This would not have been kind to any RF/EMF systems, be they GEO, LEO or terrestrial.
We'd have been walking around marvelling at st elmo's fire coming off any point-contact junction between metal or exposed metal structure, with the most fantastic skies at night.
On the other hand, would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover.
Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...
I spent my whole life only breathing through half a nostril on a good day. About 10 years ago I got surgery and Sublingual Immunotherapy drops, and the results have been life changing.
I sleep better, my mind is clearer, I feel like an entirely new person. I am not exaggerating when I say that I still occasionally think about how nice it is to be able to breathe clearly.
How would this effect computers and everyday electrical devices? If we detected something like this heading towards us would we have to turn everything off for the day/week? That's just not possible though is it, can't just turn off nuclear power plants for the day.
Solar flares do NOT affect the devices on the ground. All the fast-moving charged particles are completely absorbed in the upper atmosphere. And to give you some perspective, the most energetic flares can produce 10^-3 W/m^2 flux at the Earth's orbit.
The flares do affect the geomagnetic field. And a changing magnetic field induces current, but it becomes non-negligible only for very long conductors. So long-distance power transmission lines might suddenly become biased with a persistent DC voltage, and some long optical cables might start experiencing over/undervoltage problems with amplifiers.
> would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover
Aren’t smaller microprocessor die sizes more vulnerable to this? Should we be building integrated circuits with larger feature sizes now that we have power and performance figured out?
The article notes it is. The article seems to focus on the new discovery of just how strong the particular event seems to have been compared to the others, not the initial discovery of the event itself.
I hope it doesn't take so long to happen again that we have nobody around who remembers how to fix what it breaks. If so it'll be back to the stone ages for humanity.
You think that the farther in the future you go, the less likely it is that any existing population will know how to fix what breaks? That strikes me as oddly pessimistic, and frankly unlikely.
I wouldn't be so sure, it's wildly common. Reverse engineering products to figure out how to make them again is its own sub-industry in every manufacturing field, especially anything tool & die.
There's an enormous chasm between when companies started mass producing things and the digitization of blueprints. More often than not it isn't even the original company, it's one of their customer's customers 50+ years after they went out of business.
Im more convinced we are heading that way every year. Certainly not anytime soon, but 100, 200, 1000 years from now? Seems plausible to me. Most people don't even know how their house electricity system is setup or works, or how their plumbing system works despite being incredibly simple, not to mention more advanced technologies. We are surrounded by internal combustion engines and yet less and less people actually understand them each day and it becomes more and more specialized knowledge. How many people know how a refrigerator works despite being incredibly simple technology and the basics necessary to understand it covered by atleast freshman highschool science class if not earlier?
We have built a disposable society so people most people never have to learn how anything works. They press a switch or button and it doesn't work? Throw it away and buy a new mass-produced model. And as time goes on we only need less and less people to understand a technology to mass produce it and sell it.
It's not that I think that future generations are dumb or anything like that, it's just that the longer an assumption is held, the less likely people are to be prepared for it being invalidated.
Many of the people who designed our electrical infrastructure are still alive. Far fewer are needed to keep it running. If we must rethink our priors, I'd rather have both groups in the room while we do it.
With the state of how the ai agents stuff already is, if you don't think that most tech jobs will be automated away in our lifetime, I don't what to tell you.
Within 10-15 years, AI research automates itself and no one ever has a software engineering job ever again.
I think sometimes of how crazy it would be if we could send GPT 4.5 in the past somehow, what effect that could have, just a magical almost all knowing being from the future
I didn't read the comment in that way, but rather that it's better to kill electronics while we still have people alive who know how to build back better rather than that it strikes us in a situation where robots make everything from food to food-making robots
Isn't it amazing that we have an in-silico model that goes back thousands of years and can even tell us about atmospheric conditions 12,000+ years ago? We can confirm this via miyake events which are registered as growth in the tree rings. One just cuts down 13,000 year old trees to confirm the model, and we're good!
