Slashdot Mirror
Cosmic Ray Intensity Reaches Highest Levels In 50 years
An anonymous reader writes "A NASA probe found that cosmic ray intensities in 2009 had increased by almost 20 percent beyond anything seen in the past 50 years. Such cosmic rays arise from distant supernova explosions and consist mostly of protons and heavier subatomic particles — just one cosmic ray could disable unlucky satellites or even put a mission to Mars in jeopardy."
Clearly we need more energy-efficient stars.
"It's Cosmic Rays mutating the electrons."
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
In this Brian de Palma film, a mission to rescue astronauts stranded on the titular planet finds a hill shaped like a giant face, with alien technology inside.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Will the legacy of environmental disaster that was George W. Bush's presidency never end?
#DeleteChrome
The increased cosmic ray flux will undoubtably cause global cooling. The high energy rays and penetrate deep into the atmosphere where they create nucleation points which increase cloud over. The inreased cloud cover reflects more energy into space and the planet will cool.
This is likely the mechanizm behind the little ice age which occurred during the Maunder minimum between 1645 and 1715.
At this point solar cycle #24 is more than 2 years late. Solar cycle #25 was predicted to be very weak but #24 was predicted to be more or less normal. The predictions for #24 are proving to be in error.
A cooling trend can go on for decades.
A NASA probe found that cosmic ray intensities in 2009 had increased by almost 20 percent beyond anything seen in the past 50 years.
Well, crap, then. Maybe we actually SHOULD all get out our tinfoil hats.
Actually, lead foil might be a better bet...
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Cosmic rays damaging electronic equipment? I've been using this computer for years and my RAM is doing just fi
I was wondering, "Why are cosmic rays so dangerous, It's just protons and electrons, just like the solar wind".
However, there's a huge energy difference between the two.
The particles in cosmic radiation have 1x10^20eV and the solar wind is 1x10^3eV
So, while it's the same "stuff", the cosmic particles are moving a lot faster relative to us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_radiation
I guess now would be a good time to use ECC RAM in consumer PCs and not just servers anymore. In fact, I've always been in favor of ECC in every workstation. At least nVidia is talking it seriously.
FYI. Cosmic rays have been known to cause bit-flips in RAM. That's why using ECC is important in preventing data corruption committed back to disk.
Life is not for the lazy.
Centuries ago, cosmic-ray concentrations grew to be as much as 200 percent more intense than they are now, yet humankind survived.
How do we know this? Who was measuring cosmic-ray concentrations centuries ago, and how did they measure them? How accurate were the measurements, and how certain are we of that accuracy?
According to wikipedia, "In 1910 Theodor Wulf developed an electrometer (a device to measure the rate of ion production inside a hermetically sealed container) and used it to show higher levels of radiation at the top of the Eiffel Tower than at its base." That sounds like a bit less than "centuries ago".
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
FYI. Cosmic rays have been known to cause bit-flips in RAM.
But the odds are astronomical.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"...or even put a mission to Mars in jeopardy." If you are talking about a human mission to Mars, even the lightest of cosmic radiation would only allow for a one way trip for any human. A round trip would provide fatal doses (just a side note).
The Sun has been very quiet recently, so this is not surprising. Now that the Sunspots are back and the Sun is getting more active, I would expect things to go back to normal.
Even trolls need feeding from time to time...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/taking-cosmic-rays-for-a-spin/
Let's hear it for cosmic rays. We need something to kick evolution into gear. Things seem to have been at a standstill lately.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
If we're going to set a course of deliberate climate change, I'm going to go out on a limb and nominate Mars for the pilot project. Let's try it there and if it works, bring it home.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
SUV's are responsible for global warming. Damn them!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't think that makes sense. Mars, as far as we know, doesn't have a pervasive biosphere. The reaction of the Martian climate to a given input probably has no correlation at all to the reaction the Earth's climate would have to the same input. Think about the amount of CO2 which is modulated into/out of the atmosphere by life.
Don't be so hard on yourself.
Ant core samples? Just how large are these ants?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I wouldn't raise alarm too much, cosmic rays affect a space craft in mainly three ways: Single Even Upset (SEU), Single Event Latchup (SEL), and Total Ionization Dose (TID) measured in kRad. The higher cosmic rays increase the TID, but all these satellites are built for it and it shouldn't raise an alarm except for very long term missions. SEUs and SELs are what the phrase "just one cosmic ray could disable unlucky satellites or even put a mission to Mars in jeopardy." is mentioning. SEUs aren't too much too worry about, usually nothing too harmful, just a few errors and at worst a reset of some subsystems. The bad one is the SELs. These can cause a temporary short and potentially cause damage. The key thing with SEUs and SELs is that they're typically temporary and the spacecraft's power systems nowadays can easily handle them. The solid state switches/fuses they started with Cassini (and are now typical for NASA missions) are very effective (accidently proven so during integration) and can cut off a shorted subsystem quite fast and prevent damage.
