This unstable period could last for years if not decades.
Or centuries or millennia. Which is the direction the geological record points to.
Many of those satellites are not made to withstand direct exposure to the Sun's radiation for very long. So most of the electronics in orbit will be fried.
All satellites have a limited lifetime, whether it be fuel exhaustion for station keeping, or bit rot from cosmic rays. What you're talking about is needing to increase the replacement rate. Not "start replacing satellites for the first time ever", but increase the rate of replacement. As I recall, we're already into the 3rd generation of GPS satellites.
Anyone who doesn't want to carry around a couple of kilos of solar charger in the rucksack along with the tent, sleeping bag, rock hammer, stove, fuel, food, maps (at various resolutions), sample bags... oh, and the compass and clinometer are built into the same unit and the clinometer is an essential too.
I'm not sure anyone knows how long geomagnetic fields take to reverse and rebuild. It could be years. And during this time, we will experience repeated blackouts. Or perhaps one big one.
As I've said before, the best, limited, information, we have is that they take centuries, maybe millennia. So, we could have spent the whole of the history of electrical manufacture in a period of increasing Geomag Induced Currents, continue through the same for a few more centuries, and it all be a matter of history by 3000 CE.
To be honest, I don't care about your technology, as long as you don't veer across my path. My technology and navigation methods aren't going to be upset by this, even if it happens at an unprecedentedly high rate. I've seen people get seriously fucked-up by navigation errors, and certainly don't intend to fall for that sort of mistake.
Chuckles to self : about $18million for one particular fuck-up. I lost days of sleep over that one, and when the navigation SNAFU came out - a year later and a thousand kilometres away - I was pissing myself with laughter.
Hell, I have to regularly refer to the compass built into my Chevy just to prevent Waze from sending me in the wrong direction...
Adjusting the counter-magnets in the binnacle to correct for the car's (is a Chevy a car?) own magnetic field must take a time every time you've had any welding done on it.
I have had to use a compass, in the Lake District, in the snow, on my own.
There are grues in the wild up there. They look white and fluffy until they get close enough to leap and "game over".
There were five paths going away from a cairn so I too a compass bearing from the map.
Which is, of course, why you dig the compass out, select your exit path from your known point, then continue to monitor if what you're seeing underfoot is what the map says you should see.
We've all learned, one way or another. Well, at least those of us who've called themselves mountaineers.
Navigating in caves, or for that matter, surveying them with pace and compass, is pretty hard work.
IIRC the furthes down the chain that the Sun will get is to forming oxygen. And then it'll start to fizzzzzzllllllleeeeee ooooouuuuuuuutttttttttttttttttttttt...................
SJBE (rightly) raises some issues over your ideas of nucleosynthesis below.
The iron isn't essential to generating a magnetic field. Any conducting fluid will do. So for example, magnetometer readings from spacecraft going past Europa and Enceladus suggest that they are reacting to their motions through the magnetic fields of Jupiter and Saturn in a way consistent with a deep fluid conductor, which is inferred to be saline water. If there were enough geothermal heat produced, then there might be a Europa-dynamo or Enceladus-dynamo. The modellers don't agree, but people are still trying to tease enough information from the various spacecraft passages. Work In Progress.
Wasting time watching youtube is a waste. If you can't be bothered to write a paragraph or two to summarise whatever was said by whoever about whatever, it's probably not worth me watching.
If you had ever looked at a magnetic field strength estimate taken from a sediment (or igneous) pile of rock, you'd know that fields are constantly changing by large factors. Indeed, anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of geomagnetics knows that during the period of instrumental measurement (~2 centuries) there has been a factor-of-2 decrease in general field strength, and more in some areas. So, anyone designing a system that uses geomagnetics is going to incorporate that possibility in their design. Anyone not doing that is flat-out ignorant, incompetent, or both.
"Equipment designed by ignorant/ incompetent people breaks" - even Slashdot would probably reject that story!
Obfuscant is probably right about shorting the antenna.
As long as the vehicle is one which has non-GPS models, then the antenna is likely in a corner of the windscreen (whatever Americans call it). Just glue tin foil on the outside of the windscreen where that sits, then do the same on the inside of the screen. When you switch on, and the GPS can't pick up any satellites... problem solved. And if you're conservative about your choice of glue, you can return this system to "store condition" before you sell the rusty hulk.
