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.
Flonase (fluticasone) has been a life changer. I have taken for granted how valuable breathing is in terms of speech, let alone sleep and general fatigue.
I have had bad allergies for a lot of my life. I probably have some sort of histamine intolerance behind it all.
Recently my allergist gave me a tip with regard to nasal congestion. First, you can use Flonase and Astepro together, apparently they work better when used together. Astepro has an antihistamine in it that can help. Second, moisturize the interior of your nasal passages with a drop of muciprocin in each nostril applied inside your nose at the tip of it, then squeeze your nose gently to distribute. This lets you use get the benefits of Flonase without drying out your nose (which can trigger congestion).
Same for me. I spent the first 45 years of my life breathing almost entirely though my mouth. Then I tried some nasal spray that was great, but made the situation worse when I inevitably overused it, so I went to a doctor. I had been told when I was a kid that I had polyps, so I went to see about getting them removed. She put me on Flonase, which at the time was prescription, and since then I've been able to breathe through my nose unless I'm sick. It has been a significant quality of life improvement for me.
Moving to the coast made me feel like I finally woke up, after growing up perpetually stuffy and sniffly. Turns out I'm not a mouth breather after all!
Just moving away from what your body decided to be allergic to when you were a kid with a bored immune system seems to help a lot, I moved from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast and my allergies receded a lot. I eventually moved back to where I grew up and they didn't really return except on days when the whole city's collective nose is running because all the trees are having an orgy up in there.
I’ve taken it for over 30 years now. It has indeed been a lifesaver and so much better than all the pills. One side effect is blurred vision and I have definitely noticed a slight blurring in the last couple of years. I gladly accept it as a small price to pay for decades of relief.
I feel like this is a trade-off not always understood and accepted in modern times; we expect our medicines to be perfect and our bodies to be restored to new condition, and when this isn't the case we feel betrayed.
I tried nose strips but I don't like disposables. I now use silicone nostril openers - two little tubes attached at the base that you stick up your nose. It came as a set of 4 sizes so a bit of waste there, but one size fit me and one size fit my wife.
These work well, but I wonder about hygiene. I keep mine in a glass dish on my desktop and attempt to cleanse them in hydrogen peroxide on occasion.
Ultimately, surgery is the best option in my experienced opinion, but it also has diminishing returns over time (~20 years in my case). This occurred recently for me, and I am looking to consult with an ENT again, when I feel like taking the recovery leap. With that said, I am still functioning extremely better than I ever did when I couldn't breathe 20 years ago.
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?
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.
Solar flares consist of protons and electrons, that are pretty slow-moving by nuclear standards. So they get absorbed by the atmosphere completely.
What solar flares do, they deform the Earth's magnetic field so that more cosmic rays (from outside the Solar System) can reach the surface. But the cosmic ray flux is not that high to begin with. And electronic devices certainly won't self-destruct if the radiation is slightly higher than normal.
After all, you experience far more cosmic ray radiation when you're flying on an airplane than during one of these events!
> They won't affect your phone or laptop, but transformers along the longer ranges of the grid are unprotected.
They actually are. Protection against lightning strikes and atmospheric electricity is a part of the design for the high-voltage lines.
CMEs might cause enough additional load on the lines to cause them to trip if they are close to failure already, and this is well-recognized and can be mitigated by load-shedding early.
The panic about these is way out of proportion with the real risks. Modern systems have all sorts of over-voltage protection, and we no longer use "telegraph wires" directly connected to vulnerable electronics like speakers and amplifiers.
All modern telecommunications are over fibre or radio links.
How much do wire distance, intended voltage matter? All the power electronics are almost certainly protected by caps, but are big office ethernet runs long enough to cause issues? What about coax cables? It seems like with how many more cables we have now, that one of them probably has a design that would cause notable inconvenience.
Geomagnetically induced currents generally become a problem over hundreds of kilometers. Long range electricity transmission lines are the main worry I believe and solar storm events have knocked off large grids occasionally.
I have no idea what the correlation is between particle flux (the metric reported here) and actual geomagnetic variation which induces the current (varying magnetic field causes voltage). Basically the charged particles zoom past earth, then loop back from the magnetotail towards the poles. The magnetohydrodynamics cause effects large enough to modulate the magnetic field on earths surface.
”We have this long conducting loop” is the issue. The Earth is one component of the loop.
You need at least hundreds of kilometers for the effects to become significant (as in "tens of volts"). Nothing on the small scale will be affected.
