind of thing I call Disasterbation. Like the recent run of "Yellowstone will kill us all" programs on the infortainment networks. Forgive me if finding a cheaper wireless rate is higher on my things to do list. Yes, we need to do something about the threats we can do something about. Those asteroids for example. That threat is within our ability to control if not yet within the public will to do something about it. I wonder how big a city has to be smacked before that will will exist?
I am of the opinion we should put our physical and mental energy into problems we can deal with.
Garry AKA -Phoenix- Rising Above the Flames
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes
Could happen anytime...makes you think huh
--
jamescliffer@juno.com
michaelsydney@juno.com
Strip away half our ozone layer in a few weeks? It's taken us two centuries to do that. We are seriously lagging behind.
I filtered Ask Slashdot and YRO from my front page a long time ago. What I'd really like to be able to do, though, is filter all stories that have a question mark at the end of the story title. A regular expression filter would do the trick, if not too inefficient.
If you can't actually justify what you're reporting as more than rumours, you shouldn't bother reporting it. At the very least, reporting unresearched stuff and asking slashdot readers to verify its worth is lazy, and a poor substitute for the submitter and editors actually doing the easy research themselves and telling people about it instead of asking them.
Yeah, I know. This is slashdot. But if editors won't stop posting stupid headlines with stupidly phrased stories, I'd still like a regex filter.
If it's happened only once in the four billion years that Earth has sustained life, chances of it happening in your lifetime are difficult to distinguish from zero, and also difficult to distinguish from the odds of it hitting any of the next forty generations of your progeny.
There are much more likely threats that humanity faces such as climate change-related problems, nuclear war, running out of fossil fuels, not to mention AIDS has a good chance of wiping out 10% of the human population within our lifetimes. What do you put the odds on at least one of those things happening within your life span?
Any gamma burst from a single point will only fall on half the Earth's surface directly. What stops us from just hopping across to the other half, instead of needing scifi tech to survive?
Short Answer: RTFA
Long Answer:
The Gamma rays would destroy the ozone on the unlucky side. Once the ozone redistbutes, you are down to 50% everywhere. That is, aparently, enough to kill plankton. Probably would kill land plants, too.
So, on the unlucky side everybody dies. On the lucky side, crops fail for several years. Very bad news, though I doubt it would actually exterminate the human race. Plants would still grow in UV filtered green houses.
If we were all exposed to such radiation, would we all turn in to varying versions of the Hulk? Incredible or otherwise?
Wouldn't Stan Lee like that.
The real problem is ozone depletion and the formation of odd Nitrogen compounds, such as NO2. NO2 absorbs visible light (i.e. it gets dark and cold) and also steals ozone, O3, which is what saves our DNA from getting destroyed by UV light. Its not the gamma rays themselves that will kill us, they'll only last for 10 seconds and plenty of people will survive by simply being on the other side of the planet at the time. the radiation isnt going to cover the entire planet, but the argument they are trying to make is that it will make a hole in the ozone layer and might lower global temperatures. Here are some quotes from a preprint paper of theirs that I dug up at http://www.arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0503/0503 625.pdf
"For some time, it has been known that high energy radiation may, through dissociation of N2 , create a variety of "odd nitrogen" compounds which lead to ozone depletion, making the atmosphere more transparent to solar UVB (290-315 nm) radiation. UVB is strongly absorbed by the DNA molecule and hazardous to life [e.g. Cockell 1999]."
"Reid et al. [1978] noted two other potentially important effects, which have been acknowledged [Thorsett 1995] but not yet treated quantitatively in subsequent discussions of GRB atmospheric ionization effects. NO2 is one of the primary compounds formed. It has a major role in O3 depletion, but also absorbs strongly in the visible, giving it a brown cast. Such absorption may easily lower global temperatures, if sufficient NO2 is formed. Also, rainout of dilute nitric acid (HNO3) is one of the principal mechanisms of removal for the so-called "odd nitrogen" or "NOy" compounds formed. This can potentially contribute large amounts of biologically active nitrogen to the biosphere. The results are unpredictable but may be major, since biota are typically nitrate-starved and highly responsive to supplementation [Schlesinger 1997]"
So a better option to Nuclear might be those Solar Stack Power Generators. as seen in wired., 00.html/
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66694
After all its a big funnel to at least the mid-atmosphere, and it produces power that could be used to make the ozone.
"Call us when the New age is old enough to drink" Beck
Superman.
be remembered. What if your son or daughter figures out a way to block such a gamma radiation effect?
The name of the book was manifold space. Great sci-fi, probably Baxter's best book. Dont read the other manifold books they are in no way part of a series.
I remember picking up that book and being floored by the fact that it starts off with the Fermi paradox. The downside is the plot is pretty morbid. I won't give away the ending but prepare to be underwhelmed with the rewards all of the main characters get for in some cases literally thousands of years of tireless effort towards the safety of humanity and life in general
Scientists do not understand the whole shape of anything and can't see above their fields. If they could they would know the truth: Time is a cube!
Fast save the penguins!
the other side gets insta-sunburn the moment they walk outdoors for the next few years.
Proof that geeks do abide by darwin's laws! You see our natural aversion to sunlight is akin to an animal's honing of instict. We are the next generation survivor =)
A pre-print of the research article is available. The impression that I get is that they don't claim to really "prove" the idea, but rather pose it as a very interesting hypothesis which is compatible with the evidence and deserves further investigation. In particular, I think their claim is that gamma ray bursts can explain the evidence of rapid cooling from the extinction period. Of course, the popular press claims this tentative hypothesis like it was already a concrete fact, but that's what the press does.
Here's the basic info:
Title: Did a gamma-ray burst initiate the late Ordovician mass extinction?
Abstract: Gamma-ray bursts (hereafter GRB) produce a flux of radiation detectable across the observable Universe, and at least some of them are associated with galaxies. A GRB within our own Ggalaxy could do considerable damage to the Earth's biosphere; rate estimates suggest that a dangerously near GRB should occur on average two or more times per billion years. At least five times in the history of life, the Earth experienced mass extinctions that eliminated a large percentage of the biota. Many possible causes have been documented, and GRB may also have contributed. The late Ordovician mass extinction approximately 440 million years ago may be at least partly the result of a GRB. A special feature of GRB in terms of terrestrial effects is a nearly impulsive energy input of order 10 s. Due to expected severe depletion of the ozone layer, intense solar ultraviolet radiation would result from a nearby GRB, and some of the patterns of extinction and survivorship at this time may be attributable to elevated levels of UV radiation reaching the Earth. In addition a GRB could trigger the global cooling which occurs at the end of the Ordovician period that follows an interval of relatively warm climate. Intense rapid cooling and glaciation at that time, previously identified as the probable cause of this mass extinction, may have resulted from a GRB.
Were they killed by the gamma radiation, or was it the following rampage of very angry, large, green fish?
"green clerk try, gel or abjure"
I thought we fell apart much more rapidly because of child-rearing.
just fly to the otherside of the planet , and hide in a cave
The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant compared to the power of the Force.
-- Darth Vader
Post tenebras lux. Post fenestras tux.
Black holes do not exist, but some weird objects that behave exactly like black holes do. :))
OTOH, I haven't found that article too reasonable. It relies on contradictions between Quantum physics and General Relativity that are currently being solved by Superstring theory.
http://superstringtheory.com/
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
At first I thought this was an Ask Slashdot question that got a little out of hand. ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Actually, Swift is up there now, having been launched late last year, and it is keeping we astronomers very busy. I'm up chasing one right now, actually.....
Hey, why worry about neutron stars? As the article says, we can't do anything about it. But we are already in the sixth mega-extinction.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Inasmuch as no one has, insofar as I've read, any way of detecting that a large gamma burst occurred for any of the mass extinctions, I think that we should settle for the things we can detect.