The article casually mentions a "notorious" 775 AD event which I'd never heard about (insert relevant XKCD here), so here's Wikipedia:
The event of 774 had no significant consequences for life on Earth, but had it happened in modern times, it might have produced catastrophic damage to modern technology, particularly to communication and space-borne navigation systems.
Baseless wild speculation time: I don't think the timing quite matches up, but the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck is a little close to this.
What if radiation from the sun actually sterilized something like 90% of neolithic men? Is that possible?
This creates a selection pressure for men whose sperm just happens to be resistent to the sun's radiation to get with as many women as possible. So any groups that don't practice patriarchal polygyny are at a sudden and catastrophic disadvantage for not utilizing their men who are still fertile and get outcompeted in a generation.
Thousands of years later we're still unwinding the social ramifications of this.
Sure, but assuming humans are just "naturally" polygynous doesn't explain the actual observed range of human behavior or the Y-chromasome bottleneck I just mentioned.
I'd never even heard of this until today, but from looking it up, it seems speculated this happened nearer to the dawn of civilization, like 5000-7000 BCE at worst, nowhere near 12000 BCE.
How would some sperm be resistant to radiation? Like what is the physical difference in that sperm that resists radiation? Your entire supposition rests on this being possible.
Are there any cultural artifacts from these types of events? You'd think there would be stories of sky gods causing all kinds of mischief in areas where they are unaccustomed to aurora.
If this is C14 then this requires biological matter. Carbon dating depends on C14 so I’d assume that this needs to be tied to a chain of tree ring dates going back to tie these events down.
There’s no doubt evidence of stronger events further back, it would be interesting to see if theirs a loose record of suggested intensities for those.
I take it most of these details will be in the happy which I’ll need to study.
Around this time we know there was a rise in human migration and settlement across Europe in particular. A human Y-chromosone haplogroup associated with the Near East shows up in Italy, and Western Hunter Gatherers start to move across Europe replacing the Magdalenian cultures.
I wonder if this event prompted people to think about the World around them differently in any way.
If I notice an unusual and not predicted weather change I usually check for space weather news to see what’s the sun up to. Afaik no weather model can include solar flares reasonably which can temporarily change the weather on earth abruptly.
It's a Fibonacci sequence number of decades though
Just think: number of earth revolutions between this event and now minus the number of earth revolutions since Jesus Christ divided by number of fingers and thumbs on a human written out in base (number of fingers and thumbs on a human) is a sequence where each digit is the sum of the previous two digits.
For your specific case: maybe 1 in 10000. Or 1 in 5000 because "11230" would fit just as well.
So about 13 bits of improbability.
But your hypothesis took a lot more than 13 bits to encode! It would be better compressed to say "Just think: 12350. What are the chances?"
That an elaborate explanation can be found to fit a number is not that surprising when you consider how many possible elaborate explanations there are.
An international research team has identified the most extreme solar particle storm ever recorded, occurring approximately 14,300 years ago in 12350 BC.
wow that's cool. Given that the 12350 BC event was over 500 times more intense than the 2005 solar storm, what are the possible consequences if a storm of similar magnitude were to occur today?
Holy shit, is this the squatting man? (strangely similar stick figure cave drawings dating to the same timeframe all over the world, and reproduced apparently with high energy plasma experiment).
More fuel for the Fermi paradox. Our sun is a fairly calm well behaved star. Many stars, even if they allow life, might make anything using electricity very problematic.
Of course ours will eventually if we don’t prepare. Seems like this type of event would also doom any space settlements if it hit one.
Makes me wonder if going to the outer solar system further from the sun would be better than Mars.
The outer solar system is a pretty inhospitable place due to cold, darkness and cosmic rays. You'd need a lot of nuclear power plants to survive there, and it must be the most depressing existence living below ground.
> The findings revise our understanding of solar physics and space weather extremes. "This event establishes a new worst-case scenario," Golubenko notes. "Understanding its scale is critical for evaluating the risks posed by future solar storms to modern infrastructure like satellites, power grids, and communication systems."
…then proceeds to not explain anything about what that new, data-supported worst case scenario is.
The whole article is light on quantitative data, it’s a shame.
