Slashdot Mirror
New Theory Links Biodiversity to the Stars
eldavojohn writes "Space.com's Mystery Monday has an article proposing a hypothesis that our solar system's undulations directly affects biodiversity on earth through cosmic-ray exposure. There's data that, through the fossil record, shows us earth's biodiversity peaking again and again until a great cataclysmic period where it is greatly reduced. The theory essentially suggests that this 62 million year cycle can be attributed to how our solar system moves within the milky way galaxy which turns out to be a 64 million year cycle. It's a plausible explanation though very tough to prove, hopefully we don't have to wait around 64 million years to draw a conclusion on this hypothesis."
Am I the only one who refreshed the chart after a few minutes to see if it updated?
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
"hopefully we don't have to wait around 64 million years to draw a conclusion on this hypothesis."
I don't plan on being here in 64 million years, do you?
I always knew stars fit into the equation some how.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
How far into the cycle are we now?
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
I'll wait.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
There's data that, through the fossil record, shows us earth's biodiversity peaking again and again until a great cataclysmic period where it is greatly reduced [...] hopefully we don't have to wait around 64 million years to draw a conclusion on this hypothesis.
Personally, I hope we do have to wait that long. :-)
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
I used to think God was responsible for sheep love because he made them so soft and cuddly. Now I know it's the stars it seems much more like it's cosmic destiny to create human/sheep hybrids.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
...and the dinosaurs became extinct approximately 65 million years ago? Something tells me it's time for the tinfoil hat again...
This general idea has been around for a very long time, I've come across it several times in various magazines like Scientific American, etc.
Apparently the second derivative of biodiversity (wrt. to time) had a minima 3 years ago. Co-incidently bush got re-elected.
Astrologists are freaking out across the world at the first sign of honest scientific news that shows a link between stars and life on earth, telling everyone that they knew all along the stars are what makes everything the way it is.
There is no replacement for displacement.
The cycle is 64M years so have to wait less than that. Maybe as little as 32M years.
You're over it!
I bet it's closer to a 67108864 year cycle.
I need to become a superhero if I am to have a chance in hell with Sue Storm...uh I mean Jessica Alba.
Preferably I would like super strength and the power to know women's thoughts -- could come in handy! ;)
There is nothing really backing this one up. The Permian extinction could have just as easily been a glaciation on Gondwana. My personal vote would be that the Permian and Ordovician extinctions were the result of some earth-based forcing of the environment. But most importantly, this new information is just a hypothesis, nothing more. Lets not try to give it more weight than it deserves.
Buy hybrid cars. Start conserving toilet paper. Wait, that's for global warming!
Can we launch a few nukes at a nearby Asteroid? Oh, that's for stopping the apocolyptic end-of-the-world asteroid collision.
What can *I do* to help stop this 64 million year cycle? There must be something I should worry about here. I'll buy some solar panels. Doh! That's for global warming again...
There's data that, through the fossil record, shows us earth's biodiversity peaking again and again until a great cataclysmic period where it is greatly reduced.
Is this where homo sapiens come in? Are we the next cause of a great cataclysmic period?
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
...it was cosmic rays stupid!
Now here's one iPoddy site! iPod Range
I thought I saw something a few years ago about this on discovery science discussing this same thing. I'm not so sure how 'new' this theory really is.
"until a great cataclysmic period where it is greatly reduced" -- There is a cycle but no abrupt decreases in that graph. So the explanation may be different.
As for me, I'm not going to worry about it too much. Think of me as Beowulf Schaeffer not worrying too much about the galactic core exploding, and the shock wave arriving in a mere 20,000 years into the future. Nothing to lose sleep over.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
FTFA: "At least two of the Earth's great mass extinctions--the Permian extinction 250 million years ago and the Ordovician extinction about 450 million years ago--correspond with peaks of this cycle"
Shouldn't the difference between these two (200 million years) be a multiple of 62 million years? (OK, 200 is a multiple of 66.7 million years, but still...)
astrophysics link
as the title alone is the perfect companion to the worldview of the cosmological link clicker.
Cosmic rays can affect our biodiversity, but heaven forbid anybody suggest the sun affects our weather! It's the evil of mankind! Go green--the new marketing buzzword for people to make money off of (like "carbs"). Thanks, Al Gore.