For instance, the greatest mass extinction that occured at the end of the Permian Period was associated with the largest surface outpourings of magma that the earth has ever experienced. These episodes poison the air and the water on a worldwide basis. No need for hypothetical gamma bursts to explain the largest extinction.
http://esa.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~shibata/anim.html
You mean my lead foil hat won't help?
If our reality as we know it suddenly got deleted for whatever reason
... SpacePassage
According to the article, it would suffice to regenerate 1/2 of the ozone layer. In a few year we might already have the technology to do that because we need it to compensate the ozone depletion due to industrialization.
Technology has advanced considerably when compared to 450 million years in the past. When it comes to gamma rays and so forth, if you consider the fact that life exists on the planet now, ironically, an asteroid hitting the planet would have a much larger inpact than a starburst. In the case of a starburst, with the help of radioactive precautious measures such as lead and a little bit of water, we can taste the rainbow.
I was going to use it my second novel (currently under revision) but the numbers didn't work out the way I needed them, too. I'm saving the research I did for my third book.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
if there is a gamma burst, we get no warning. And if we did, would there be any way to protect the planet?
Planet sized tinfoil hat.
Nope. Studies indicate that breastfeeding (which implies having children) reduces a woman's risk of certain types of cancer.
... biologically, having children doesn't make a lick of difference. Mentally, having someone to visit you in your dotage will probably keep you from tipping over the edge into insanity. Or it will send you crazy, if your children are that way inclined ;)
Menopause happens whether you have children or not, and a lot of things go screwy after that.
As for guys
You are confusing what you ought to do with what mathematically represents the general tendancies of your breeding behavior. In doing so, you deprive yourself of all the advantages of humanity. I also read the selfish gene. I was barely a highschooler when I read it: already interested in the field of genetics. At the time, it made a brilliant sort of sense. Our actions encaged by the selfish genes. How brilliant, how pure! When I grow up, I will have harems and seed sperm banks. My sweet sweet genes will survive! Twelve years and a lot of population genetics later I still remember that book quite clearly. I remember it because of how little since it makes in the face of real science. The first major crime committed by your arguement is that of heubris. Genetically, the death of the individual does not matter that much for a given gene pool. Your genes will continue as long as the group's genes continue: every gene in your genome will be represented. It makes heroism make a bit of sense. It opens us up for freedom to die. Quite liberating, actually. The second major crime espoused by your position is that of confusing mathematics with philosophy. Allow to to provide an example. When I was a young lad, after reading that foolish book, I was really concerned: I was brilliant, and it was my duty to insure my brilliant genes would pass on. I could insure this with my brilliance; with the harems and sperm banks previously mentioned. But would this be enough? Would I also have to go on semenary roadtrips across foreign lands, seeding the population like johnny appleseed? That's what Attila the Hun had to do, but I don't know if I could act like that. How would I be able to overcome my moral repugnance to the actions of the selfish genes? I was truly concerned that my moral sense was going to be a competitive disadvantage. Poisoned by memes! For surely nothing so disadvantageous as morality could have a genetic component? You have to forgive me for worrying about such silly things as selfish genes: I was extremely young and uneducated. I don't worry about that stuff any more. My genes aren't anthropomorphic things that define me and dictate my actions. They have brought me where I am, but then leave it up to me to decide what to do with it. Surely you can think of examples of choices that make sense for the individual but not for their genetic legacy? Surely you don't think that becasue genes are passed on, that that becomes more important than the choices you make? Monks make choices; they find those choices to be more important than passing on their legacy. Their genes are still circulating in the community of other humans; it is no loss to the pool. Their genes wouldn't care even if they did have a say. Evolutionary principles may tell us what happens, but they can never justify those choices. Your arguement could equally be used to rationalize male polygamy because of evolutionary tendancies. LEAVE DARWIN OUT OF IT. Mathematics has never been used to dictate morality.
Actually, there might be a way to get a little bit of warning, depending on the source of the gamma ray burst.
Photons (gamma rays) take a long time to get out of a star. But neutrinos, because of their physical properties, pass right through most of the star. Most nuclear reactions that generate photons also generate neutrinos. They're just very hard to detect (because of that same physical property).
Well, I'm working on a neutrino detector at the South Pole right now. http://icecube.wisc.edu/
It could, when it's complete, pinpoint the source of the neutrinos. Given the energy level of the neutrinos and the sudden, large burst of them, a whole lot of scientists are going to be woken up - and I mean that literally.
An earlier version of the project, AMANDA http://amanda.wisc.edu/, already has a supernova detector. It hasn't gone off yet, but when it does it will start a sequence of events that ultimately steers a lot of telescopes to point at that supernova.
1. 2.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've read the selfish gene too. A couple of times in fact, the last one only last month. You clearly didn't get it. Perhaps you were too young and naive when you read it and interpreted it in the way that you wanted too (as many people have done in the past to justify selfish behviour of all kinds). But the point that Dawkins makes is exactly the same as yours - that with our understanding of what we are and how we happened we're in the unique position of being able to resist the urges of our selfish genes.
Sunscreen!
I mostly meant that during the process of raising children you get worn out physically and mentally. I'm thinking all the late nights, interrupted sleep, emotional and physical drain of being in close contact with children. But there are some up sides too!
The planet, and its life, is being destroyed in a
much less spectacular, because much more gradual, way by humans currently.
bjd
from http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/0 4/1112248&tid=160&tid=14
"Nature reports that, according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, 'It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist.' George Chapline argues that the collapse of massive stars is more likely to lead to dark energy stars. These dark energy stars behave somewhat like a black hole outside of the surface, but the negative gravity inside could cause matter to 'bounce back out again.'"
HD Trailers
Even if this whole theoretical construct would be true we probably can't protect an entire planet. But there is a way to protect our species and our civilization. It is to get out of Earth and spread ASAP. In more places we are the less chance of any single event wiping us out.
Let's hope it's the OTHER half. ;-)
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
This is a common weirdness in the media... Scientists state big probabilities that life-threatening events will hit Earth in the next decades.
To state these probabilities (absent any reasons why they should be much bigger now than in the past), you only need to count them in Earth's history. There are tens of millions of years between extinction events. So we'll be hit by this star explosion every other million of years now.
Not scary
Surviving the first 10 seconds is not the problem. Surviving the next 30 years is the problem.
There have been many articles and papers and whatnot published over the last several years, all proposing different models of what happens when Earth gets hit by a gamma-ray burst. They all point to Very Bad Things happening to the atmospheric layers, which then has a cascading effect.
Fine, you survive the first 10 seconds, but none of the crops did. Growing new crops in time to feed anyone is problematic when the UV shielding is gone. Reactions in the lower atmosphere would likely form a fair deal of the chemicals that result in "acid rain", so once you're wearing 100% UV sunscreen and can go outside, you still can't grow anything. Etc, etc.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Diaspora is another novel dealing with gamma-ray burster stars. Far less morbid than the Manifold "trilogy" (each novel in a seperate universe).
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
the lead of this article suggests that one of these going off anywhere in our galaxy is planetocidal, but when we read the article- the model they are using is one of these going off 6000 ly away. Since the galaxy is over 100,000ly across and we are about 2/3 out from the center, a random distibution of these things suggests their model is of a very close one.
I dont do meaning of life questions.
It's Gamma radiation right?
soooooooo..........
We'd all be big, green and speaking broken english.
Where's the problem?
"Well you're not Fiona Apple, and if you're not Fionna Apple, I don't give a rat's ass."
Prove me wrong.
If the GRB only lasts for a few seconds, the opposite side of the planet will be protected from direct irradiation.
Of course, side effects like a damaged ozone layer could spread to that side, but I fail to see how all life could be suddenly wiped out.