In a nutshell, don't get your panties in a bunch.
I went to school with Cosmic Ray and I know for a fact that he died in some ugly drowning incident involving a bong. Ray Dead = No more Cosmic Ray.
Galactic Warming, a green-blooded commie Vulcan myth!
Table-ized A.I.
If any trolls are still hungry, try some of my home made troll food
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The solar activity is decreasing we are in a sunspot minimum temps will decrease on the earth and more cosmic rays will mean more rainfall due to the "cloud chamber effect" in the upper atmosphere.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I want to be invisible, then you'll see me spoiling the Vatican's secrets... oops!
I mean, whether we like it or not, with or without us, the climate will change. We have proof of this from Ant/arctic core samples and other sources that point to prehistoric changes in the Earth's atmosphere. It was warmer during the time of the dinosaurs and colder during the reign of the mammoths.
No one disputes this -- at least not on the side of people who accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change. The important difference is that the changes you list took VERY long times to happen; even so, many species couldn't adapt.
Maybe it's time to start testing those orbital solar reflectors or beefing up our Near Earth Asteroid Tracking efforts?
Maybe it would be actually much cheaper to change things on the ground rather than to attempt a MASSIVE orbital engineering project. You think it's a bitch getting modern industrial societies to pay to save energy and switch generation sources? Imagine trying to fund a project to put a structure large enough to shade the Earth in a stable position between us and the Sun (i.e. the L1 point).
So, yeah, no. But it's not like we can do a damn thing about cosmic rays, and it's not like they have much influence on global warming, anyway.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Mostly clear with scattered cosmic rays, some heavy. Temperature near steady at 3K. Stellar winds light and variable except near stars.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
attempting to engineer our climate is a massive fuck up. anyone who suggests it needs to step back and evaluate thier compertence....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Has anyone thought to run the supercolliders a couple times? I'd really like to know the spread on the superbowl.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Could someone clarify if you can have "...just one cosmic ray...". I know that high energy particles of this sort are simultaneously considered both a particle stream and a wave-front but that sentence stuck out for me. Not being nit-picky, just curious. thanks.
Well, at least you have a sense of humor.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm totally going to clear out my Bugzilla queue tomorrow:
Bug 13272: Memory leak in widget_process_task()
RESOLVED/INVALID: cosmic rays
Bug 11207: Database corrupted by invalid user input
RESOLVED/INVALID: cosmic rays
Bug 12304: "if (A = B)" in the code where clearly "if (A == B)" was intended
RESOLVED/INVALID: cosmic rays
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
I attempted to read the comments for this article. I do believe that this is the most troll-filled article ever to hit /.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Core_(story)
Mars doesn't have a pervasive biosphere because we haven't rehabilitated it yet. On a global level there's little difference in difficulty level between rehabiltating Mars and rehabilitating Earth. On Mars opposing ventures aren't going to counteract your efforts. Martian climate is about that of antarctica, and the establishment of a biosphere will change that. Either Martian or Terran solution is going to have to leverage biogenic action because self-replicating actors are cheaper than man-manufactured ones, especially on a global scale. I'm sure we have samples of phtotosynthetic biogenic organisms that operate in low pressure and cold environments even without bioengineering anything new. I think may be easier to Terraform Mars than it is to Terraform Earth.
Mars's atmosphere is currently frozen at its poles. In order to engage some Martian Global Warming we'll need to thaw the CO2 and convert massive quantities of water ice to CO2 and hydrocarbons (We'll need some carbon). Still no Nitrogen but if we can't find any in the soil we should be able to mine it somewhere.
I've been thinking about this Mars thing a lot lately. A rocket sled to Deimos seems inefficient and unreliable even though there's some gravity assist if you use the Olympic skijump model of ramp made of ice. I think that it should be easy enough to build a cannon out of the available ice and use steam propulsion to launch multiton ice slugs up to Deimos, if you can adequately control the steam pressure and timing. If you want to get fancy you might put some minor steam propulsion in the ice slug and some minor intelligence to guide it. If you miss your shot it falls to barren Mars, so lots of practice shots are possible.
The gravity on Deimos is only 400 Micro G, so the shot's got to get pretty close. Once you have tons of water in a shallow gravity well with plenty of electrical energy you've changed the game for off-earth work and life.
Martian global warming might just be a side-effect of us doing what we're supposed to do: explore. Hopefully in 200 years the very idea of activating a Martian atmosphere will sound silly.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So just because a guy is black it automatically means he is a criminal?
No, just because a guy is a politician it automatically means he is a criminal.
Blank until
Clinton, Bush, *Real* loser, Obama?
Right?
Whoever was stupid enough to tag this " globalwarming " isn't doing the whole "Green" movement much good.
That tag on this story just screams IGNORANCE.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
What is the nature of these "rays"? Duration, frequency, intensity and width would be of interest.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
With clinton's track record in that department, are we really sure of that?
Any direct correlation between the activitity and the current natural earthquakes/typhoons etc?