If your car tries to use WiFi connections to map location in town, repeat with it's antenna.
You can't. You agreed to it when you signed up to their service.
Of course, you can delete all your existing content (don't worry, they'll keep copies), disconnect from all your "friends" (if they don't know you well enough to complain the next time they see you, are they really friends?), delete all your posts which mention any locations, companies or products. Then log off and don't come back. That'll stop them from recording anything new into their database, but they'll still know of your existence.
The things is, nobody seems to have reported on this investigation and trial until its conclusion, which suggests non-standard reporting restrictions were imposed.
What were they, and why?
I've not investigated, since it's under a different country's jurisdiction (I live, nominally at least, in the same country. For the moment.) with a completely different legal system. But from previous cases I've paid attention to, the commonest reason for suppressing reporting of trial X is that there is also a set of charges resulting in another trial (of the same person, or other people in a related case) still going on, and the reporting of the first trial is suppressed until the end of the second trial and the expiry of the window for lodging an appeal in the second trial.
In this case, for example, Wossname (I've already forgotten his name) was convicted of running a drug-sales website, but he may have been using an accountant to launder the money whose defence to accountancy charges was that he didn't know the illegal source of the money.
People have been jailed in consequence of such false connections, appealed, and their initial conviction quashed (made to not exist) because of contamination of the jury by the first trial by press reporting. Then the cost of the second investigation and trial (tens of millions of pounds, potentially) was wasted. Completely wasted, because of double jeopardy.
A nasty little bigot called Stephen Yaxley-Lennon recently got thrown in jail for repeatedly violating these reporting restrictions. Because the reporting restrictions are about reporting on the trial, not about being in any professional sense, a reporter. He's not an accredited journalist, just a YouTube reject. Specifically, he was repeatedly live-videoing from outside the court room, showing the faces of the accused and relating their alleged crimes regardless of the restrictions imposed because of 3 or 4 linked trials. So, the judge threw him in jail until the trial was finished.
Have these theories been conclusively disproven now,
No. Theories need to be backed by evidence to be accepted. Checking the evidence is hardly rocket science. You go online, you get a global bathymetry set, you learn how to plot it up, you look at the results. And then you get to the question of were there major landslips in the area before historical records? That is actually a fairly important question for the residents - for reasons obvious to anyone who is aware of the Anak Krakatau landslip and tsunami (and associated few dozen deaths) of a few weeks ago. (Or the Storegga Slide of about 8500 years ago which devastated the North Sea coastal populations, including the current Netherlands with a hard-to-estimate body count. Or the non-trivial hazard posed by sector collapse of some of the Canary Islands (tens of millions of people at risk) or parts of the Hawaii archipelago (similar tens of millions at risk). Unfortunately, that is the sort of question that is really hard to answer if the relevant data is buried under hundreds of metres of mud and sea. Welcome to geology - you don't get easy answers to hard questions.
I've posted my bathymetry plots at https://wellsite-geologist.blo... . Have fun with them. If you want different answers, do your own study.
or is the article trying too hard to be sensational by implying that our pre-historic relatives were capable of navigating the oceans,
What is sensational about a claim like that? We (geologists, archaeologists) have been functionally certain for decades that early hominins, including hominins assigned to species other than Homo sapiens, could cross significant water bodies. The "out of sight of land" criterion has been a dead concern (#Insert Monty-Python-parrot-sketch.h) since the 1970s. We don't know precisely how they did it, but we've known that they did do it.
while the homo sapiens who surplanted them only gained that skill much later in their history?
I'm struggling to follow you. You have some evidence that at some point in time all hominins alive on the planet, both those who lived alongside coasts and those living far inland, forgot how to work wood well enough to construct sea-going craft. That is some damned big claim - are you really sure that you want to make it?
Or... is it more parsimonious to accept that at some point in the family tree of the several species of humans, the skills of working wood, cooperating, planning and navigation were learned, remained in use, and repeatedly our highly intelligent ancestors would meet bodies of water, learn (or remember) how to build watercraft to exploit the resources of those bodies, and then they cross. The crossing might be deliberate. Or it might be a storm event putting a boat load of "fishermen" onto the other side of a strait, at which point they re-stock and use whatever navigation techniques they have been using since their grandparents taught them... and navigate home to say "There's land that way."
