Luckily I’ve found a new disaster that could befall us.
The image above, courtesy of NASA, is something called the heliosphere. The circles in the middle are the orbits of the planets of the solar system. According to Wiki the solar wind travels out from the sun at over a million kilometres per hour for the first ten billion kilometres. This forms a safe little egg that keeps us safe from all sorts of interstellar nasties like cosmic rays and dust.
But now according to the New Scientist scientists from the University of Arizona and University of Texas have found that between one and 10 times every billion years the earth is exposed to interstellar assault when the solar system meets particularly dense interstellar gas and dust clouds. Then the heliosphere can shrink exposing the earth.
Such an assault may not be terminal but the “cosmic rays would damage the ozone layer, and interstellar dust could dim sunlight and trigger an ice age”.
Nasty.
In case you missed them, other disaster posts:
Planets spinning out of control
How the biggest bang in 2 million years nearly did us in
I’m so glad that you’re here to petrify us, Brian! Gaaaah!
Happy to be of service, Davey.
We must declare interstellar dust an WMD, send out inspectors, and pre-emptively declare war on the galaxy!
While you are contemplating these matters, spare a thought for the man (kiwi) who did much of the calculation for solar wind and its interaction with our atmosphere. Sir Ian Axford is, I am told, not at all well and may not be with us much longer. After an unbelievable career he settled down in the last few years to highlight some of the looming disasters facing our climate. He is particularly concerned about methane releases from the Russian steppes. I am, personally, inclined to follow his lead over that of climate deniers any and every day.
The permafrost, surely, BilB, not the steppe? The steppe’s a very fertile, productive bit of country already if I recall my Russian geography.
Thanks Brian again for the existential terror, especially the day after the North Koreans let off some bungers.
Come friendly bombs, etc.
You’ve got to get the governence right ( aka making sure the right people make a motza out of it) mister z: this war on the rest of the galaxy will have to be out-sourced to private security firms.
The timing is good, Dick Cheney Inc , will be looking for opportunities now that, as another thread notes, the US is pulling out of Iraq.
Yep, this sounds like a job for Blackwater ( now rebranded Xe, – the force that cannot have it’s name name uttered, if you can’t say it you can’t refer to it in testimony?) and Haliburton. Just change the tender and contract letterheads from ‘Project for a New American Century’ to a kinder-sounding, more upbeat ‘Project for a New Human Century’ and Robert’s Your Parental Male Sibling, Inc.
Oh Beauty,
Another opportunity to introduce a tax that will save the earth!!
Death from the skies!
And so the left launches its bid for a heliosphere tax, oblivious to the fact that cosmic rays have actually been getting WEAKER since 1998.
You’re being a bit pedantic, Liam. Should I have said Permafrost and Tundra Steppes?
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009GeoRL..3602502Z
Steppes just the same.
What I was trying to do was highlight the work of a quietly famous scientist who draws enormous respect from scientific community. He has published a book I believe on the dire risk to the atmosphere as the permafrost steppes convert to temperate steppes.
The calm before the storm, Ken @ 9, the calm before the storm. Just wait a few hundred million years and see how we fare!
Got anymore more this comes from Brian? I love these disaster stories.
The destructive cosmic rays in the diagram are coming from TEH LEFT.
Coincidence?
You decide.
Well-spotted Katz!
Fine, I despair when I can’t find any, so I’ll keep looking.
Will the excess CO2 and other Greenhouse gases destroy the heliosphere?
ta, I think on this one the sceptics/deniers/delusionists are right. The sun trumps the puny efforts of humans.
Are there any mass extinctions on Earth reliably correlated with past events?
If not, I’m not going to get to worried.
I’d thought about that Martin B, but didn’t want to spoil a good story. But when did we crawl out of the sea? Roughly about a half a billion years ago? And there was a ’snowball’ earth event from memory about 700 million years ago. Maybe a failing heliosphere was a factor.
But you think they’d have done some sort of a reality check. But then weather forecasters don’t always look out the window before issuing the forecast.
I have a technophope friend who’s not on-line. Probably because she thinks I’ll send her stuff like this.
Back to the quill, and the days when the earth was flat and was circled by the sun, I say. Things were so much simpler then.
Scanning the paper, they don’t seem to be that interested in empirical checking. In fact they don’t seem that interested in Earth at all – the focus is on planets around M type stars.