C - the footgun of programming languages
From my limited observation, most people tend to have a "compressed" (for lack of a better word) perception of large distances, weights or times. Sort of like Terry Pratchett's trolls, whose counting skills went "one, two, lots", but on a larger scale. Beyond a limit, for the vast majority of humans anything is just "lots". I mean, picture one human in your mind. You can do that. 10 humans? No problem. 1000 humans? How about one _billion_ humans? It's, uh, "lots". Do you know how long a day is? Not just theoretically, I mean. Well, yes, you experience that time interval every day. How about a year? It still works. How about a _billion_ years? Try to really imagine that interval in your head. It's, uh, "lots" of time. In practice, for most humans the "lots" limit is even lower. E.g., people have no trouble treating intervals like 20,000 years of a SF universe's history as a blip where nothing noteworthy happened. Yeah, sure, for 20,000 years noone designed a new ship or generally invented anything new. Now think that in half that time RL humans moved from living in caves to launching spaceships. (The first known city is less than 10,000 years old.) So in fact, that "20,000 years" interval is perceived as a _much_ smaller one. Once you've reached the "lots" limit, everything above that is the same. If someone's "lots" limit for time is, say, 20 years, anything over that will be the same. Be it 20,000 years or a billion years, is in fact perceived as the exact same as 20 years. Hence our fascination with stuff that could happen in a billion years or several billion years. (E.g., that our sun will eventually kill us all.) Because instinctively we perceive it at a much closer point in the future. It's in the same "lots" range a your kids' going into retirement. (Incidentally, and just for the sake of a tangent, most people's inability to comprehend evolution. Stuff like billions of billions of billions of organisms, over billions of years, gets compressed to the same "lots" range as 100 cows on a farm over 20 years. And, duh, noone saw those evolve into something else.) Well, it's just a wild hypothesis. I could well be wrong.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So say, we get hit with a 10 second photon burst, what about about the other half of the earth. They will be shielded by the water and earth and will recieve less dose.
It would have to be really highly high dose to wipe out the whole earth and I find it really improbably due to the whole inverse square law of a point source.
I find this all highly unlikely.
35 feet of concrete
To borrow from Blazing Saddles...
Someone's going to have to go back for a shitload of tinfoil...
AT&ROFLMAO
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
(One of the other posters here compared it to a flashlight beam.)
Yesterday or the day before, one of the science channels had a program about GRBs.
They may still be running it, or may repeat it during the week, if anyone is interested (or even if no one is interested).
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Just create a reverse polarity tachyon pulse from the reflector dish.. oh wait, nevermind.
meh
No need to protect the planet, it will be just fine. Better probaby after a good de-human^H^H^H^H^H^Hlousing.
If our lives depended on saving the ozone in a hurry, I'm sure it could be done.
Hmmm, not sure what you mean with "in a hurry", as ozone depletions aren't exactly happening overnight.
The ozone layer is having documented problems, and we have already had increased levels of skin cancer. The change will likely slowly continue, but the reason I believe not much will be done about it is because it's a slow change, and we're then more likely to adapt to it instead of change it. Only seeing the effects when someone in 100 years from now look back and laugh about people tanning on beaches for hours.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
be it a gamma ray burst, meteor/comet collision or a volcano eruption big enough to destroy the environment, if any of the above happens it is much to big for humans to control and it would doom humanity to extinction...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
actually you are pretty wrong with your calculation. if you want to calculate the density of energy in a certain distance, its the surface and not the volume of the imaginary sphere. because the energy the photons carry is not spread over a 3rd dimensional space, but over a surface if its absorbed.
so the density of energy just decreased quadratically and not cubically. the area of the surface increases by a factor of 40,000 and can still be pretty much dangerous for human IMHO. because if even marine life (water absorbs gamma rays) are endangered, so is mankind!
It seems rather unlikely that marine animals are going to be harder hit when they have that kind of protection.
After reading this story, I can't help but think about another Slashdot story posted a couple months ago. The story talked about VIRGOHI21, the galaxy that seems to be comprised of solely dark matter. Now, I'm definately not a physicist, but I'm pretty sure that the gamma particles from one of these explosions couldn't possibly damage a galaxy comprised of solely dark matter. So could it be possible that an extremely technologically advanced race lives inside of VIRGOHI21? Armed with a dark matter shield around their galaxy, they sure would be able to avoid these sorts of catastrophies.
Stress is a symptom of other problems, not a cause, the way of your body telling you you are doing something very wrong in maintaining it. The sooner everyone realizes this, the happier they will be.
First, humans are infamous to murder (i.e. "kill intentionally and with predermination") their own species on a large scale, and the term usually used is "war", and it's all actions actively supported by many via e.g. elections.
I would argue there is no large scale murder, compared to other communal predatory species which routinely eliminate the weak from the groups (such as dolphins and wolves).
WWII was supposedly the worst, yet all that death had no noticable impact on world population levels.
If anything, compared to most species, it could be argued that the unnatural human desire to insure that all humans survive no matter what is destroying not only the earth but humanity as a whole. Humans are in many ways devolving.
Most mammals don't randomly kill others of their own species, they kill the weak ones. That isn't random, that is eugenics.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
We encircle the earth with 10^100 satelites all at the distance of one light year in a geosyncronous orbit .(we need to cover every direction) You make a detector that uses quantum entagled particles. When the particles in space change do to gamma bombardment the particles on Earth will instantly change. We will then know we have one year to get out of Dodge.
No matter where you go , there you are.
"Definitely one of those put your head between your legs and kiss your ass good-bye" kind of moments. If it sterilized the ocean, where are you going to hide? All you could hope for is that you're on the opposite side of the planet WHILE the 10sec burst occurs. Maybe then, you'd have a chance.
We dig up all the lead in the world and give the world a Lead-foil hat.... If it's good enough for the average paranoid-scitzo, it's good enough for EVERYONE!
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
"And if we did, would there be any way to protect the planet?"
I pretty sure all the corpses would provide pretty good radiation shielding, at least until they decomposed.
What about our beloved penguins? Will they survive the mass extinction?
don't understand that. That is why you see such "self centered" behavior among many children, teens, young adults and the groups to which they gravitate.
When I was very young, I thought the idea of the human race becoming extinct was unacceptable. I thought we had to migrate to space so we could ensure the survival of our species. Then I reached a jaded period of my life when I did not care anymore. Now that I have children, I have to care.
How would this affect "sea life" exactly? Water is pretty dense and a ten second burts of radiation would hardly affect a fish at the bottom of the ocean. This doesn't make any sense..
This is interesting, but certainly nothing to fear... fear is an instinctual mechanism that evolution has let emerge to enhance a species' chance of survival. In a global gamma event which precludes any possibility of survival, fear isn't really a useful reaction and should be ignored.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
Consider this:
As I'm sure you know, neutrinos very rarely interact with matter, but they do interact. Now, currently we are bathed with a flux of approximately 5,000,000 neutrinos/cm^2/s (could be off by a factor of 3, and depends on what kind of neutrinos you're talking about). At this flux, interactions are extremely rare and we have to set up huge tubs of water or cleaning fluid in order to detect them. However, what if the flux was not 5 x 10^6, but was on the order of 10^10? Well, I don't know, but I expect we'd still be OK, although we suddenly would be exposed to an increased amount of radiation from the 10,000-fold increase in neutrino interactions. We might even notice the occasional flashes in our retinas (although I doubt it). Now, what if that was increased to 10^30 neutrinos/cm^2/s? Now we're talking about an increase similar to Avogadro's number. I'm fairly certain we would notice that, and I expect it would not be healthy. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but I'm certain you agree that there's some flux of neutrinos that definitely qualifies as being "a very bad thing".
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I mostly meant that during the process of raising children you get worn out physically and mentally. I'm thinking all the late nights, interrupted sleep, emotional and physical drain of being in close contact with children. But there are some up sides too!
Like...?
Thicker tinfoil hats
Ah, but we evolved to run after food every day, and survive without when we couldn't catch it. Modern life has changed faster than evolution can keep up. We aren't made to sit in a cubicle all day. We aren't made to drive cars everywhere, or get a meal whenever we want it, or play video games after sitting in a classroom all day. Hence many problems from living a modern life; American obesity comes to mind.
