NASA's Van Allen Probes Spot Man-Made Barrier Shrouding Earth | Hacker News Reader

NASA's Van Allen Probes Spot Man-Made Barrier Shrouding Earth

nasa.gov

52 pointscolanderman16 comments

>With further study, VLF transmissions may serve as a way to remove excess radiation from the near-Earth environment. Plans are already underway to test VLF transmissions in the upper atmosphere to see if they could remove excess charged particles — which can appear during periods of intense space weather, such as when the sun erupts with giant clouds of particles and energy.

The ability to deflect solar storms would indeed be quite helpful!

I read that particles in the radiation belts have been observed with large concentrations in the in keV range, peaking into MeV range. Impacting particles from the sun can be orders of magnitude higher. https://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wenpart1.html

I thought this looked familiar..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14366819

I wonder if this phenomenon could be used on Mars to make it safer to colonize. Or on ships going there.

was just thinking this. it's one of the bigger problems facing any potential mars colony.

Ironic that this system was built and is used for communicating with systems capable of creating radiation belts.

https://fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/verdin.htm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_radiation...

> "remove excess radiation from the near-Earth environment"

I feel like I'm hideously misunderstanding this, but could this be used to help slow down global warming?

Not in any appreciable way.

Only in the most indirect way.

By clearing out the Van Allen belts, I suppose you could reduce the need for radiation shielding of satellites and spacecraft that need to operate in them and cross them. Less shielding would equate to lower weight spacecraft which require less energy to be flung into space.

But then you'd probably get some atmospheric warming from the RF energy, so it might all be a wash. I certainly can only speculate, but I think the short answer is 'no'.

The transmission facilities that broadcast VLF to submarines do so in the 100-1000 KW range, with the facilities' actual power consumption likely being at least 150% that value. On the assumption most of this power is derived from fossil sources, such facilities may still retain a carbon footprint.

Though accurate to the title, the post name is misleading (in my opinion). Possibly useful would be revising to refer to VLF?

I will admit some disappointment that this article is not, in fact, about ancient astronauts, monoliths, Martian pyramids, or any such thing.

So aliens really didn't use the Egyptian pyramids as landing pads to take unwilling humans as hosts by acting as their Gods?

The article takes no position on that question.

...It was a Stargate joke.

I’d be curious if this effect could be how the emdrive is achieving its thrust?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com