"Sufferin' succotash."
One interesting hypothesis is is that a red or brown dwarf in a highly elliptical orbit with our sun periodically (every ~26M years) passes through the Oort Cloud and pulls comets into the inner solar system, causing a wave of extinctions.
BTW, one of the physcists researching this idea, Richard A. Muller teaches a great physics course, titled "Physics for Future Presidents" which is available online for free on google video.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
I would prefer to wait as long as possible before having to verify this first-hand.
I volunteer to conduct the research. I'll just need a small yearly grant for 64 million years.
Utterly stunning! The very idea that it peaks, until it reduces, that just leaves me totally gob smacked.
This is not meant to be a funny post.
Here's an article on extinctions in Wikipedia.
Here's a snipet from that article about mass extinctions:
There have been at least five mass extinctions in the history of life, and four in the last 3.5 billion years in which many species have disappeared in a relatively short period of geological time. The most recent of these, the K-T extinction 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, is best known for having wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs, among many other species.
In other words, don't laugh about the 62-64 million year cycle. We are due for a mass extinction, according to the fossil record. Maybe this phenomenon has something to do with it. Note that when biodiversity goes down in a species, that's not good, biologically speaking. Less diversity means less chance of a species being able to survive a catastrophic event.
Take it for what you want, but all those people laughing about having to wait 64 million years, my point is, I don't necessarily think you have to wait all that long.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I really doubt this hypothesis because it assumes that organisms are helpless in the face of change levels of cosmic radiation. The reality is that DNA repair mechanisms are subject to evolution (and can evolve relatively quickly in lab experiments). If background radiation rose, organisms would simply evolve more robust DNA repair mechanisms. If cosmic radiation dropped off, then organisms would simply evolve less robust DNA repair mechanisms.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The 64 million year cycle they are invoking is an up and down cycle through the galactic plane. This means the danger zone must be associated with a certain Galactic height
(distance above the mid-plane of the Galactic disk). But:
1) the bio-diversity cycle would not be a fixed 64 billion year cycle, unless the danger zone was at the sun's peak Galactic height. Otherwise, the
sun would pass through the danger zone at uneven (though still periodic) time intervals.
2) the height of the danger zone would have to be at a roughly uniform Galactic height throughout the disk, otherwise the sun would aperiodically emerge into the danger zone.
3) the danger zone would have to exist on one side of the galaxy, but not the other.
Seems unlikely to me.
for anybody.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Damn it, I read that twice. The moment I hit submit I noticed the error!
grrrr...stupid getting old lazy brain.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The chart caption says fish are not affected. You might want to restart the old Soviet program that aclimated people to living in the water from birth.s -selling-solar.html
--
For sea level and above: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I hear that the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe has a great bar called Cosmic Ray's.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Another article about Rosie O. and Ellen D. Haven't we had enough??
Some settling may occur during posting.
Hopefully we do have to wait!
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
I would really like to see a larger chart than the one they give. Cycles which are 64 and 62 years long respectively will begin to shift out of phase with each other eventually, and after (I think) 32 cycles they will be 180 degrees out of phase. If the biodiversity cycles still are still the same when the two are out of phase, it would discredit the theory. Of course, this means you have to go back almost two billion years, when the only life was a kind of blue-green sludge (at best).
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
hopefully we don't have to wait around 64 million years to draw a conclusion on this hypothesis.
Because we're going to invent a time machine, or because we're going to teleport the solar system to another part of the galaxy?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
How soon will be be able to develop and apply this research to explain hip-hop music?
According to a different article on the same study, the dinosaur mass extinction at the K-T boundary doesn't fit the pattern.
We've still got at least 10 million years before we enter the next cosmic ray cycle.
... when you have humans to trash the biosphere.
Variations on this have been kicking around for a while. Some of the wacky-but-plausable explainations for the periodicity off mass extinctions, including this one, show up in this book, written in the late 1990s. The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science
Everyone knows the Inhibitors occupy space we pass through every 62 million years.
Don't park near Resurgam next time. And stop trying to solve that puzzle!