Power lines might be the most vulnerable part, actually. The geomagnetic field can induce current that will bias the core of transformers, causing them to overheat. This can lead to blackouts if the networks are close to capacity, and it's suspected that the 2003 North East Blackout was at least partially caused by them.
Essentially, components that kick in when a voltage exceeds a certain limit to allow that excess voltage to shunt to ground instead of continue to build up in the circuit.
Similar devices in pneumatics or hydraulics are pressure relief valves [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_valve], and they provide similar functionality - giving a easier/lower resistance path for the high voltage/pressure, so delicate things downstream don’t fail.
> 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 did research on the solar event find a layer deposited in what is undoubtedly surface not upper atmosphere?
FTFA: "Solar particle storms can greatly enhance the normal production of cosmogenic isotopes like radiocarbon (14C) in the atmosphere by galactic cosmic rays. Such enhanced production, preserved in annual tree rings, serves as a clear cosmic timestamp making possible absolute dating of tree samples."
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.
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 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.
I assume you mean that some humans happened to be in a protected place during a critical period... rather than some weird practice of (effective!) delayed artificial insemination using miraculous pottery.
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.
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.
What a strange attitude. It certainly is not anyone else's job to maintain the home I own and live in. That is my job. If something breaks, I don't get to tell someone else that they have not done their job. I am responsible for fixing it. Yes, I can delegate a specific fix to a professional electrician or plumber, but that is a project-by-project choice.
If people want to approach life by hiring out every little thing, they can certainly do so, but those choices do not make my home maintenance someone else's job.
Yeah, but he is extrapolating something going from common knowledge to specialist knowledge as a step towards it being something that nobody knows, and that's just not what it is at all.
Isn't that a bit pessimistic? Assuming machine natural language understanding and general reasoning improves dramatically (which seems possible, based on recent history), it is likely that (given that we still have the data) at some point in the future anyone will have the ability to acquire these skills, or that machine agents will be skilled enough to guide human or other types of agents to do things.
The post is about solar events, good luck getting machine agents working in case this happens...
It is pessimistic yes, but what in recent history did happen to not have a pessimistic outlook on things?
As far as I am aware, the vast majority of electrical components will still function during an extreme solar particle event. The major risk is to electrical distribution, but, as you are surely aware, there are other ways to access electricity off grid.
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 feel like you're coming from a place where GPTs value lies only in coding. I use it for planning all the time, saving me hours per week.
For example, the security team gave me a list of 100s of policies that need to be implemented. I was able to dump that list in and get a rollout plan over the next two months in a matter of minutes. This would easily have taken me half a day before GPT.
Computing power requirements and the fact that my subjective appraisal of the performance of these LLMs doesn't match the insane scaling curves that AI companies put out showing that their capabilities double every 6 months. Even if a 100x increase in computing power could equal a software engineer (and that's far from certain), that would be more expensive than a software engineer.
But really the burden of proof is on you here since you are making extraordinary claims of AI superintelligence replacing all jobs in 10-15 years. You are making the trillion pound baby argument, so you need to back it up.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
(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.
I was recently on cortisone for 3 months due to another condition and whoa I didn't remember how cool life was without a perpetual running nose.
Flonase (fluticasone) has been a life changer. I have taken for granted how valuable breathing is in terms of speech, let alone sleep and general fatigue.
I have had bad allergies for a lot of my life. I probably have some sort of histamine intolerance behind it all.
Recently my allergist gave me a tip with regard to nasal congestion. First, you can use Flonase and Astepro together, apparently they work better when used together. Astepro has an antihistamine in it that can help. Second, moisturize the interior of your nasal passages with a drop of muciprocin in each nostril applied inside your nose at the tip of it, then squeeze your nose gently to distribute. This lets you use get the benefits of Flonase without drying out your nose (which can trigger congestion).
Same for me. I spent the first 45 years of my life breathing almost entirely though my mouth. Then I tried some nasal spray that was great, but made the situation worse when I inevitably overused it, so I went to a doctor. I had been told when I was a kid that I had polyps, so I went to see about getting them removed. She put me on Flonase, which at the time was prescription, and since then I've been able to breathe through my nose unless I'm sick. It has been a significant quality of life improvement for me.
[dead]
Moving to the coast made me feel like I finally woke up, after growing up perpetually stuffy and sniffly. Turns out I'm not a mouth breather after all!
Yep - moving away from the coast basically did the opposite for me. :(
Just moving away from what your body decided to be allergic to when you were a kid with a bored immune system seems to help a lot, I moved from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast and my allergies receded a lot. I eventually moved back to where I grew up and they didn't really return except on days when the whole city's collective nose is running because all the trees are having an orgy up in there.