Just need a Ringworld tipped on its side, with the ringfloor scrith facing the gamma blast. This stuff even stops most neutrinos!
When you consider all the other possibilities of problems facing life on planet earth, the probability galactic gama ray bursts being a serious problem is far closer to zero than things like global warming, mass habitat destruction, pollution, importune volcanic erruptions, tsunamis, nuclear war, etc.
...) this ought to be one of the least of your worries.
As for you loosing your own life to such a cause, as opposed to some other (old age, cancer, heart disease, HIV, being killed in an accident, earthquake, hurricane, starvation, being mugged by a politician,
I hate to say it, because I really feel that space science along with ALL other sciences are getting the short shrift with regard to funding by our society (or all others for that matter), but there seems to be an underlying desperation among some in the space science community to attempt to justify the relevance of their science by somehow attempting to link it to the importance of detecting of really bad things that COULD POSSIBLY happen should the universe go awry. While scare tactics work in politics, military and religious matters, this is hardly the way to build longterm rational support for science. Besides, there is a far higher probability of BAD things that are almost certain to happen given current trends in human behavior. We need to spend more "scientific and emotional capital" focusing on these.
The debate over whether a killer asteroid killed the dinosaurs is still largely unsettled, notwithstanding the small industry that has emerged producing all the niffty graphic animations that now pass for popular science. The controversy stems from the fossil record (mostly in China) providing evidence that the "causal event(s?)" was not as instantaneous as once believed. When you consider that the Orodovician occurred MUCH further back in time than the end of the Cretaceous, when fossil evidence is even less clear in part because the relative fequency of hard-bodied vs soft-bodied organisms is much less well understood, its far too early to start jumping to conclusions.
Given the state of dispair in the astrophysical community with the Bush budgets and the very near zero profile or interest or understanding our political leadership shows toward science of any kind, I can understand why such a letter would be published in a scientific journal. Nonetheless, a few pencil/computer calculations hardly make for convincing or even interesting earth history.
If scientists are now going to bring out cosmological causes to explain every mass extinction, we might as well also start invoking the hand of god as a potential cause for all historical events and let Newton roll over in his grave (and take his science with him). Besides, even if it were true, there would be absolutely nothing mankind's technology is likely to come up with in the next 1000 (100,0000,000?) years that could do any thing about such a catastrophe.
I would argue that at this stage of human history, it is far more critical that we motivate cosmological (and other) research on issues that are directly relevant to understanding higher probability events that are much much much much more likely to have significant relevance to the "near-term" future of humanity, such as global warming, loss of coral reefs and forests, effects of pollution, lack of cheap non-polluting energy resources, limits to human intelligence, etc. Frankly put, humanity is running out of time on a far shorter time scale than is probably relevant to cosmological purturbations of the universe of the kind discussed in the letter. To direct significant resources toward study of such probably infrequent perturbations would IN NEARLY ALL PROBABILITY result in our succumbing to other more immediate problems long before the "BIG ONE HITS". So if you are not also busying worrying about ghosts (after all science can never entirely rule out the possibility that the big green ugly people-pestering ones are not the source of all our problems), you might instead worry more
- Supernovae may not be predictable, but mergers of neutron stars may be. If theory of gravity waves is correct, we could detect the orbital spin-ups before mergers using laser interferometers.
- If you can stick enough mass in the path of the burst to scatter the gamma rays to lower-energy photons or deflect them entirely, you could prevent this problem. This means having a disc of material at least 8000 miles across in the exact right place to shadow the Earth at the moment of the burst, but I never said it would be a small job.
From this, it follows that long-baseline laser interferometers and GRB research are good things for now. Aiming for serious space-construction capability is a good long-term goal.Sustainability and energy independence essay
would it be a silly idea to have a proper category for fear-mongering so that it would not always make proper science look like an idiot..? i know that in this era of learning through discovery channel "documentaries" some people are finding it harder and harder to tell the difference between science and speculation. i'd like it if slashdot would not stoop to calling this kind of articles "science". it has science in it but it's purpose is clearly to make people scared, not to increase their knowledge. then again i'm a bit silly and as an astronomy hobbyist i take the misuse of GRBs slightly personally. they're really interesting and we need to do proper science about them. saying that they might have caused disasters in the past is just stating the obvious. (of course it's nice that they have made a computer model that proves that the speculated GRB is a plausible candidate for the fast die-off, but everybody knew that already, didn't we..?) hmm... are there any geologists here who know of an isochron dating method that might result from GRBs? would make it easy to verify whether or not the extinctions were due to these things...
Enough said.
10 second burst? No way to predict? No way to defend against it? At last! A natural disater that even Hollywood con't make into a bad action movie! Yay! I could see it now, 1 hour of plot, followed by a burst of light out of nowhere and everyone dies. Perfect. Great movie right there.
This is a story about a potential world-wide gamma ray exposure event, and there are only TWO posts that even MENTION the Incredible Hulk?!?
And I thought this was news for NERDS!
my comic
No, stress kills.
The difference is, those stresses your body/mind is adapted to.
About to get trampled by a mastodon? Bam! Adrenaline surge, you run, condition resolved and a few hours later your body chemistry is completely normal.
But we've created a world of constant low-level stressors, where our fight, flight, or freeze reactions won't help. Stressors are unresolved, so the alert mechanism is always on at a low level, diverting resources away from the immune system and the restorative mechanism.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
This would take way more engineering and effort than we can manage today, but....
The gamma rays would be emanating effectively from a point source. If you got a big asteroid and put it between the Earth and the point source, it would shadow the Earth from the beam. It would have to stay there for the duration of the burst.
As a random, no-basis in fact estimate, I would guess that in order for us to have the know-how and ability to do this, we would have to have had a colony on another planet that grew up into a major nation all its own and each planet to have several beanstalks. We would also have to have a major antimatter production facility somewhere.
Of course, this would mean a lot of our space holdings would be likely to be wiped out. We could probably only manage 2-3 asteroids to keep the planets safe. Maybe some of the more mobile space stuff could hide behind the sun or something. But, it could work if models could give us a few months warning and be accurate to within a couple of weeks.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Dude, excellent band name!
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
... being able to spend all your money on your child who then moves away and sees you maybe once a year? Yeah, that's well worth it.
The big killer of sea life isn't the prompt gamma rays but the destruction of the ozone layer by the various oxides of nitrogen that the flash produces plus there's immediate destruction of ozone by the gamma rays. Higher UV damages the land and low water depth ecosphere so the deep sea animals get less food (since most of their food filters down from surface water and land run off). Also, after the prompt gamma and X-ray flash there's a chance of a period of higher than normal cosmic rays from the explosion. Since some of those particles have charge, galactic and earth magnetic fields can bend them around (which is how they last a while, they travel a longer distance) to hit from any direction and delayed by enough time for the earth to rotate enough that the shadowing effect doesn't help. This page also explains that there's not just gamma rays but muons, these can penetrate many hundreds of meters of water and rock: http://www.exn.ca/Html/Templates/topicpage.cfm?ID= 19980713-60&Topic=Dinosaur
What's worse now is that people self-medicate to reduce the same stresses that people experienced in prehistoric times. Used to be that if you couldn't handle the stress your carcass was quickly eaten by carrion birds. Now we have all these weak genes flowing rampantly through our pools, simply because we are 'civilized.' The thought of it leads me to drink. Now where's my Prozac?
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
Isn't gamma radiation the stuff that made Bruce Banner become the Hulk? Perhaps 450 million years ago this gamme burst made tiny pink lizards into giant green dinosaurs?! (unless there were already giant green dinosaurs back then, in which case i withdraw my dull speculation)
Marques Johansson
Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Sound familiar?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I don't see what the big deal is. All we need to do is thaw out the Master Chief and get him going on the Covenent.
I mean, everyone knows that "exploding star" is just government-speak for the HALO project, right?