It's hard to read off the chart, and I didn't see mention in the article, but this submission immediately brought a few things to mind:
About 55 million years ago the earth apparently underwent a significant warming event called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum that resulted in the extinction of 30-40% of deep sea life, and may have been equally instrumental in the emergence of mammals as the asteroid 10 million years before that killed off the dinosaurs.
The trigger is unknown, but it is believed that warming oceans due to a natural cycle caused the sublimation of large quantities of methanes from clathrate deposits on the sea-floor. Methane, of course, is a potent greenhouse gas. The result was average ocean surface temperatures as much as 10 deg C warmer than before. The cause of the natural cycle is unknown. However, I just did some digging around, and it appears the major long term thermal cycles (based mostly on O-18/O-16 ratios in sediments, is my understanding) run 140 million years on average, but higher frequency signals definitely exist.
Now, there has been some recent research finding that cosmic ray activity may be an influencing factor on global warming (Note: No need to revive the global warming debate...I'm just sharing my thoughts, and am not claiming anything). Basically cosmic rays appear to affect the formation of clouds in the upper atmosphere, which in turn effects solar insolation.
It would be very interesting if this 62 million year cycle happened to coincide with the PETM extinction 55 million years ago. My thought being perhaps a cosmic ray cycle caused a typical warming cycle that happened to induce the "big burp" of methane-clathrates, which significantly magnified the warming effect.
Actually, with some further poking around, I see this basic theory has been proposed for explaining the 140 MY cycle, minus the methane-clathrate bonus.
Old Nature article about the periodicity: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7030/fu ll/434147a.html
ArXiv preprint proposing the galactic hypothesis: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0602092
Sheryl Crow will be thrilled with Europe's new Sharia law toilet technique. You use no paper.
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_toilet_etique tte
* Say before entering the toilet: In the name of Allah, O Allah! I seek refuge with You from all offensive and wicked things (Al-Bukhaaree)
* One should enter the toilet with the left foot and leave with the right foot.
* It is not permissible to enter the toilet whilst carrying or wearing anything bearing the name of Allah, such as the Quran, or any book with the name of Allah in it, or jewelry such as bracelets or necklaces engraved with the name of Allah.
* One should remain silent whilst on the toilet. Talking, answering greetings or greeting others is forbidden.[2]
* One should not face nor turn your back on Al-Qiblah whilst relieving yourself.[3]
* One should be out of sight of people when going to the toilet
* It is considered forbidden to relieve oneself whilst standing up, lying down or if you are completely nude.[citation needed]
* One should avoid going to the toilet anywhere where people may take rest or gather for any purpose.
* Do not raise clothes until you get close to the ground and do not uncover the body any more than is needed.
* One should sit on the feet (e.g. squat) keeping thighs wide apart with the stress on the left foot.
* Do not look to the private parts of the body nor the waste matter passed from the body.
* Do not sit more than needed.
* Do not spit, blow nose, look hither and thither, touch the body unnecessarily nor look towards the sky but relieve oneself with the eyes downcast in modesty.[citation needed]
* After relieving oneself it is essential to perform Istinjaa (washing with water) of the anus and/or genitals with the left hand and water. The precise mode of performing Istinjaa has also been defined by religious leaders: "At the beginning of Istinja, it is preferable to use toilet paper three times. If Istinjaa is being done on a hot day, then the person should start from the front to the back and then from the back to the front and the third time from the front to the back. If Istinjaa is being done on a cold day, then he should begin from the back to the front. After wiping, he should wash his hand first and then he should cleanse himself with two fingers and three fingers if necessary together with 'pouring' water. When using the two fingers, one should keep the middle finger in front and the ring and index finger behind it. After beginning with the fingers in this position, he should bring the ring finger forward and rub with the middle finger and ring finger. Thereafter, he will wipe with the index finger, if necessary. He should continue until all the impurity and smell is removed. The left over water after Istinjaa is paak only if there is no impurity in it." (Mufti Ebrahim Desai) And further: "To wash the orifice with water, even though no filth is stuck to it after relieving oneself, is desirable. If the filth is sticking to it (less than a Dirham or equal to it) then the use of water is 'Sunnah' (optional) and in the case the filth stuck to the orifice is more than a Dirham then its washing with the water is 'Fard'. (obligatory)" Islamic Academy
* Other than toilet paper, water and the left hand Istinjaa can be performed with earth, grit, stones and worn-out cloths provided they are all clean. It is forbidden to perform Istinyaa with bone, any edible item, dry dung, baked brick, potsherd, coal, fodder, writing paper and anything which has even a small
This comes up every few years in the paleo literature. In the 80's it was called the 26-million-year Death Star, aka the Nemesis Theory (http://swanson.bol.ucla.edu/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(star)). Supposedly old Sol has a companion star somewhere out in the Oort cloud that disrupts the orbits of comets and meteors on a regular basis, increrasing the likelihood of an Earth collission. Of course, major extinctions controlled by a regular astronomical phenomenon then they would be very regular. But, they're not periodic because they're caused by many different factors often occurring simultaneously. They call it the "Murder on the Orient Express" hypothesis - one of my favorites!