I'm selling Doomsday Reverse Insurance: You sign up, I pay you $1000 today, and you owe me $10000 to be paid back on December 31st, 2012, unless the world ends before that, in which case you don't owe me anything.
Original Cosmic Ray's or Cosmic Original Ray's?
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
Damn You Carl Sagan!!!! You said once that we would reach the stars if we didn't destroy ourselves first, turn out it was you and your Voyager program which will destroy us and prevent us from reaching the stars!
A far more glorious dawn awaits, not a sunrise, but a cosmic ray rise which will burn all of us to a crisp with the power of 400 billion stars!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
It's obvious that we're starting to hit the Photon Belt
Solar system magnetic field is weaker and more cosmic energy is getting through. This predicts a return to normal as the next solar cycle revs up.
Flight, invisibility, sheesh. You'll both long since be rotted away while I'm still having fun.
And the Vatican's "secrets" are just largely already-known writings that show stuff in the Bible as evolving from other sources. Didja know there's a quote floating around from the year 400 AD of some guy whining that these documents must be a clever forge by the Devil just to make it look like the accepted cannon was derivative crap?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Damn, I'm trying to cut down on feeding the trolls. Clinton was arguably the best President I've seen as an adult, and the first President I voted for was Nixon.
Clinton took a federal deficit and turned it into a surplus. He inhereted a recession and did the right things to end it -- he put money into the hands of those who would actually spend it, like SMALL businessmen, working people, and city governments. He paid to put put 100,000 extra cops on the street, and that coupled with the improved economy caused a marked decrease in crime, particularly violent crime.
There were no wars on his watch, although there were two terrorist acts: Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center. The perpetrators of both terrorist acts were caught, sent to trial, and imprisoned and (in the case of McVeigh) executed.
There were other downsides; Ruby Ridge and Waco were certainly fuckups. But compared to every single other President I've had the chance to vote for or against, he was the best one I saw. I actually voted against him in his first term, but when I saw what a good job he was doing I voted for his re-election.
Contrast that to the incredible incompetent that replaced him. I never thought I'd see a worse President than Carter, but Bush proved me wrong. He turned Clinton's budget surplus into the biggest defecit in American history, got us into two wars that we're still fighting (note I was for attacking Afghanistan, but we had no reason to invade Iraq). He took a big federal bureaucracy and expanded it to mind boggling hugeness, stifled human rights by imprisoning people, even American citizens arrested on our soil, with no trials and proceeded to use torture against them.
He fucked up royally every time there was a natural disaster, the worst fuckup being Katrina (with help from the equally inept La and NO governments).
I don't know what you Clinton-hating Bush lovers are smoking, but I suspect it's white and looks like small rocks.
Free Martian Whores!
No, it's not dead.
They used cherry picking to declare cherry picking.
Even if it is true i ONE paper, it doesn't rule out global warming.
For example:
If tomorrow I found evidence that Darwin's theory was so flawed as to be discredited, it would change the theory of evolution bacause of the massive volumes of supporting data.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So just because a guy is black it automatically means he is a criminal?
No, just because a guy is a politician it automatically means he is a criminal.
Politicians aren't criminals, they're insane. They can't help themselves.
How do I know they're insane? Well, no sane person would accept the job.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Hate to bust your fanboy bubble, but Clinton inherited a post-recession booming economy (5% growth by the time of the election, well before he even took office). To the extent that anyone took action resulting in a reduction of the deficit, you can credit Newt Gingrich, although the dot-com boom had more to do with it than any particular policy or budget. Clinton's team was actually opposed to a balanced budget at the time.
I can't disagree with much of the vitriol heaped on Bush II, although the federal level Katrina screw-ups were more PR than factual. They are hamstrung by local sovereignty even to this day.
As far as creating the biggest budget deficit in American history, I'm afraid he's ceded that title to our current Dear Leader. We've managed to run up a bigger deficit this year than the entire Iraq war cost or Bush's entire first term in office. Wow. In fact, this year's deficit is larger than the entire tax receipts of the Federal Government. Seriously. We spent way more than twice what we took in. Holy crap, that takes a lot of effort.
And that doesn't even count the trillion dollars spent by the federal reserve increasing our money supply. Holy Inflation, mcgrew!
See Taking Cosmic Rays for a Spin (2006). Also a very informative section in Spencer Weart's Discovery of Global Warming.
like the difference between being hit by a car going 1mph and one going 300'000'000mph?
That square root sure makes all the difference. A difference of 17 orders of magnitude was just difficult to handle.
But now, the difference between a car going 1mph and ~1.5x the speed of light isn't so bad at all.
I feel much better!
I posted this to Slashdot but it appears that the editors are more interested in Cosmic rays.
To quote from Theregister:
The world's source for global temperature record admits it's lost or destroyed all the original data that would allow a third party to construct a global temperature record. The destruction (or loss) of the data comes at a convenient time for the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia - permitting it to snub FoIA requests to see the data.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/cru_missing/