We can just use the Reagan-"star wars" sattelites to shoot down the blast. It would probably work even better than the defence we've got against asteroids.
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
But there are some up sides too!
Like...?
diaper changes in your 80's.
Do you Gentoo!?
How can we prevent being fried?
Make sure there's an atmosphere! We have survived being right next to an inconstant star for quite some time. Some of those recent X-class solar flares have been quite fierce.
GRR
This line no sig
See this.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I'm not sure that's the principal reason we invented religion, but it is one of the main reasons for its broad appeal...
Like hearing my 2.5 year old son giggle manically when we spot him peeking through our bedroom door at 7:00am. Like seeing grandma's face when she says "See the sun going down?" to our five year old daughter and our daughter says "Actually the sun stays still - the part of the Earth we live on is just turning away from it." Like having two little guys who are small enough to crawl under Daddy's desk and help him fish cables, and who get such an enormous kick from doing it. I'll now return you to our normal Slashdot cynicism :)
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
After all, we will be protected from the gamma burst by all of the ash when Yellowstone super-erupts.
Laws of thermodynamics and entropic considerations ultimately dictate that organized (non-random) systems will eventually decay toward randomness.
However, the question with regard to rate is of the utmost importance in self-replicating systems. Bacteria in a sense do not die, in that they clone themselves (albeit with sometimes intermittant reproduction through genetic exchange with other bacteria) and hence in a sense are immortal (they make identical copies of themselves which persist more or less indefinitely).
Studies of the aging process (ie genes controling catabolism relative to anabolism) in eucaryotic organisms suggest that genetic systems have evolved genes that actually shorten life span. Hence, the question arises as to why, since one might initially assume that being able to live forever (like bacteria) would seem a more effective reproductive strategy.
It turns out that there appears to be selection for genes that produce shorter life spans in situations in which the presence of such genes increases the probability of survival of the offspring, even if their activity/presence takes place at the expense of the parent. It would seem that perpuation of self-replicating systems necessarily requires the need to take some risks to overcome the reality of dynamic environments. Ones current genetic makeup although nearly optimal (or more apply sufficiently near optimal) in the current environment may not be so in a future environment. Hence, a slightly different genetic makeup in ones offspring may be selected for in some future environment. Since prediction of exactly what the future environment might be is to some degree uncertain, most sexual organisms are capable of having more than one offspring, thereby increasing variety and hence the probability that at least some will be nearly optimally suited to survive.
Keep in mind, however, this is only an evolutionary strategy. While only those gene combinations that are successfull in reproducing will persist in subsequent generations, there is no guarantee that a particular gene combination will survive.
As for your arguments regarding "genes not grading anything in levels of mportance or having a perspective", this is really little more than a matter of semantics. The adult phenotype is nothing more than the product of its genes acting in an environment during its ontogeny. While it might seem to we are something more than our genes, at a molecular level there is nothing about us that is not the direct result of metabolic processes that occur (or occurred) as the direct result of the collective response/relative control of our genes to our environment. However, when you consider the shear number of different variatnts of tens of thousands of human genes and the incredible diversity of their responses to slightly different kinds of environments, the complexity is truely something to marvel at; so much so that it is hardly worth worrying about whether or not "something" (like some kind on mystical spiritual essesence or soul or other such unecessary nonsense) is missing.
A Gamma Ray Burst that lasts about 10 seconds could penetrate the oceans and kill many species, but only at the fraction of Earth's surface that is directly facing it. It would not be able to cross the entire planet and reach the other side of the oceans. For sure, it would cause a great loss, but the kind of mass extinction that happened 450 million years ago is probably related to a more persistent change in Earth's environment.
I have an AOL email account, so I expect to be still getting spam a thousand years from now.
Nice post. You beat me to it. I am, in fact, one of those astronomers studying binary pulsars and even PSR J0737-3039 in particular. You are very correct when you state that these things will collide -- we can easily measure the decay of the orbital period over a time-span of a couple years.
One small nit-pick, though: J0737-3039 is not the first binary pulsar known (that was PSR B1913+16 which eventually led to the Nobel prize). J0737 is the first double pulsar known (i.e. where both neutron stars are active radio pulsars instead of just one as in B1913+16's case).
One has to notice that half of the world will be protected by the bulk of Earth. Only 50% of the Earth's surface will be exposed. THerefore it is very unlikely that the civilization will be wiped out entirely.
Hey, I'll have you know the vending machine is *all the way* on the *other* side of the building. As soon aa a cube over there frees up, I'm outta here. Hmm, it might speed things up if I push Joe in front of that next mammoth.
At least if astronomers find out that an asteroid is heading our way, we can do something about it, but if there is a gamma burst, we get no warning. And if we did, would there be any way to protect the planet?
Well, at least us geeks who spend so much time in our data centers will survive...
- passion
Many species have been shown to adapt (or for those who aren't afraid of the word, evolve) to fit their environment and the hazards within. Given human's tendency towards the use of low-radiation devices, would it make sense that within a few centuries we might develop some sort of immunity/response-system to deal with such things.
Are there any lifeforms which are immune to heavy radiation? Perhaps we can learn from them and stimulate defences in ourselves.
Look it up. Build it just outside the orbit of Earth. Only problem is finding the funding, and probably some stability issues, but...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
A fever is also a symptom and fever also kills. A symptom can get to the point where it is worse than the problem it is signalling.
Hope you still feel that way after they drop out of college on you. ;)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That reminds me an anedocte of last time someone I know tried to do a statistical study on incomplete medical data. The analysis tool coughed out that all male piano players had cavities. On closer inspection, it was revealed that the database had only twenty people in it and only one was a piano player.
Laws of thermodynamics and entropic considerations ultimately dictate that organized (non-random) systems will eventually decay toward randomness.
This argument is so often used falsely about biological systems that it needs correcting (even though I doubt you intended to sound like a creationist). Organized systems will decay towards randomness without energy input. Fortunately there's this huge fusion furnace in the sky dumping energy into the system like crazy.
There may well be a reason why organized systems tend to have limited duration, but it's not thermodynamics!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Why would there need to be one? It survived the last one, didn't it?
Sure, there might be widespread damage in a number of ecosystems, but it would hardly be fatal to global functioning - perhaps not even to human life.
Land-dwelling creatures are far more resistant to radiation than ocean-dwelling creatures, particularly we hairless mammals. Additionally, I'd say the chances are quite good that a majority of species alive today are descended from species which survived that most recent gamma burst, and an incidental resistance to gamma radiation, if it evolved prior to the last burst without any incentive to do so, is not a phenotype that's likely to have vanished.
That's not to say that there won't be damage, of course. But it won't be nearly as bad as the last time if it happens. We're not outside of nature, but we're also not completely at the mercy of natural events.
...but is it art?
Hehe - I'll give 'em hell, but ultimately if their decision gives them a happy life then my work is done.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
If we could accurately calculate when we are going to be hit, we could try to speed up/slow down the moon (or another small-ish body in the solar system) to shield us.
We could do this by extracting power from tidal waves which are caused by the moon's rotation.
temporarily sigless
We're all going to die anyhow, so wht's the point of worrying about it?
It's always nice to see the complete bastardization of science. The amazing ass-backwards logic in the majority of your post gave me a good laugh.
Next time your going to to pontificate about ANY science-related subject, do yourself a favor and at least read a Wiki article on it, dumbass.
Click here or here.
Wouldn't that shield some of us? How about the attenuation of gammas in water? I heard once that the 1/10th thickness of water for gammas is 24". Two feet. Anything 10 feet deep or more wouldn't notice a thing.
Ma gavte la nata
You're technically wrong as you assume absolute time.
Perhaps there is a reason your kids would only want to see you once a year...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
First Hulk think, "Hulk no like! This make everybody Hulk. Who Hulk smash?" But then Hulk think, "Maybe this make easier for Hulk to get laid."
Hulk like getting laid. Maybe Hulk go for this...