I’ve taken it for over 30 years now. It has indeed been a lifesaver and so much better than all the pills. One side effect is blurred vision and I have definitely noticed a slight blurring in the last couple of years. I gladly accept it as a small price to pay for decades of relief.
I feel like this is a trade-off not always understood and accepted in modern times; we expect our medicines to be perfect and our bodies to be restored to new condition, and when this isn't the case we feel betrayed.
Oxygen is a hell of a drug.
I use nose strips, and I'm addicted now too.
I tried nose strips but I don't like disposables. I now use silicone nostril openers - two little tubes attached at the base that you stick up your nose. It came as a set of 4 sizes so a bit of waste there, but one size fit me and one size fit my wife.
These work well, but I wonder about hygiene. I keep mine in a glass dish on my desktop and attempt to cleanse them in hydrogen peroxide on occasion.
Ultimately, surgery is the best option in my experienced opinion, but it also has diminishing returns over time (~20 years in my case). This occurred recently for me, and I am looking to consult with an ENT again, when I feel like taking the recovery leap. With that said, I am still functioning extremely better than I ever did when I couldn't breathe 20 years ago.
If it's silicone, just put it in boiling water sometimes, as you would a menstrual cup.
Silicones are common in cooking utensils and used at temperatures way beyond what you'd need for your hygiene purpose.
I would love to know where you got them from!
You can find them under the search phrase: "nasal dilator".
What specific surgery and what specific drops?
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?
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.
> But locally? You won't see anything unusual.
Not necessarily?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset
Some Miyake events are also thought have lasted a year or longer. I think there could be a very bad time if an event like this lasted a year?
Solar flares consist of protons and electrons, that are pretty slow-moving by nuclear standards. So they get absorbed by the atmosphere completely.
What solar flares do, they deform the Earth's magnetic field so that more cosmic rays (from outside the Solar System) can reach the surface. But the cosmic ray flux is not that high to begin with. And electronic devices certainly won't self-destruct if the radiation is slightly higher than normal.
After all, you experience far more cosmic ray radiation when you're flying on an airplane than during one of these events!
Right, but there are still risks (aside from SEUs) that one would "experience locally"?
https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the...
They won't affect your phone or laptop, but transformers along the longer ranges of the grid are unprotected.
An X-class flare won't do anything. But in the size of the article? Localised temporary blackouts would be entirely unsurprising.
> They won't affect your phone or laptop, but transformers along the longer ranges of the grid are unprotected.
They actually are. Protection against lightning strikes and atmospheric electricity is a part of the design for the high-voltage lines.
CMEs might cause enough additional load on the lines to cause them to trip if they are close to failure already, and this is well-recognized and can be mitigated by load-shedding early.
Well there you go then, a little dull but probably for the best.
The panic about these is way out of proportion with the real risks. Modern systems have all sorts of over-voltage protection, and we no longer use "telegraph wires" directly connected to vulnerable electronics like speakers and amplifiers.
All modern telecommunications are over fibre or radio links.
How much do wire distance, intended voltage matter? All the power electronics are almost certainly protected by caps, but are big office ethernet runs long enough to cause issues? What about coax cables? It seems like with how many more cables we have now, that one of them probably has a design that would cause notable inconvenience.
Geomagnetically induced currents generally become a problem over hundreds of kilometers. Long range electricity transmission lines are the main worry I believe and solar storm events have knocked off large grids occasionally.
I have no idea what the correlation is between particle flux (the metric reported here) and actual geomagnetic variation which induces the current (varying magnetic field causes voltage). Basically the charged particles zoom past earth, then loop back from the magnetotail towards the poles. The magnetohydrodynamics cause effects large enough to modulate the magnetic field on earths surface.
”We have this long conducting loop” is the issue. The Earth is one component of the loop.
You need at least hundreds of kilometers for the effects to become significant (as in "tens of volts"). Nothing on the small scale will be affected.
Power lines might be the most vulnerable part, actually. The geomagnetic field can induce current that will bias the core of transformers, causing them to overheat. This can lead to blackouts if the networks are close to capacity, and it's suspected that the 2003 North East Blackout was at least partially caused by them.
Over voltage protection is not provided by caps (generally), but MOV’s, Zenier Diodes, spark gaps, etc. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surge_protector].
Essentially, components that kick in when a voltage exceeds a certain limit to allow that excess voltage to shunt to ground instead of continue to build up in the circuit.
Similar devices in pneumatics or hydraulics are pressure relief valves [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_valve], and they provide similar functionality - giving a easier/lower resistance path for the high voltage/pressure, so delicate things downstream don’t fail.