The story is about scientists establishing that over 10,000 years ago, there was a spike in carbon-14 production that's higher than anything previous recorded. Figuring this out was already complicated enough (see actual study below), but going from that into modelling what kind of flare could have produced this is a whole new level of speculation.
(pdf) https://oulurepo.oulu.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/55447/nbnfio...
This would not have been kind to any RF/EMF systems, be they GEO, LEO or terrestrial.
We'd have been walking around marvelling at st elmo's fire coming off any point-contact junction between metal or exposed metal structure, with the most fantastic skies at night.
On the other hand, would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover.
Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...
Damn, you took me from “hope that doesn’t happen again in my lifetime” to “oh Jesus please let that happen tomorrow” in just a few words.
I spent my whole life only breathing through half a nostril on a good day. About 10 years ago I got surgery and Sublingual Immunotherapy drops, and the results have been life changing.
I sleep better, my mind is clearer, I feel like an entirely new person. I am not exaggerating when I say that I still occasionally think about how nice it is to be able to breathe clearly.
19 replies →
How would this effect computers and everyday electrical devices? If we detected something like this heading towards us would we have to turn everything off for the day/week? That's just not possible though is it, can't just turn off nuclear power plants for the day.
There won't be any effect.
Solar flares do NOT affect the devices on the ground. All the fast-moving charged particles are completely absorbed in the upper atmosphere. And to give you some perspective, the most energetic flares can produce 10^-3 W/m^2 flux at the Earth's orbit.
The flares do affect the geomagnetic field. And a changing magnetic field induces current, but it becomes non-negligible only for very long conductors. So long-distance power transmission lines might suddenly become biased with a persistent DC voltage, and some long optical cables might start experiencing over/undervoltage problems with amplifiers.
But locally? You won't see anything unusual.
16 replies →
>Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...
Not exactly both though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle
You're overestimating the effects. They would have been imperceptible on the ground, except for the stunning aurorae.
> would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover
How do solar flares render pollen groundborne?
How did research on the solar event find a layer deposited in what is undoubtedly surface not upper atmosphere?
1 reply →
I feel like primitive man had no problems breathing through both nostrils anyway.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/allergies-are-common...
The ones that had - died as small kids.
I recall reading about some link between respiratory effectiveness and human development.
No idea how valid that research might have been. In retrospect, it almost borders on phrenology.
Aren’t smaller microprocessor die sizes more vulnerable to this? Should we be building integrated circuits with larger feature sizes now that we have power and performance figured out?
Nature's way of saying sorry for the EMP apocalypse
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Is this not one of the Miyake Events[1]? This particular one was reported in 2023 [2].
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event
[2]. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02624...
The article notes it is. The article seems to focus on the new discovery of just how strong the particular event seems to have been compared to the others, not the initial discovery of the event itself.
Doesn't that roughly coincide with the Younger Dryas?
This was my first thought. It seems this solar event happened over 1000 years before Younger Dryas
Yes, such a fun topic…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
a topic infected by bullshit
1 reply →
better make a podcast episode about it, maybe a netflix series /s
I hope it doesn't take so long to happen again that we have nobody around who remembers how to fix what it breaks. If so it'll be back to the stone ages for humanity.
We will ask ChatGPT!
You think that the farther in the future you go, the less likely it is that any existing population will know how to fix what breaks? That strikes me as oddly pessimistic, and frankly unlikely.
I wouldn't be so sure, it's wildly common. Reverse engineering products to figure out how to make them again is its own sub-industry in every manufacturing field, especially anything tool & die.
There's an enormous chasm between when companies started mass producing things and the digitization of blueprints. More often than not it isn't even the original company, it's one of their customer's customers 50+ years after they went out of business.
Im more convinced we are heading that way every year. Certainly not anytime soon, but 100, 200, 1000 years from now? Seems plausible to me. Most people don't even know how their house electricity system is setup or works, or how their plumbing system works despite being incredibly simple, not to mention more advanced technologies. We are surrounded by internal combustion engines and yet less and less people actually understand them each day and it becomes more and more specialized knowledge. How many people know how a refrigerator works despite being incredibly simple technology and the basics necessary to understand it covered by atleast freshman highschool science class if not earlier?
