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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
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
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?
Yay! This is our chance to use up all the fossil fuels real quick-like and then by the time the cold spell is over we'll all be using nuclear and solar panels.
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").
I guess now would be a good time to use ECC RAM in consumer PCs and not just servers anymore.
Note that Intel are a bunch of $^@#! and try to segment the market by disabling this on their desktop processors. I've been trying to decide whether getting ECC might just be worth taking the 30% (or whatever it is at your favored price point) performance hit of going with AMD.
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.
Terrible plan. When the next sun cycle starts and the cloud cover is gone, global warming will hit us like a train.
Better idea is to use geothermal heating to keep us all warm during an ice age. The technology exists today but there is no reason to use it while energy is cheap. A period of rapid global cooling would cause energy prices to skyrocket as electric, gas, oil and wood furnaces blaze to keep people warm. The coal plants will roar ahead like nothing is wrong, wind and solar won't be doing very well but that's ok - they dont make up much of the grid right now anyway.
If global cooling became a real problem, food shortage would actually be the most serious impediment to our survival. Extra rain would be good, but the reduced sunlight would hurt crops catastrophically and the average surface temperature really doesn't need to go down that much for crops to be impacted.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
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.
Or vice versa: The screwy solar cycle is messing with the heliopheric current sheet and thus allowing more cosmic rays to enter the system. We know that even minor solar fluctuations can manipulate the termination shock, so the idea is not -entirely- implausible. Dress it up in some Star Trek language and it'll sound more convincing.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Why didn't you provide any citations? Perhaps because it was disproved in 2007.
Thirty seconds with google and the keywords "cosmic rays global warming" brought a wealth of stories describing research which found no correlation of any kind between cosmic ray flux and cloud cover. Sure, you'll find articles describing this theory, but it's called a "hypothesis," and "controversial" at best. And all those stories are older than the 2008 analysis of MODIS data.
I can see the fnords!
According to Crucial and other sites that benchmark, going ECC is only 2% slower than non-ECC memory. That's a very good trade off for reliability IMHO.
As for Intel. Yes, ECC support is restricted to their Xeon line now. You will also need a workstation motherboard. Even though Intel's latest "high-end" desktop gaming board (X58 chipset) supports the Xeon CPU, ECC support is not available. At least, no reference was mentioned in the manual.
I think my next workstation build will be AMD based.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
Maybe it's those bastards doing warp 10 around the sun causing all the problems. If only we could reverse the polarity on the main deflector to radiate a tachyon pulse directly into the sun. That oughta solve any problem we come across.
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.
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.
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
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
Not having access to anything but the abstracts, I have to ask...
What does a one year difference in date have anything to do with reaching drastically different claims using the same data source? According to GP, in 2008, MODIS data was inconsistent with cosmic rays causing cloud formation. According to your "newer research" in 2009, MODIS data magically became consistent with the theory. They both claim reliance on MODIS data and reach opposite conclusions. So... what gives? Either they played with the data selection process or they had different criteria for deciding what's a correlation and what's not. That doesn't sound like being "out of date" to me...that sounds more like having different presuppositions and methodologies going in. A one year difference isn't enough to wave the wand and make all prior research go away - you've got to demonstrate that either the methodology or the data of the old research was flawed.
* I'm not claiming I know which research is closer to the truth. It could be this year's, it could be last year's. The date isn't going to tell us.
-- Joren
Actually, Solar flares correlate with solar activity and, at least in theory, increased solar activity shields Earth from Cosmic Rays. i.e: more solar flares implies more solar activity which implies less cosmic rays reaching earth which implies fewer clouds which implies more sunlight which implies hotter temperatures on the planet which implies global warming.
SUV's are responsible for global warming. Damn them!
SUVs are partly responsible for global warming, but so are compact cars (which are less responsible than SUVs). But as to the "damn them", considering that more people die in SUVs per passenger mile than any other type of vehicle, I'd say Darwin is working hard to get rid of the SUV drivers.
SUVs are so dangerous because of a lot of factors:
BTW and offtopic, SUV is an acronym, not a contraction. The apostrophe doesn't belong there.
Free Martian Whores!
* I'm not claiming I know which research is closer to the truth. It could be this year's, it could be last year's. The date isn't going to tell us.
They both claim reliance on MODIS data and reach opposite conclusions. So... what gives?
To be honest, it sounds like you skimmed what I wrote and decided I was a global warming nut. If you enjoy arguing against them, then by all means have fun pretending that I am one. By all means, tell me what "my attitude" is - I'm sure it'd be news to me, since I never expressed an opinion about what should receive funding and what should not. But I digress...
My main point isn't about which one's right or wrong - frankly I don't know or care. It's about the rules of logic. You're saying the other research is "a little old" when it's only one year older than the link you cited. It matters little which side a person is on - what matters is that they follow the rules of logic and provide a refutation that goes beyond "it's [one year] old." They both use the same MODIS data and reach different conclusions - that points to a difference that cannot be explained by one being a year older than the other. There must be different methodologies, and one has to decide which one is closer to the truth. I would like to know what the difference in how they assess the MODIS data is - unfortunately, I can't know, because I don't have access to anything beyond the abstract of the research you cited. The full papers seem to require paying for access.
-- Joren
"Imagine, if you like, that we just don't know enough about the system to say one way or the other whether cosmic rays influence low cloud cover?"
there is a lot we don't know, but we do know that doesn't happen.
"Well, I for one don't think the science is EVER settled."
that statement makes me wonder if you know what science is? by definition science is never settled.
That doesn't mean everything that pops into someones head is possible, or that we don't understand anything, or that the unknown is unknowable.
The data gathered in the linked paper is from one event. it is in no way strong enough evidence to counter the 22 other events where this did NOT happen. Just looking at the data shows that there is no statiscal correlation.
"Further research is needed"
Only if they take a new tack, the current equopement doesn't show any statical correlation.
If any one in this post has a religious faith on this issue, it appear to be you. You do realize that that paper is not about global warming at all?
He didn't say they don't cause "Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds". He said there is no link to global warming, and there isn't.
"As I keep saying in these types of discussion, the "team" warmists have all the funding, even though much of their research is bollocks."
Both those statements are provable false.
"hey peer review each others papers, use each others data (without archiving it for replication) and cite each other all the time,"
yes, as does every else, Including coutries that would like very much to show that man has no impact on global warming.
The BIB monney is in man not ahving an effect. Very powerfull companies and countries have a lot more money to spend if it's real.
All the data points to it being man made. There is not correlation with the INCREASED temperature and suna ctivity. In short, when cosmic rays and sun activity are in a phase for a 'cool' earth, the temperature doesn't return to pre industrial numbers of similar events.
Add ot it, it should be COOLER do to increase contrails and particulate matter; which is in fact helping keep the temperature down.
If you bother to calm down and think,you would notice that it's the anti warmers that are cherry picking data. The will ignore volumes of data to highlight one flaw.
Do you know whaer the money and prize is in science? doing studies the disprove previous theory, or discovering something radically new. It is in the best interest of corporate paid, and some emerging government paid scientist to show that man has no effect on global temperature, not to mention OPEC.The most interested, most heavily invest, and powerful groups can't find data to show that the earths warming isn't man made. Thye people making big money are books written by deniers. Any scientist that can disprove the man isn't impacting the global temperature would get wheel barrels of money from those groups.
So, your PhD is in...?
Finally:
Linking to a study that most people wont't be able to get to is BAD FORM in the extreme.
Too bad for you that not only can I get to the study, I had previously read the draft.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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/