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Linking Mass Extinctions To the Sun's Journey In the Milky Way
schwit1 writes "In a paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint service, astronomers propose that as many as eleven past extinction events can be linked to the Sun's passage through the spiral arms of the Milky Way. (You can download the paper here [pdf].) From the paper: 'A correlation was found between the times at which the Sun crosses the spiral arms and six known mass extinction events. Furthermore, we identify five additional historical mass extinction events that might be explained by the motion of the Sun around our Galaxy. These five additional significant drops in marine genera that we find include significant reductions in diversity at 415, 322, 300, 145 and 33 Myr ago. Our simulations indicate that the Sun has spent ~60% of its time passing through our Galaxy's various spiral arms.'"
**might** be explained
Isn't that pretty much what "correlation" means?
I know that's supposed to be tongue in cheek, but correlation is just another way of saying, we need to look into this with more detail. So if that's your hypothesis and there's correlation between the events, then who am I to judge if you decided to study it with greater detail.
So why are you calling it "rubbish?" They've found a correlation. That's interesting. No-one's claiming to have discovered the mechanism. Correlation is not causation. You seem to have inferred that because someone's found a correlation, they must also be claiming causation.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Before you read too much into this report, remember that a preprint service makes papers available to researchers in the field before the paper has undergone the peer-review process. This allows the results to be circulated amongst other researchers quickly as the peer-review process can takes quite some time.
While not as bad as say having a press conference about discovering "Cold Fusion" before any peer-review only to find that the results could not be duplicated, take the papers contents with a grain of salt as the research has not been peer-reviewed.
You might think of it like the answers you get in the back of a textbook that have usually been done by an author's grad students. Most of them are probably correct, but nobody has gone over them with a fine-tooth comb to verify their correctness.
in other news...many people die in hospitals, therefore hospitals may cause death.
And indeed they do.
http://www.health-care-reform.net/causedeath.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital-acquired_infection
So don't be so quick to dismiss the possibility of causation, simply because it was discovered by correlation.
Falsely assuming no-causation is every bit as much as a statistics induced error as falsely assuming causation.
With correlation you have a reason to look for causation. Without correlation, looking for causation is just shooting in the dark.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Ah, such clarity.
Have you told those clowns at Harvard about this?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
... is when we pass through the next one!
We use the most up to date Milky Way model and solar orbit data
in order to test the hypothesis that the Sun's galactic spiral arm crossings cause
mass extinction events on Earth.
That is how the authors of this paper reported their findings in the actual article's abstract. As for how some random Slashdot poster reported this idea, does it really matter? If you are complaining about Slashdot itself and lame editorship on the part of those who review these stories on the Slashdot staff, that is something else entirely and not something to complain about to the paper's authors.
Besides, they claim it is a causation, or that events which somehow happen during those crossings in turn trigger these extinction events. Unfortunately we have a data sample of one solar system to compare against right now to see if there might be any substance to the mechanism.
That doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. "Correlation is not causation" is a statement reminding people that "B causes A" and "X causes A and B" are alternative explanations to "A causes B" when one observes a correlation.
In this case, the only reasonable choice is "galactic orbit causes extinctions" or "the correlation is accidental"; none of the other alternatives are reasonable.
Areas of star formation are more radioactive due to massive blue stars and resulting supernovas when the massive star dies. More star formation happens in the arms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
A technological regress requires a fragile society not just a sudden jolt.
But we are a fragile society. Without even having to bring up the Idiocracy, the fact remains that we're mostly a society of specialists, dependent on the other cogs in the machine for our survival, stupidly mocking the "preppers" who are really just trying to be generalists. A comet strike could easily disrupt this machine and cause it to grind to a halt.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
I believe a mile wide asteroid destroys everything for about 100 miles and would be killing 200 miles on out. So for example a mile wide asteroid hitting New York kills most everyone in Philadelphia. So let's assume that happens. Note you are picking an almost worst case scenario with the eastern seaboard. We instantly kill say 20m people. GDP would drop a minimum of 10% but the dislocation is bad and say it drops more like 30% instantly (i.e. 27% per capita) That's an incredibly deep depression in the USA. So things are bad. Globally that's going to hit other countries in terms of trade. So UK, China... lose say .3*.2*.25 = 1.5%. We'll make it 2% drop for our trading partners so they have a normal moderate recession.
But... the we know how to fix supply chains. I'd assume we have growth on the order of 8% or more annually from that depressed level easily in the USA and similarly globally as we fix that dislocation. It might even be faster than 8% since 30% is such a depressed level.
A return to the dark ages would be something on the order of a 98% drop per capita that we don't recover from. You can see it is not even close.