"For example, gamma rays that require 1 cm (0.4 inches) of lead to reduced their intensity by 50% will also have their intensity reduced in half by 6 cm (2.4 inches) of concrete or 9 cm (3.6 inches) of packed dirt." - Wikipedia article on Gamma Rays.
Now, IANAP, but that article was probably written by someone who is, or close to it. Shouldn't things like buildings, and even cars more or less negate gamma rays received from space?
The article on Cosmic Rays states that the energy we receive from cosmic rays are the inverse cube of their total energy.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but right now I'm thinking "so what?" If I'm standing outside when one of these burst hits the planet, I better have some SPF 1,000,000 otherwise I'm toast. But I hardly think that it's the end of life on earth.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
"On August 29th 1997 it's going to feel pretty fucking real to you, too! Anybody not wearing number two million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day, get it?" -- Sarah Connor
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
Yes, a main reason that our particular organized system (earth) does not decay toward randomness is because of the sun's energy input. But even this is just a temporary reprieve from the omnipresent laws of thermodynamics, as the order in one small corner of the larger system (the universe) increases at the expense of greatly decreased order in the rest of that system as a whole. Any "energy input" is just order moving from one section to another, and a temporary evasion of the tendency towards decay of an organized system.
So yes, organized systems do always tend toward decay (if your time span is long enough (i.e. including the death of our sun), or your scope large enough(i.e. including the sun itself)), and yes, that tendency is governed by the laws of thermodynamics.
I also don't see how this smacks of creationism, especially when you consider that given the best theory we currently have for the origin of the universe, the universe started out in a highly ordered state. Couldn't there be some of that order left, gathered up in our little corner of space and time?
Of course, I'm genuinely interested to hear your views on what other causes there might be for the decay of order in organized system.
Just another proletarian malcontent.
If we instinctively care so much about our progeny why are we so short sighted about the environment and economy that we are handing down to them?
I think your observation is apt on a personal level but I don't think it scales well.
Wouldn't it just destroy the portion of the human race (and other species) on the half of the globe facing the burst source? An entire planet's worth of soil, rock, magma, etc. makes a pretty good shield.
Humanity is certainly positioned to survive such an event, though many wild species lack our enviable dispersion and would not.
6. Audible Alarm (not shown)
-from a Cuisinart product owner's manual.
If you're not a parent, you probably don't get it. If you are, you do.
Trust me, it's the best feeling in the world.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I've always wondered what effect it would have when Betelgeuse finally goes supernova. Has anybody calcuated how much energy would hit our solar system and what kind of effect that would have?
For those of you not astronomicaly inclined, Betelgeuse is an immense red giant star rougly 425 light years away. Its radius is estimated to be roughly the size of Mars's orbit.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
crate a giant Umbrella in space mad out of a maetrial that won't tlet the gamme rays through. Either through reflection, comversion, or absorbtion.
I have no idea on the time defference between the burst of photons and gamma radiation, so I don't know how much time we would have.
Perhaps we will get to a point to detect that the event is going to happen a couple of hundred years before it does. then we could listen to pundits whine about how it won't matter for 150 years, then get of are asses and get it done.
At no point did I say it would be simple..or easy..or free.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It seems to me that something else is required for maintaining organization other than mere energy. Energy alone will increase the heat of the system: more heat->more particle motion->more disorganization. There must be some sorting or filtering mechanism in place to selectively apply that energy... unless steam is considered more organised than ice.
Please enlighten me.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
If we keep backup copies of major Internet sites, people in thousands of years will still be able to read what we wrote on places like Slashdot. So they may not remember us personally, but they'll at least see our online pseudonyms, laugh at our stupidity, and wonder what kind of life that 20th/21st Century person lived.
Of course, it's unlikely that sites will survive for millennia. There's liekly to be an apocalypse at some point that will destroy civilization, for example. And even if there isn't, you've got to migrate them to new storage media every few years, and avoid restrictive copyrights laws and DRM.
Shit Happens
We need a scrith sheild around the Earth.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Like the screams of joy as you walk through the door after work, making you forget all the stuff that happened at work that day? And the next day they ask if you can stay home from work...and you do. Who else would you do that for?
:-)
Or the sheer wonderment and joy on their faces as they experience something new to them, that you take for granted everyday. (Think elevators for a minute, or escalators until security shows up
Or doing the inevitable childrens damage to themselves, and crying, yet a kiss from you wipes all the tears and pain away. And then in return offering you a kiss when you say "Ow!"
Or maybe last week, when Daddy was sick, how my 2.5 year old was concerned enough to get me my
medicine (really just vitamin C tablets) and juice and water. Concerned enough to come up with "Daddy has to lie down, get better! No 'puter!!"
Or perhaps how they have a different view of things, in that they can teach you as much as you teach them.
I could go on and on...
"during the process of raising children you get worn out physically and mentally. I'm thinking all the late nights, interrupted sleep, emotional and physical drain of being in close contact with children."
Never looked at it that way. You are correct in a way....but it's all worth it.
Vip
We have to redouble our efforts to make real artificial intelligence. We have to be the ancestor race.
---
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Speaking of bands, that's a wonderful sig :)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I won't insist that you RTFA, but if you don't, at least read the fine summary.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach teachers.
Supposedly we detect about 1 a month right now (in all the seeable universe). They're hoping to lauch a space probe that will bring the number up to 1 every week or 2.
Did anyone else think, "Quick, get the Holy Materia"? :)
"The planet" is destroyed?
Even a full-scale nuclear war wouldn't "destroy" the planet.
Using a phrase like that makes you look like an idiot.
Forests are destroyed, life is destroyed - but not "the planet".
Just to clear things up, fever isn't your bodys way of telling you something is wrong. Fever, normaly, isn't even caused by external problems in itself. Little organisms floating arround in your body simply doesn't like the heat, thus the body makes itself warm. Might missfire at times, sure, but most often does more good then bad.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
As for your arguments regarding "genes not grading anything in levels of mportance or having a perspective", this is really little more than a matter of semantics.
It's more than semantics. Genes have no goal, they are "blind" if you like. Using terms like "selfish" and "strategy" can be misleading as both words imply an objective.
Who ordered that?
To be pendantic, energy is necessary but not sufficient to prevent the breakdown of an ordered system. You need a system to maintain order, and such a system is required to consume a certain amount of energy.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> And if we did, would there be any way to protect > the planet?
Half of the planet would be protected by the mass of the planet itself, of course.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Assuming a 100 year lead time.. it not too bad, we do some mild calculations and move the planet to the far side of the sun to eclipse the gamma rays. Alternates including being in the shadow of gas giants during the phase(way harder timing).. Or evacuating half the planet, With large amounts of teraforming supplies on hand to repair the scorched side of terra firma. But moving the earth at light speed is tough even at "Star Wars" levels of technology. Heck we'd just raise shields instead of moving the earth that fast. Storm
The thermodynamics argument is sometimes used by creationists as an argument against evolution. I can't really explain that, since it doesn't make sense in the first place.
Sure, eventually the sun will burn out and whatnot, but that's a much longer timescale than biologists are usually concerned with. (Also, there's no reason for a technological species not to survive the death of its star, or pretty much anything else short of the eventual triumph of entropy over all sources of energy - but that's a long way off.)
Life is not merely an organized system, but a self-orginizing system. On a more familiar timescale, there's no reason why a system of good self-repair couldn't exist within an organism, providing a lifespan limited only by accidents. This wouldn't seem to have a strong evolutionary advantage, however, so it's not a big surprise it didn't evolve naturally.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So what?
It's not like you're taking life away. You're just not creating more kids. There's no shortage of children on this Earth in case you haven't noticed. By your logic, we should all be "giving someone else the chance to live" and having children as fast as possible.
It's more useful to humanity, if you want to think that way, to not have kids and put those resources towards making the world a better place for those of us who are here.
It's amazing how many kids some people have even if they're dirt poor and can't support them. They're "giving life", but only a neglected and warped version of what life should be.
