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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
7 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.
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> 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?
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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.
>Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...
Not exactly both though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle
Nature's way of saying sorry for the EMP apocalypse
You're overestimating the effects. They would have been imperceptible on the ground, except for the stunning aurorae.
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.
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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.
New as in research from 2023?
https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S02624079230189...
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
3 replies →
Yea billions of dead people. What a thing to hope for.
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
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!
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Chances are that people died of other causes before any cancer could metastasize.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event
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".
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
https://www.robertschoch.com/sida.html
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> 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...