It's the aliens!!
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
German theorist Von Meuller came up with the same idea in the twenties. This one just has a fancier chart.
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!
I guess I'm the only one who thought about star alignment and great change...
Maybe we will need all those nukes after all. Aim to the mid pacific - each one should give us 15 minutes or so...
[ Off to hunt elder signs on eBay ]
Couldn't you recreate cosmic rays or at least elements of them somehow in an environment with small rats or something and see if they evolve / mutate more often? Or is it impossible to recreate cosmic rays?
l ackholeclusterbreathesoutenormousgascloud;_ylt=Aus _tFR4hBF4F26rzjcxIU7MWM0Fp ace-gas/pg/49/aid/90169
This also reminds me that just recently they have found a giant super massive black hole which seems to be the source of mysterious cosmic rays in our universe.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20070420/sc_space/b
http://www.qj.net/Black-hole-gang-seen-gobbling-s
The first discovery of this cyclicity in the appearence/ disappearence of fossil species or genera was published in approximately 1982 by David Raup and Jack Sepkoski (a project that pre-dates the Alvarezs' KT impact hypothesis). They see a 26 million year cyclicity. (Note - that link is to a proponent of the "Nemesis" hypothesis ; don't take this as endorsement of that theory. But the man provides an accessible summary of Raup & Sepkoski).
A few years later people looked at essentially the same data set through different statistical goggles. They came up with a 24 Ma cycle. Others have come up with figures around 30 million years, from the same data. Now someone is extracting figures of around 64 million years. Whoopy-dee!
As a geologist, I'm perfectly open to this sort of hypothesis. Space effects on life-on-Earth? Hey, I've been to Nordlingen - tick the box that says "space can affect life on Earth". But being open to this sort of idea does not mean accepting any presentation that's made. It's entirely possible that the observed variations in historical biodiversity levels are as much a product of variable preservation as of variable historical biodiversity.
My guess - there's a lot of statistical effort applied to "damp down" the effects of the big spike in extinctions at 63~65 million years ago courtesy of (amongst others) the Chixulub impactor ; but the studies all show a spike in extinction frequencies at half, one, or twice the period of the biggest spike in the data set. That sounds to me like over-correction or under correction of the data, not helped by the data set being one-sided (we don't know biodiversity rates for the next 100 million years).
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I do hope that we don't find out as well, but not because we would have to wait, but because I want to happen LONG from now. Anyone realise what the downside slope of those curves mean? :)
Hopefully we WILL have to wait 62 million years to test this hypothesis. The alternative is to have a cataclysmic event (of unknown type) that decreases biodiversity happen SOONER, which is bad news for most life on this planet (probably including humans, if we're still around).
Massive die-offs tend to take larger, more complex life (like people), leaving simpler, more robust life (such as lichens, bacteria, and cockroaches) to inherit the Earth.
Am I the only one that sees a statement like "hopefully we don't have to wait 62M years" for some cataclysmic event (implying "hopefully we'll get to see this") and is forced to wonder at the common sense of someone expressing such a desire?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It also bears a striking resemblance to the Nemesis Star theory, which solves a problem that already has simpler solutions.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"There's something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out"
But "cataclysm" refers to the flood. Wouldn't he be better served by building a giant boat? :-)