From a long ways away, a 10-second burst of unholy gamma-ray badness is aimed at the earth. Everyone in its path is instantly extra-crispy.
However, won't it only hit the nearest half the earth? Even though gamma rays are hard to shield against, I'd naively think that the bulk of a planet would do a reasonably good job of shielding some of us. Catastrophe? Yes. End of a species? Maybe not.
Is there some reflective effect I'm missing? radioisotope pollutants? Is the earth not enough shielding? What am I missing?
I have a girlfriend whose name doesn't end in
Wouldn't about half the people (and half the animals etc.) on Earth be A-OK if this happened?
i.e. wouldn't the Earth itself be a rather good shield from this burst?
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
If a gene in a protozoan mutates into a new form that processes sugar better, or causes the host to swim faster, or in general be a better and more well adjusted individual, then that gene will spread through the population, causing all its hosts to swim faster. Thus you might in a way say that the host is just a way for gene to spread through the population. The gene doesn't care exactly why the host causes a faster spread of genes.
In humans, on the other hand, if you have a gene that will - what - cause you to want to explore space? Or mate with astronauts, or become a rocket scientist? That gene will have absolutly no effect on its own future, or the future of the human race. Instead, kids will want to become astronauts if Disney makes a cool film, with a cool space-exploring astronaut in the leading role. Or if Newsweek publishes an article showing how astronauts make most money, or become CEOs of companies, or are in general cool dudes.
Genes have very little to do with what happens to humans, and they have very little control of what happens to themselves.
Now, I agree with your second point. We have absolutely no way of knowing that e-coli do not also study quantum physics. All we know is that till now it seems that genes do have quite a lot of control of bacteria in the lab.
So, if I offended any protozoan, I am sorry - protozoans, just as humans, might also not be controlled by their genes, but by their morals.
A billion years is no problem to imagine. It's just 365^10 days! Sheesh!
put the what in the where?
we do not deal/prepare with/for these types of threats well that have small probability but have large casualties. maybe something to do with innate gambling nature.
Well, you probably manged to have sex at least once!
No, it wouldn't be the wrong time. It would nevertheless be wrong:
protozoan n. pl. protozoans or protozoa (-z) also protozoons
Any of a large group of single-celled, usually microscopic, eukaryotic organisms, such as amoebas, ciliates, flagellates, and sporozoans.
It would, however, be the right time to point out that e-coli aren't protozoa! Sorry.
If you need convincing, then why would we want to convince you?
That's putting it a bit personally, so let me rephrase:
Raising children is so demanding, that if you aren't driven to do it, it's better that you don't. You'd be likely to quit half-way through, which is a recipie for social disaster.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Heat death is not necessarilly what the universe is heading towards. This is due to gravity - some scientists claim that uniform soup of particles at the end-state of the universe will not come to be for a simple reason that particles will start to attract each other and complexity would increase, aided by the rules governing chaos. Some of the ideas relevant to this can be found in this book
Damn you, Ziggy!
to answer the question......
Just have the gamma burst be at the point in the sky behind the sun. Then we'll be safe.
Seuss - I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends
That's a little harsh. Xav_jones could be young, and young people sometimes can't appreciate why people have children. But the positive responses were pretty good at explaining why people would want to have kids, so give those a read.
So, the planet will end up being run by miners, because they will be the only ones to survive, unless these bursts last longer than a shift. For the long term benefit of humanit, we need more female mine workers! Also, more females at deep underground military sites. You know they must still be running those things.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
We could counter the depletion by making some ozone ourselves. To do this on a planetary scale would require immense amounts of energy, but we will probably have plenty of fusion power by 2100 AD (or sooner). So if no nearby gamma ray bursters occur for at least a century (very very likely), we will be OK.
What comic books have taught us. That Radation only has positive effects.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
butterfly kisses
However, to overcome entropy requires not just energy, but also information.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
"That's why we age - and why we fall apart much more rapidly after child-rearing age is past" Oh, so, the trick is, KEEP REARING-CHILDING -Enjoy life
It is a privilege to be alive
Even more reason to explore space.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Listen, not a year goes by, not a year, that I don't hear about some escalator accident involving some bastard kid which could have easily been avoided had some parent--I don't care which one--but some parent conditioned him to fear and respect that escalator!
/Brodie
Nuclear reactors could, heh... I'm sorry. Mr. President. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plantlife. Animals could be bred...and SLAUGHTERED.
-Doktor Merkwürdigeliebe
Very briefly, I was arguing against the selfish gene folks. Once upon a time, genes made hominids, and hominids were flung at survival obstacles. some of the ones that randomly made it through sometimes did so because of some genetic advantage. If you want to anthropomorphize those genes, go for it.
However, that is not the selective paradym that faces humans. The whole reason for the period of immese selection for the modern human mind was that in it rested the capacity to form internal abstractions of external obstacles. This problem solving skill could shift the point of selection from the death of unfit creatures to the death of unfit ideas. When that transition was complete, selection lo longer acted upon the critter, but rather internally, in a virtual space where that critter could throw itself at a problem a thousand times with no real risk of injury (with the exception of a couple of my other readers.). In the modern world, it is folly to worry that all your actions serve the interest of selfish genes.
That was what I was arguing. Here was how I did it.
1) Genes are not anthropormorphic entities.
The misunderstood hypothesis: Genes act randomly.
Some variation is selected for.
Selection filters adaptive variation.
Some behaviors can be selected for.
Advantageous behavior genes often popularize.
Therefore:
many animals sometimes serve some of their genes, sometimes.
living beings are the result of a perfect legacy of successful procreation.
The way it is: Living beings have a heritage of many genes that might have been useful at one point or another.
However
Evolution is additive (you work with what you've already got.)
selective conditions are in flux (times change)
Adaptive advantages are eacg local to a set of specific conditions.
Therefore
What we end up with is not this Olympian survival machine that everyone in this post keeps talking about, but rather a legacy device that has managed to clunk its way through a vast past of obstacles by accumulating hack upon hack upon hack.
Selfish genes are not what predicts the outcome of behavior. Humans are released into each new generation's new environmental conditions with the patchwork of software and hardware that had gotten them through the past. Like all such evolutionary tales, not all will make it; not all were meant to. The point of diversity is that random variation in function can cover a side enough range that enough of a subset can always fit through selective barriers to perpetuate into the next generation.
Remember violence? Violence was useful once. It may not be so useful now. It would be better that violence was not used by anyone, but it is a truce that is almost impossible to establish when we all were born with violent capacity from our genes. Don't try to blame the rules of power for a need for violence: many animal types use violence, many do not. We used it. A behavioral gene type that is no longer as useful, and yet it remains.
It is being selfish? Not effectively. Our new moral structures have caused those genes to be selected against, by incarcerating (effectively sterilizing) many of the more violent individuals. Individuals who MIGHT be carrying violence genes. This is not a selfish gene, it is a stupid gene that just does its thing. In the past centuries the release of new moral thought occured in contradiction with these violent genes, dispite their presence. New conditions allowed new thought to be selected for, and the thought in turn creates the new conditions that we select ourselves with. What is this going to be called, the Selfish Mind?
My point is this: don't thank your genes; they don't know what they are going. Thank luck, thank your particular collection of choices that led you to where you are, thank your mommy, thank whatever you want, but not your genes. You were made with them, but they made you with a mind strong enough to ursurp them.
If all goes well, the probe could catch two three explosions a week.
If all goes well??? Yeah, if all goes well, we'll have a couple explosions a week, really, really close by, so we can get a good look at them!
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Could we not just hide behind our buddy jupiter and let the lead in jupiter take care of the gamma radiation? That saves our population, but our food is still gone, so just GM the food.