What about ground to satellite communication?
That would be radio links. Not many satellites connected to the ground by copper cable.
Yeah, I was asking generally with regard to panic involving "computers and everyday electrical devices", which I thought would be obvious, apologies.
honestly I'd be more worried about the upper atmosphere puffing up and taking out low satellites, like what happened with a starlink launch last year.
There was a blackout in Canada caused by a solar storm in 1989. Has this changed dramatically since then?
> 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?
> How did research on the solar event find a layer deposited in what is undoubtedly surface not upper atmosphere?
FTFA: "Solar particle storms can greatly enhance the normal production of cosmogenic isotopes like radiocarbon (14C) in the atmosphere by galactic cosmic rays. Such enhanced production, preserved in annual tree rings, serves as a clear cosmic timestamp making possible absolute dating of tree samples."
>Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...
Not exactly both though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle
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.
You're overestimating the effects. They would have been imperceptible on the ground, except for the stunning aurorae.
Nature's way of saying sorry for the EMP apocalypse
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.
[dead]
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.
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?
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.
I assume you mean that some humans happened to be in a protected place during a critical period... rather than some weird practice of (effective!) delayed artificial insemination using miraculous pottery.
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.
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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
Why jump right to the impact hypothesis?
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.
Who cares what most people know about plumbing and electrical wiring? It's not most people's job to fix it when it breaks.
What a strange attitude. It certainly is not anyone else's job to maintain the home I own and live in. That is my job. If something breaks, I don't get to tell someone else that they have not done their job. I am responsible for fixing it. Yes, I can delegate a specific fix to a professional electrician or plumber, but that is a project-by-project choice.
If people want to approach life by hiring out every little thing, they can certainly do so, but those choices do not make my home maintenance someone else's job.
I guess his point is
what happens if there's no one left who knows about plumbing and electrical wiring?
but yeah, i dont think that's gonna happen like that
Yeah, but he is extrapolating something going from common knowledge to specialist knowledge as a step towards it being something that nobody knows, and that's just not what it is at all.
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.
Isn't that a bit pessimistic? Assuming machine natural language understanding and general reasoning improves dramatically (which seems possible, based on recent history), it is likely that (given that we still have the data) at some point in the future anyone will have the ability to acquire these skills, or that machine agents will be skilled enough to guide human or other types of agents to do things.
The post is about solar events, good luck getting machine agents working in case this happens... It is pessimistic yes, but what in recent history did happen to not have a pessimistic outlook on things?
As far as I am aware, the vast majority of electrical components will still function during an extreme solar particle event. The major risk is to electrical distribution, but, as you are surely aware, there are other ways to access electricity off grid.
The only things impacted would be long powerlines, not discrete electronics components, only things that look like very big antennas will have issues.
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 feel like you're coming from a place where GPTs value lies only in coding. I use it for planning all the time, saving me hours per week.
For example, the security team gave me a list of 100s of policies that need to be implemented. I was able to dump that list in and get a rollout plan over the next two months in a matter of minutes. This would easily have taken me half a day before GPT.
My 3 month old son is twice as big as he was when he was born. He's on track to weigh 7.5 trillion pounds by age 10!
do you see meaningful reasons for it to not get there or are you just making a snarky comment
Computing power requirements and the fact that my subjective appraisal of the performance of these LLMs doesn't match the insane scaling curves that AI companies put out showing that their capabilities double every 6 months. Even if a 100x increase in computing power could equal a software engineer (and that's far from certain), that would be more expensive than a software engineer.
But really the burden of proof is on you here since you are making extraordinary claims of AI superintelligence replacing all jobs in 10-15 years. You are making the trillion pound baby argument, so you need to back it up.
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
A guy once wrote a whole book about that. Unfortunately he started randomly killing people.
I don't condone what he did, but...
1. His intention wasn't to destroy in order to build resilience.
2. His targets weren't random.
I'm dense. Who are you two talking about?
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.
New as in research from 2023?
https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S02624079230189...
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 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.
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!
It took so long to get the lights back on that we call it the "Dark" Age
What about Android? Is that also vulnerable?
Chances are that people died of other causes before any cancer could metastasize.
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
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?
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...
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!
Now your balance is 00000!
this made me laugh
I don't know why you're being downvoted for quoting Spaceballs.
Presumably because it's "not the kind of discussion we want to foster here at HN".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event
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".
An international research team has identified the most extreme solar particle storm ever recorded, occurring approximately 14,300 years ago in 12350 BC.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.