The uncertainty in the model is considerable, the uncertainty in the ISM observations is considerable. A single order of magnitude uncertainty on the result seems optimistic to me (although I stress I haven’t checked the paper throughly and am not sure I even could any more
But in any case if the ‘true’ frequency was at the lower end, it still isn’t much to worry about (we’ll have much bigger problems in +1Gyr) and if it is at the higher end, there should be some evidence for its impact if that impact is large (and conversely is probabl;y not much aof a concern if there is no such evidence).
Ian Banks covered something like this in [i]Feersum Enjin[/i] as I recall.
For me the real nasty is gamma ray burst from a supernova. For humans to survive they would need to be distributed across hundreds of light years. Not likely.
Oh great, now people know I hang out on forums which use bbcode.
I can’t remember if this was mentioned on any of the previous disaster threads, but a fair collection of world ending scenarios can be found at:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm
“Luckily I’ve found a new disaster that could befall us.”
Well, thank heavens for that, Brian. My recent bovine serenity was starting to get on my nerves…..
I have taken to reading Brian’s posts with the aid of a crash helmet and blankie close by.
What is it with teh Left and disaster porn?
Brian, you need a new hobby – all this gloom can’t be good for you.
You may be more right than you know.
Speaking of cosmic rays, there might be some good news. The magnificently named Jasper Kirkby, a particle physicist at CERN, has posited in the past that cosmic rays, via their effect on cloud formation, may be the dominant “natural” forcing of climate change, not humanity’s wickedness with GHGs, and he’s going to test the physics of it at CERN in coming years. If the hypothesis holds, you could stop worrying about yourself about Teh Looming Global Warming Catastrophe and focus on other Harbingers of Imminent Doom.
Kirkby’s excellent presentation in June [very long, but also very informative and objective, IMO]
I’m now waiting for Malcolm Turnbull’s denunciation of the Rudd government for failing to put into place measures to protect Australians from this menace.
This apparently follows on from a vigorous party room debate, with Tony Abbott loudly proclaiming he’d grown up being bombarded with cosmic rays and it hadn’t done him any harm.
Brian, I recommend taking long walks in the country on a sunny day, or spending the occasional half an hour watching a kitten play with a ball of wool.
Mercurius, I read Brian’s articles with a grin, waving a cowboy hat, sat backwards on my office chair like Major Kong on his bomb. Woooohoooo! Man, you all make out like gloom and the inevitable certainty of our own catastrophic destruction’s a bad thing.
The surprise first strike seems to have been ineffective, let’s follow it up by getting the whole of SAC in behind: John Dolan’s Case For Nuclear Winter.
I’m SOOO happy about this little ray of cosmic badness, thankyou brian!
Look Mr Liam, I’m somewhat concerned about that Evony girl. It’s all very well to be a “nihilist”, it’s quite another to be in raptures and spilling out of one’s blouse.
Don’t knock it ’til you try it.
Speaking of ebony girls*, stop: Sade time.
Just remember, kids: we’re here for a good time, not a long time.
* kinda
Oh great, thanks Terwilleger.
Now I must change my briefs.
Presented without further comment.
Thanks to Anna who performed divine intervention and restored my post, presumably I can post again…
Frankly I love the classic association by Mercurius of the Left with disaster, oh the evilness of the left! Let’s burn the witches while we’re at it. You could cling to some right wing notion that human law and order will rise to its rightful position as lord of the universe provided enough money can be found to pay for the expansion but only a denialist luxuriating in a lifetime of material success could honestly believe that this version of humanity has got long term prospects.
In the meantime, I am indebted to Koopa Troopa and Liam for sustaining my left wing fascination for doom and gloom.
Interesting comments. I guess what attracted me to this story was not the possibility of disaster so much as the notion that the sun provided this safe little haven within which our habitat is an extremely small Goldilocks place with conditions just right for life, but our little hutch was not even a pin prick in the essentially hostile vast beyond.
So I sought out an image that best conveyed the hidy-hole nature of our place. I didn’t much like the New Scientist image, the one from Wiki was too clinical, as was this one. Please note they all have the bad stuff coming from the left.
This one from Wiki has it’s own fascination – the largest structure in the solar system.
If most stars rotate and generate magnetic field, and most have planetary systems; then this picture is repeated approx 10^10 times in many millions of galaxies.
Billions of billions of tiny pin-pricks.
Shining brightly in the night sky – enchanting.
Luckily I’ve found a new disaster that could befall us.
.
Yes lucky!@ Whew! That was close. Thought I’d be able to sleep all the way thru the night.