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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
"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!
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?
;)
For that matter, even without warning around half the world population would automatically be shielded - well if China and India were on the exposed side that might be much less than half though
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Learn what a paragraph is. When you've created the executive summary maybe we'll give it a read.
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.