The Worsening Cosmic Ray Situation | Hacker News Reader

The Worsening Cosmic Ray Situation

spaceweatherarchive.com

156 pointsscarhill79 comments

To bring it a little closer to home for HN, there was, at one time, a big controversy with Sun Microsystems and cosmic rays creating memory errors on their servers. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10...

Sun cheaped out and didn't put ECC on the cache of their very expensive UltraSparc servers. I suppose the outrage is pointless now that they are gone, but it was a ridiculous cost cutting measure on a very expensive piece of hardware.

I skimmed through this comment and thought it was a sarcastic disparagement of the Sun at first, not Sun Microsystems. I understood after second read.

Surely not the last time a pointy haired boss got his/her way to the doom of everyone else involved.

I remember how our Sun representatives would go to almost any length to avoid admitting a hardware problem. Instead they tried to blame the problems on cosmic rays or the fact that the servers wasn't running in an environment with a very narrow temperature and air humidity window.

Funny how they wouldn't admit to a hardware problem but still had data that showed that the problems were less likely to surface if the temperature and humidity was X and Y..

IBM did a lot of the early research in my hometown on cosmic ray errors. It essentially said that you were 5x more likely to see single bit errors in Boulder, Colorado than NYC, and ten times more likely in Leadville, Colorado. It was mostly due to the altitude differences, Boulder being approx 1 mile up, and Leadville being two. The latitude also mattered, though: La Paz is even higher, but is further away from the poles, so it was a safer place to put your data without ECC.

https://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/50th/devices/zieg...

I wonder if it'll get bad enough to spur consumer hardware to switch to ECC. I can't believe the price difference is very significant, especially if it starts being produced in even higher volumes.

I used an Athlon in my latest PC build so that I could use ECC. And that was just the kid's gaming computer! I'm a big believer in ECC.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I looked into it, AMD's CPUs support unbuffered ECC RAM, which is really hard to come by and much more expensive than the usual buffered ECC RAM.

True, but it seems unlikely that there's a fundamental reason why unbuffered should have a higher manufacturing cost. It seems to just be an accident of history. Thus, maccam94's point still stands.

Newegg has plenty of unbuffered, ecc ddr4[0].

The cheapest registered 16gb ddr4-2133 module is $192.

The cheapest unbuffered 16gb ddr4-2133 module is $189.

So the price is about the same.

[0] https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N...

[1] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIABYY5227...

[2] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP6WX1...

Yes there are fewer choices, but that would change if more people were buying them. I found mine at Micro Center.

"Correct me if I'm wrong"

Exactly the function of ECC.

I love me an unintentional pun :-)

Tangentially related, taking a Geiger counter on a trans-Atlantic flight is a pretty good time [1]. Some good low-dose radiation data we have comes from flight crews.

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2014-05-17-radiation-on-fligh...

> The problem is, as the authors note in their new paper, the shield is weakening: “Over the last decade, the solar wind has exhibited low densities and magnetic ﬁeld strengths, representing anomalous states that have never been observed during the Space Age. As a result of this remarkably weak solar activity, we have also observed the highest fluxes of cosmic rays.”

Is the increase fully accounted for by weakening solar protection, magnetosphere, and atmosphere?

What are the causes for reduced protection in the latter two?

from TFA, it seems all of the increase is explained by the dud maunder maximum of the past few years. the magnetosphere and atmosphere are unaffected, but more rays are getting through the weakened solar wind. they anticipate a record-setting maunder minimum in 2019-2020 that will intensify the problem

The earth’s magnetic field has fluctuated and reversed throughout geological history. Recently, the field has been decreasing in strength and may be poised for a reversal. It’s bad timing insofar as it coincides with an impending solar minimum.

Magnetic field reversals happen on a completely different timescale than solar minima/maxima. Reversals take a long time to happen: ~1 to 10 ky. Quick on a geological timescale, though.

The most recent one is thought to have occurred more on the timescale of a human lifetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunhes%E2%80%93Matuyama_rever...

Tangential question, but does anyone have any idea why, based on the first graph in the article [1], NASA's allowable radiation limits for women are so much lower than for men?

[1] http://spaceweather.com/images2014/06dec14/missionduration.j...

Birth defects

In vertebrate females, all oogonia mature to oocytes before birth. In males, spermatogonia mature to spermatocytes continuously after puberty. I gather that oocytes and spermatocytes are more sensitive than spermatogonia to radiation damage. Damaged spermatocytes and sperm get replaced after a few weeks. But there's no replacement for damaged oocytes.

So yes, birth defects.

> But there's no replacement for damaged oocytes.

That was the old thinking, but now there's evidence that women can probably generate 'new' eggs:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/07/evidence-sug...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120726180259.h...

Wow, that's amazing. But on the other hand, using a chemotherapy drug to ovulate seems a little iffy.

Women are smaller...

I mean the radiation dose is calculated on an average body volume

I just had the horrific thought of what if some nearby interstellar event zaps all of earth with a deadly blast of fatal radiation killing all life in a matter of days. Is this possible and is there anything in the archaeological record hinting this may have happened?

There're theories that this happened in the past: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070420-exti...

> "The movement [of the Milky Way] is not edge-on like a Frisbee," Melott noted. Instead, he said, it is flat, "like a pie in the face."

Huh, I didn't know that, and now I have a great mental picture to accompany that fact.

For anyone who skimmed and is wondering "How long before another mass extinction, according to this theory?", the answer is in the last sentence (on page 2): we've still got 10 million good years.