You will note that most of the equipment I postulate is wooden. Wood's survival rate near sea level in the tropics isn't good. And the intensity of search for stone artefacts is not high. Don't forget the leather and sinew which were also available for binding two things together. That doesn't survive well either. During the stone age, far more wood was used than stone - a spear point for example might have been dug out of a dozen aurochs, but needed a new (wooden) shaft every time. And sinews and/ or resin glue to mount it to the haft.
One thing is lost in this latter model. You (and I) can't point at the non-humans who did this and say "Ha ha, stupid ape men!" Because they weren't.
they completely ignore a million years of continental drift and other such variables.
A million years at 5cm/year (a typical plate movement speed) is 50km. Over a million years, that doesn't make a huge difference.
But if you move beyond children's books, you'll actually find that continental drift is taken into account in such studies. The topic is simplified for children's books. If you find that galling, stop reading books aimed for children and start to study the topic seriously.
Oh, and when you're asked to give an opinion, think twice and say things like, "To the best of our knowledge at this time, Either Hamilton, Bottas or Vettel might be able to win the championship." Then resist people trying to hammer you into making a prediction, because you simply do not have the data.
Actually, many parts of the world were settled by people who got lost.
They may have been discovered by people who got lost. But the rest of the world got to hear about it the new discovery from the discoverer who found the new place, then fixed their navigation well enough to get back home. The ones who didn't get back home... nobody knew about their discovery.
For example, the thread of reporting that got news of the Viking's discovery of the North American continent was so slender that for centuries, nobody really believed it. The Aleutian/ Siberian "Indians" who first discovered the Americas seemed to be sufficiently isolated from the rest of Eurasia that news of their discovery did not spread. Ditto for Australia.
No. The compasses will still be working as well as ever. They'll be indicating the direction of the local magnetic field (with a side serving of indicating the field strength by the speed of settling in a direction). The N and S indicated on the needle (by colour, writing or whatever) refer to the magnetic field.
If a user erroneously believes that the needle points towards the Earth's rotation axis, well that is the user's problem. At worst, manuals will be more carefully written, but since I haven't needed to buy a compass since the early 1980s, I don't know what current practice in that is. (Incidentally, my 1981 compass, a birthday present, has an adjustment screw for setting the variation between local magnetic field and the grid on the map in use. That adjustment can go from zero to 90 degrees. The scale doubles for the clinometer measurement.)
Slashdot Mirror
Or centuries or millennia. Which is the direction the geological record points to.
All satellites have a limited lifetime, whether it be fuel exhaustion for station keeping, or bit rot from cosmic rays. What you're talking about is needing to increase the replacement rate. Not "start replacing satellites for the first time ever", but increase the rate of replacement. As I recall, we're already into the 3rd generation of GPS satellites.
I learned that lesson from either Towering Inferno or Jaws in about 1974.
Atmospheric stripping is one of the issues that Lingam addresses. It's not a big deal.
.zryobec n ro qyhbp fqyrvs pvgratnz tavferire jbu rrf g'abq V
Anyone who doesn't want to carry around a couple of kilos of solar charger in the rucksack along with the tent, sleeping bag, rock hammer, stove, fuel, food, maps (at various resolutions), sample bags ... oh, and the compass and clinometer are built into the same unit and the clinometer is an essential too.
That depends on the length - and orientation - of the distribution lines. Regardless of the origin of the go-go juice.
As I've said before, the best, limited, information, we have is that they take centuries, maybe millennia. So, we could have spent the whole of the history of electrical manufacture in a period of increasing Geomag Induced Currents, continue through the same for a few more centuries, and it all be a matter of history by 3000 CE.
Chuckles to self : about $18million for one particular fuck-up. I lost days of sleep over that one, and when the navigation SNAFU came out - a year later and a thousand kilometres away - I was pissing myself with laughter.
Adjusting the counter-magnets in the binnacle to correct for the car's (is a Chevy a car?) own magnetic field must take a time every time you've had any welding done on it.
There are grues in the wild up there. They look white and fluffy until they get close enough to leap and "game over".