We have built a disposable society so people most people never have to learn how anything works. They press a switch or button and it doesn't work? Throw it away and buy a new mass-produced model. And as time goes on we only need less and less people to understand a technology to mass produce it and sell it.
4 replies →
It's not that I think that future generations are dumb or anything like that, it's just that the longer an assumption is held, the less likely people are to be prepared for it being invalidated.
Many of the people who designed our electrical infrastructure are still alive. Far fewer are needed to keep it running. If we must rethink our priors, I'd rather have both groups in the room while we do it.
With the state of how the ai agents stuff already is, if you don't think that most tech jobs will be automated away in our lifetime, I don't what to tell you.
Within 10-15 years, AI research automates itself and no one ever has a software engineering job ever again.
I think sometimes of how crazy it would be if we could send GPT 4.5 in the past somehow, what effect that could have, just a magical almost all knowing being from the future
5 replies →
Well big tech wants to replace all the white collar jobs with their bullshit ChatGPT wrappers, so it wouldn't be surprising if actual skill vanishes.
4 replies →
Yea billions of dead people. What a thing to hope for.
I didn't read the comment in that way, but rather that it's better to kill electronics while we still have people alive who know how to build back better rather than that it strikes us in a situation where robots make everything from food to food-making robots
7 replies →
New as in research from 2023?
https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S02624079230189...
Isn't it amazing that we have an in-silico model that goes back thousands of years and can even tell us about atmospheric conditions 12,000+ years ago? We can confirm this via miyake events which are registered as growth in the tree rings. One just cuts down 13,000 year old trees to confirm the model, and we're good!
Surely one could just make due with a core sample.
The article casually mentions a "notorious" 775 AD event which I'd never heard about (insert relevant XKCD here), so here's Wikipedia:
The event of 774 had no significant consequences for life on Earth, but had it happened in modern times, it might have produced catastrophic damage to modern technology, particularly to communication and space-borne navigation systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774%E2%80%93775_carbon-14_spik...
Interestingly, the identification of the cause of the 775 AD event with a huge solar flare came from the same researchers as this story.
Not a single telegraph wire was operational, in the wake of the 775 AD event.
Good lord, you're right! Not even one functional iphone has been found from the period either!
2 replies →
Chances are that people died of other causes before any cancer could metastasize.
Baseless wild speculation time: I don't think the timing quite matches up, but the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck is a little close to this.
What if radiation from the sun actually sterilized something like 90% of neolithic men? Is that possible?
This creates a selection pressure for men whose sperm just happens to be resistent to the sun's radiation to get with as many women as possible. So any groups that don't practice patriarchal polygyny are at a sudden and catastrophic disadvantage for not utilizing their men who are still fertile and get outcompeted in a generation.
Thousands of years later we're still unwinding the social ramifications of this.
How could that worldwide event affect just humans and not any of our close relatives?
Most other primate species, indeed most other mammalian species, polygyny is the norm
Sure, but assuming humans are just "naturally" polygynous doesn't explain the actual observed range of human behavior or the Y-chromasome bottleneck I just mentioned.
I'd never even heard of this until today, but from looking it up, it seems speculated this happened nearer to the dawn of civilization, like 5000-7000 BCE at worst, nowhere near 12000 BCE.
How would some sperm be resistant to radiation? Like what is the physical difference in that sperm that resists radiation? Your entire supposition rests on this being possible.
Being inside a cave or underwater maybe.
2 replies →
Are there any cultural artifacts from these types of events? You'd think there would be stories of sky gods causing all kinds of mischief in areas where they are unaccustomed to aurora.
I’m curious what humans at the time would have felt, if anything.
Looking up the 775 solar storm, it appears mostly to have been experienced as northern lights coming much further south than normally experienced.
a less extreme version of radiation poisoning?
If this is C14 then this requires biological matter. Carbon dating depends on C14 so I’d assume that this needs to be tied to a chain of tree ring dates going back to tie these events down.