Maybe God was cleaning up and poured a God-size jug of bleach into the ocean by mistake.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Actually, I believe the problem with stress is that in modern society, you do not respond with fight or flight, or even minimal physical activity to the stress, which burns off the chemicals flooding the blood. Without this, it is damaging.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It is a true test of character, one where I truly wish I fared better; if you are the boss, give the Mommys and Daddys the nod when hiring, setting hours; it's expensive and hard work, and we all benefit from the next generation being properly raised in one way or another.
The term is called work, or 'useful energy'.
:)
Heat is useless energy.
Your engine burns fuel to make your car go. The work of moving the car comes from burning the fuel, but the engine is not a 100% converter of fuel to work and releases heat as a byproduct. There is a maximum efficiency of any engine based on the temperature of the engine and the outside air.
Thermodynamics for the 6th grade level.
Favorite
is it just me, or is "something about it," http://www.mediacircus.net/armageddon.html linking through to penthouse.com?
WTF?
hmm, I've just read this article, quite scarry indeed, thinking something like a bursting star, could do that much damage... Thinking, possibably, hypothetically, what would happen if another star, close to us, burst today, the effects would be devestating. What are the possiabilities of this happenign again? Probably not as thin as most would think.
I am French, and terribably sorry for my spelling.
You seem to imply indirectly that the engery transfer is 100% efficient. Ultimately it is thermodynamics that dictates energy loss, even with energy input. Sorry, but there are no perpetual motion machines, even nuclear powered ones.
My aluminum foil hat will protect me. Everyone thought I was strange when I made it and put foil on my windows. Now they will know I am not crazy!
Extinctions took millions of years, not a mere 10 secs. There have been several waves of species extinctions, each took a substantial time, the latest one is currently happening, as a new species of social animals is rapidly wiping out whole ecosystems from the planet.
... are probably more useful here :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Has anyone made or designed a bomb that is specifically designed for close--range gamma irradiation. I suppose the neutron bomb could be called that, and we've heard about cesium, strontium and uranium and a few others, but is there any body of work that could be a genuine "Gamma Bomb"?
To extend that, is it possible for a "mad scientist" (or likely some actor such as a government) to position gamma bombs in fake orbital satellites? Or, even just in the cargo bay of a passenger jet? Imagine the US getting tired of some particular nation and modifying a passenger plane to "slip out" as parachute-floated, propeller directed gamma or neutron bomb over some hapless target. Probably for sci-fi.
But, if a Gamma Bomb could be made, what kind of noise and wind would a terrestrial and atmospheric detonation produce? And, if some nut pushed one down the 4,000 foot mantle-penetrating shaft, would it cause any unpredictable EM issues? I don't imagine it'd "rock us to the core" (pun in ten ded...), but could all that heat and pressure and some gamma waves/rays/particle bursts actually be of military or mad-scientist value?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I guess I should have done the Gamma Google:
e mi stry/NuclearChemistry/NuclearWeapons/FirstChainRea ction/FirstNuclWeapons/DesignGadget.htm
e as ibility&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
t ha ts.htm
http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/Sciences/Ch
Googling:
gamma bomb feasibility
produced:
http://www.google.com/search?q=gamma%20bomb%20f
Some of it's pretty interesting...
For those looking for ways of surviving a Gamma Blast, call up the Men Without (Tin Foil) Hats and strut tothe lyrics of....
"Safety Dance":
http://www.80smusiclyrics.com/artists/menwithou
And, as the nuclear wind is catchin' up, and ever'thing's goint toshit, toss those Geiger counters and Reynolds Wrap tubes and change your tempo/beat to get to:
(Don't forget to guttarally make the throaty/kocking "Kha-tsu" instrument sound at the appropriate lines below...)
"Say we can dance, we can dance
Everything's out of control ("KT")
We can dance, we can dance
They're doing it from pole to pole ("KT")
We can dance, we can dance
Everybody look at your hands ("KT")
We can dance, we can dance
Everybody taken the chance
The safety dance
The safety dance
The safety dance"
========= (and, then queue up the vinyl for the track "Ant-Arc-ti-cahhh"" =========
==========
And, if you're on the wrong side of the shield, then recall "The Cure", and meow...
"WHYY CAUN"T IIII BEEE YOOO?!" (Simply Elegant.... hehe)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
IANAGPOOS (I am not a geo-physicist or other scientist), and I did not RTMFA, but what's to say the Gamma radiation will be particles size in wavelength?
I mean, what if the burst were/is sufficiently huge to initate a sort of "cascade" or wave of particles like a "gamma train"? Not as a conical intersection but as a rod or train-like intersection, almost piggy-backing us. (We'd not only lose the Ozone, but we'd all lose or "loose/n" (heheh) our only-remaining, other "O-zone".) I imagine with all the stellar flotsam from two colliding stars, there would be rippling or wave action in space. If that unlikely collision hit/s, and if it finds Earth, a 12-hour gamma train would coalesce or bathe the Earth sufficiently long to nullfy another 25% to 45% of the initially "unbathed" population. That is, the Earth would be orbiting in the wave bath assuming it arrived in sync with rather than tangental to Earths path in the solar system.
Even scarier, what if, as with unpredictable Tsunamis, a second or even third wave followed the first or second waves at slightly oblique angles but still managed to reach Earth only minutes or hours behind. There could an amplification effect, or hyper-concentration in some areas of the atmosphere or water table. (But, in the case of Tsunamis, somme fo the waves can take up to 4 hours to trail the iniitial devastation...)
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Forgive my ignorance, but with my limited knowledge of physics, this sounds like the most stupid thing I've heard in a long time. What about that thing we call inertia? To me, it doesn't make sense that anything would do anything without energy. How do you not need energy to get in a disorganised state? If you're organised, then you'll stay organised, unless some force is acting upon you. If the force acting on you is gravity, then you have kenetic energy.
If there is some new way of things moving without energy, I'd really like to know about it.
There is abundant evidence for selection for longevity in the animal and plant kingdoms. If you look at life spans you will observe there is a very broad variety of lifespans from only about 30 minutes (bacteria) to over 5,000 years (bristlecone pines). Among mammals there is a similar wide range, typically with larger organims being longer lived.
Diseases affect humans and other animals both before and after they reach maturity.
Keep in mind that it is not the production of offspring per se that provides evolutionary success, but rather the fitness of those offspring and the probability of their also successfully reproducing. An essential criterion for natural selection is not only the presence of genes, although these are the mechanism that have evolved to insure the inheritance of traits being passed on to future generations, but the fitness (ability of the phenotype produced by those genes) to cope with the rigors of the environment.
Obviously, you don't spend much time thinking about evolutionary or molecular biology.
Souls are just a lame excuse for "extra mystical magic" that can be added or subtracted from any argument without affecting one's ability to establish the truth or falsehood of any particular proposition. Such a notion is simply an illogical and unnecessary abstraction that can be thrown in when one wishes to transcend scientific evidence.
If it were said that a rock had a soul that was more solid than yours, how could you tell if such a statment was true or false?
If an organised system had no energy in it then, I'd agree, the system will stay in an organised state. But no real system has zero energy. Or to state it another way: All systems will contain some energy. They will therefore require energy input to stay organised.
Who ordered that?
Also see http://www.seds.org/messier/xtra/ngc/etacar.html. There is a lot of weird stuff in the universe, some of it relatively close to us. Our galaxy is about 250,000 LY in diameter, the nearest neighbor galaxy about 2.5 million LY away.) Of course, with our relatively puny lifespans of 80 or so years, we miss most of what's going on around us, and don't pay enough attention to recorded astronomical and geological events to realize that our assumptions about what is normal are completely unfounded. Ignorance is bliss! Woohoo! Pass the Fritos!
[Insert pretentious and semi-clever sig here: ______ ]
"There must be some sorting or filtering mechanism in place to selectively ..."
Chlorophyll is the main filtering, capturing mechanism that diverts some of the sun's energy into chemical energy that life can use. UV, infrared and gamma wavelengths are not much use, but a big enough gamma ray burst would inject a whole lot of energetic noise into the system.
To do:
Visit buoy 42002 in western GoM.