Which is, of course, why you dig the compass out, select your exit path from your known point, then continue to monitor if what you're seeing underfoot is what the map says you should see.
We've all learned, one way or another. Well, at least those of us who've called themselves mountaineers.
Navigating in caves, or for that matter, surveying them with pace and compass, is pretty hard work.
IIRC the furthes down the chain that the Sun will get is to forming oxygen. And then it'll start to fizzzzzzllllllleeeeee ooooouuuuuuuutttttttttttttttttttttt ...................
The iron isn't essential to generating a magnetic field. Any conducting fluid will do. So for example, magnetometer readings from spacecraft going past Europa and Enceladus suggest that they are reacting to their motions through the magnetic fields of Jupiter and Saturn in a way consistent with a deep fluid conductor, which is inferred to be saline water. If there were enough geothermal heat produced, then there might be a Europa-dynamo or Enceladus-dynamo. The modellers don't agree, but people are still trying to tease enough information from the various spacecraft passages. Work In Progress.
If you had ever looked at a magnetic field strength estimate taken from a sediment (or igneous) pile of rock, you'd know that fields are constantly changing by large factors. Indeed, anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of geomagnetics knows that during the period of instrumental measurement (~2 centuries) there has been a factor-of-2 decrease in general field strength, and more in some areas. So, anyone designing a system that uses geomagnetics is going to incorporate that possibility in their design. Anyone not doing that is flat-out ignorant, incompetent, or both.
"Equipment designed by ignorant/ incompetent people breaks" - even Slashdot would probably reject that story!
Now, or in a couple of centuries. Maybe.
The value of the device is to Amazon, not the user. That is why they are giving them away.
As long as the vehicle is one which has non-GPS models, then the antenna is likely in a corner of the windscreen (whatever Americans call it). Just glue tin foil on the outside of the windscreen where that sits, then do the same on the inside of the screen. When you switch on, and the GPS can't pick up any satellites ... problem solved. And if you're conservative about your choice of glue, you can return this system to "store condition" before you sell the rusty hulk.
If your car tries to use WiFi connections to map location in town, repeat with it's antenna.
Of course, you can delete all your existing content (don't worry, they'll keep copies), disconnect from all your "friends" (if they don't know you well enough to complain the next time they see you, are they really friends?), delete all your posts which mention any locations, companies or products. Then log off and don't come back. That'll stop them from recording anything new into their database, but they'll still know of your existence.
I've not investigated, since it's under a different country's jurisdiction (I live, nominally at least, in the same country. For the moment.) with a completely different legal system. But from previous cases I've paid attention to, the commonest reason for suppressing reporting of trial X is that there is also a set of charges resulting in another trial (of the same person, or other people in a related case) still going on, and the reporting of the first trial is suppressed until the end of the second trial and the expiry of the window for lodging an appeal in the second trial.
In this case, for example, Wossname (I've already forgotten his name) was convicted of running a drug-sales website, but he may have been using an accountant to launder the money whose defence to accountancy charges was that he didn't know the illegal source of the money.
People have been jailed in consequence of such false connections, appealed, and their initial conviction quashed (made to not exist) because of contamination of the jury by the first trial by press reporting. Then the cost of the second investigation and trial (tens of millions of pounds, potentially) was wasted. Completely wasted, because of double jeopardy.
A nasty little bigot called Stephen Yaxley-Lennon recently got thrown in jail for repeatedly violating these reporting restrictions. Because the reporting restrictions are about reporting on the trial, not about being in any professional sense, a reporter. He's not an accredited journalist, just a YouTube reject. Specifically, he was repeatedly live-videoing from outside the court room, showing the faces of the accused and relating their alleged crimes regardless of the restrictions imposed because of 3 or 4 linked trials. So, the judge threw him in jail until the trial was finished.
Some people crossed the gaps in the 17th century CE.
Other people crossed them in the (approx) 650th century BCE.
I know who I'm more impressed by.