There’s no doubt evidence of stronger events further back, it would be interesting to see if theirs a loose record of suggested intensities for those.
I take it most of these details will be in the happy which I’ll need to study.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11123
Around this time we know there was a rise in human migration and settlement across Europe in particular. A human Y-chromosone haplogroup associated with the Near East shows up in Italy, and Western Hunter Gatherers start to move across Europe replacing the Magdalenian cultures.
I wonder if this event prompted people to think about the World around them differently in any way.
> This event establishes a new worst-case scenario
This person’s definition of “worst-case scenario” is much different than mine.
We don’t know with certainty what the universe will throw at us.
We just do the very best we sensibly can.
Why should we assume that the worst thing that could happen to us happened within the past 20K years?
I honestly don't understand what you're trying to say, even from a semantic standpoint.
I think they're quibbling with the fact that this isn't technically the worst case scenario, but merely the worst known, historical case.
If I notice an unusual and not predicted weather change I usually check for space weather news to see what’s the sun up to. Afaik no weather model can include solar flares reasonably which can temporarily change the weather on earth abruptly.
Just 5 years away from being 12345
It's a Fibonacci sequence number of decades though
Just think: number of earth revolutions between this event and now minus the number of earth revolutions since Jesus Christ divided by number of fingers and thumbs on a human written out in base (number of fingers and thumbs on a human) is a sequence where each digit is the sum of the previous two digits.
What are the chances?
For your specific case: maybe 1 in 10000. Or 1 in 5000 because "11230" would fit just as well.
So about 13 bits of improbability.
But your hypothesis took a lot more than 13 bits to encode! It would be better compressed to say "Just think: 12350. What are the chances?"
That an elaborate explanation can be found to fit a number is not that surprising when you consider how many possible elaborate explanations there are.
See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-ga...
That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
Same as my bank pin too!
1 reply →
this made me laugh
I don't know why you're being downvoted for quoting Spaceballs.
3 replies →
So we can look forward to radiocarbon spikes in the weather forecast.
"New SOCOL:14C-Ex model reveals that the Late-Glacial radiocarbon spike in 12350 BC was caused by the record-strong extreme solar storm".
Were they able to measure the -nT value for this storm?
That would be interesting to know, I was at the May 11th 2024 event taking photos. It was probably the strongest in the last 30 years.
An international research team has identified the most extreme solar particle storm ever recorded, occurring approximately 14,300 years ago in 12350 BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event
wow that's cool. Given that the 12350 BC event was over 500 times more intense than the 2005 solar storm, what are the possible consequences if a storm of similar magnitude were to occur today?
Holy shit, is this the squatting man? (strangely similar stick figure cave drawings dating to the same timeframe all over the world, and reproduced apparently with high energy plasma experiment).
https://medium.com/@rajkumarrr/history-mystery-the-squatting...
https://www.robertschoch.com/sida.html
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More fuel for the Fermi paradox. Our sun is a fairly calm well behaved star. Many stars, even if they allow life, might make anything using electricity very problematic.
Of course ours will eventually if we don’t prepare. Seems like this type of event would also doom any space settlements if it hit one.
Makes me wonder if going to the outer solar system further from the sun would be better than Mars.
The outer solar system is a pretty inhospitable place due to cold, darkness and cosmic rays. You'd need a lot of nuclear power plants to survive there, and it must be the most depressing existence living below ground.
> The findings revise our understanding of solar physics and space weather extremes. "This event establishes a new worst-case scenario," Golubenko notes. "Understanding its scale is critical for evaluating the risks posed by future solar storms to modern infrastructure like satellites, power grids, and communication systems."
…then proceeds to not explain anything about what that new, data-supported worst case scenario is.
The whole article is light on quantitative data, it’s a shame.
The story is about scientists establishing that over 10,000 years ago, there was a spike in carbon-14 production that's higher than anything previous recorded. Figuring this out was already complicated enough (see actual study below), but going from that into modelling what kind of flare could have produced this is a whole new level of speculation.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X2...