No. Theories need to be backed by evidence to be accepted. Checking the evidence is hardly rocket science. You go online, you get a global bathymetry set, you learn how to plot it up, you look at the results. And then you get to the question of were there major landslips in the area before historical records? That is actually a fairly important question for the residents - for reasons obvious to anyone who is aware of the Anak Krakatau landslip and tsunami (and associated few dozen deaths) of a few weeks ago. (Or the Storegga Slide of about 8500 years ago which devastated the North Sea coastal populations, including the current Netherlands with a hard-to-estimate body count. Or the non-trivial hazard posed by sector collapse of some of the Canary Islands (tens of millions of people at risk) or parts of the Hawaii archipelago (similar tens of millions at risk). Unfortunately, that is the sort of question that is really hard to answer if the relevant data is buried under hundreds of metres of mud and sea. Welcome to geology - you don't get easy answers to hard questions.
I've posted my bathymetry plots at https://wellsite-geologist.blo... . Have fun with them. If you want different answers, do your own study.
What is sensational about a claim like that? We (geologists, archaeologists) have been functionally certain for decades that early hominins, including hominins assigned to species other than Homo sapiens, could cross significant water bodies. The "out of sight of land" criterion has been a dead concern (#Insert Monty-Python-parrot-sketch.h) since the 1970s. We don't know precisely how they did it, but we've known that they did do it.
I'm struggling to follow you. You have some evidence that at some point in time all hominins alive on the planet, both those who lived alongside coasts and those living far inland, forgot how to work wood well enough to construct sea-going craft. That is some damned big claim - are you really sure that you want to make it?
Or ... is it more parsimonious to accept that at some point in the family tree of the several species of humans, the skills of working wood, cooperating, planning and navigation were learned, remained in use, and repeatedly our highly intelligent ancestors would meet bodies of water, learn (or remember) how to build watercraft to exploit the resources of those bodies, and then they cross. The crossing might be deliberate. Or it might be a storm event putting a boat load of "fishermen" onto the other side of a strait, at which point they re-stock and use whatever navigation techniques they have been using since their grandparents taught them ... and navigate home to say "There's land that way."
You will note that most of the equipment I postulate is wooden. Wood's survival rate near sea level in the tropics isn't good. And the intensity of search for stone artefacts is not high. Don't forget the leather and sinew which were also available for binding two things together. That doesn't survive well either. During the stone age, far more wood was used than stone - a spear point for example might have been dug out of a dozen aurochs, but needed a new (wooden) shaft every time. And sinews and/ or resin glue to mount it to the haft.
One thing is lost in this latter model. You (and I) can't point at the non-humans who did this and say "Ha ha, stupid ape men!" Because they weren't.
That would be the press spokes-thing? Or has she been taken out back and "retired" this morning?
A million years at 5cm/year (a typical plate movement speed) is 50km. Over a million years, that doesn't make a huge difference.
But if you move beyond children's books, you'll actually find that continental drift is taken into account in such studies. The topic is simplified for children's books. If you find that galling, stop reading books aimed for children and start to study the topic seriously.
Oh, and when you're asked to give an opinion, think twice and say things like, "To the best of our knowledge at this time, Either Hamilton, Bottas or Vettel might be able to win the championship." Then resist people trying to hammer you into making a prediction, because you simply do not have the data.
But which do swim. In fact, they swim considerably better than humans.
which can also swim - not just the Galapogean marine iguanas, but also their South American land-dwelling closest relatives.
They may have been discovered by people who got lost. But the rest of the world got to hear about it the new discovery from the discoverer who found the new place, then fixed their navigation well enough to get back home. The ones who didn't get back home ... nobody knew about their discovery.
For example, the thread of reporting that got news of the Viking's discovery of the North American continent was so slender that for centuries, nobody really believed it. The Aleutian/ Siberian "Indians" who first discovered the Americas seemed to be sufficiently isolated from the rest of Eurasia that news of their discovery did not spread. Ditto for Australia.
No. The compasses will still be working as well as ever. They'll be indicating the direction of the local magnetic field (with a side serving of indicating the field strength by the speed of settling in a direction). The N and S indicated on the needle (by colour, writing or whatever) refer to the magnetic field.
If a user erroneously believes that the needle points towards the Earth's rotation axis, well that is the user's problem. At worst, manuals will be more carefully written, but since I haven't needed to buy a compass since the early 1980s, I don't know what current practice in that is. (Incidentally, my 1981 compass, a birthday present, has an adjustment screw for setting the variation between local magnetic field and the grid on the map in use. That adjustment can go from zero to 90 degrees. The scale doubles for the clinometer measurement.)