Gamma ray bursts can happen at anytime![0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY

I remember learning about this. I wonder if Earth was enveloped in such a burst, if we'd go out quickly, peacefully, like a heart attack in our sleep. Most life wiped out on our planet in an instant. It makes you wonder how many world out there contain the empty structures of civilizations that went out in an instant, with a whisper.

I just hope we can even find a xeno microbe to put another nail in the coffin of organized religion.

It wouldn't be quick, and it would be ugly, as explained in...

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090403-gamm...

and

https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-deadly-would-a-nearby...

BUT, such events are (apparently) every billion years or so...

I think that on average, there's a GRB close enough to us to matter once every billion years or so. However, it'd still need to be aligned perfectly to hit us, making the actual extinction event far less likely.

https://www.space.com/5081-real-death-star-strike-earth.html

We need to start a colony on Mars as backup

Mars has no magnetic field and very little atmosphere, which makes it a terrible place to avoid cosmic rays.

... and because of these first 2 facts will probably have living quarters underground. Which is a good way to avoid cosmic rays.

Then it seems slightly easier to just have some people living underground here on earth.

You know what's even better than dirt at stopping radiation? Water. And we have lots of it. 10km of water at the bottom of the Mariana trench should stop any amount of radiation that could hit Earth.

On the other hand, we can live underground, but we can't live underwater.

Both require living in some sort of pressurized container, unless you assume we could live in underground caves(but those can't be very deep so probably not good enough). Obviously the underwater one would require more engineering, but probably still less than one needed for Mars.

That depends on your perspective. We have the technology to go to Mars right now; we do not have the technology to go to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. It is a much more hostile environment than Mars is.

However, if you assumed that we were able to go the bottom of the ocean, transporting supplies there would be much easier than transporting supplies to Mars.

we do not have the technology to go to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

Except we reached it four times since 1960 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench#Descents

So... you're saying Elon needs to colonize Venus too.. ?

This is true and possibly one reason I think moons are a better bet for cosmic colonization.

Mars, venus, and mercury have next to no field, earth has a moderate field, and all our gas giants have very strong fields.

Some of the gas giant moons are attractive since the gravitational effects on the moons can create geo-thermal energy. Pair a large planet with a strong magnetic field and energy created from gravity and we might have something interesting worth exploring.

I do not think this is perfect though, due to the size of our atmosphere we are shielded from meteorites,, this might not be the case of these moons. We would need to consider making some way to protect ourselves like harvesting ore from surrounding areas. Even then this might not stop large collisions.

Mars colony helps with asteroid impacts. For interstellar events, like gamma ray bursts, distance between Earth and Mars makes no difference.

that's assuming the centre of the burst is earth or the sun, but a glancing ray could kill all life on earth and still not touch mars?

Cosmic Rays that hit earth are very likely to also hit Mars, at the usual large distances they can cover a couple light hours of diameter. I would recommend colonizing at least 4 solar systems no less than 10 lightyears apart to avoid any and all possibility of a GRB/CRB lining up a shot.

That won't help. The closest GRB we've detected was about 100M light years away, so well outside the galaxy. If we had one happen within our galaxy that's beamed towards us, I don't think that 10ly make any practical difference in the 1/r^2 attenuated flux. Also, the beams are thought to be several degrees wide, so unless it's a very close GRB (in which case we should consider other problems), it's also unlikely that 10ly would move is out of the beam.

Source: former astrophysicist. Also if I remember correctly, the Wikipedia article on grbs is actually decent. (Edit: overstated things - need coffee, I suppose)

How does one relinquish one's credentials as an astrophysicist? If you have the education and can do the math, is it not a title you bear for life?

I would guess and say "changed field", so Astrophysics is no longer primary.

Still an astrophysicist. I'm a Computer Scientist. I won't cease being one even if I change professions, I will just be whatever I become in addition to a CS.

I always thought of it as a profession, not a title.

I do have a degree, though, so it's purely a matter of perspective.

Assuming the species is worth saving.

I'm hoping humans colonize space with entire ecosystems, not just ourselves.

It's unlikely that humans could colonize space without entire ecosystems. If that (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/how_habi...)

Humans not worth reaching Kardashev type II or III ? Worth only for thinking about that.

Why do nerds and geeks think we can do in space what we haven't on Earth? https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/why-do-nerds-geeks-think-w...

My Inc. article asks why we think we will solve problems off Earth that we haven't on Earth. Or if we think we can solve them there, why don't we solve them here first?

If we want to get to Mars, probably the best start is to solve the problems we have here first.

Fixing problems on Earth vs colonising Mars is the difference between carefully maintaining your family PC and buying a second one so you still have a working one when the first one breaks down.

Redundancy doesn't fix problems but it cushions the failure case. There are numerous ways Earth could be wiped out in a way we can't defend against.

The problem with this argument is that it is a false choice. We do not need to choose between fixing our planet and expanding into space. There are seven billion of us, and collectively we’re not that bad at multitasking.

Furthermore, it is a straw man, because nobody actually believes that we should give up on Earth. You cited a number of headlines attributing this position to people like Elon Musk and Steven Hawking, when a quick reading of their actual quotes shows that they do not actually say what the headlines claim (Musk also runs a clean energy company for Pete’s sake—doesn’t sound like he wants to give up on Earth). I really want to believe that you wrote your article in good faith, but that means I must believe you did not read the articles you linked as evidence.

I see this phenomenon quite a lot, even on HN. Supposing we find a planet that is conducive to life, how can we avoid exporting all of humanity's cultural and biological baggage to that new civilization? Aside from the exploitation and near-genocide that took place in the Western hemisphere, how is it really any different that the opening up of those continents, but with a bigger ocean between? I've seen other discussions try to route around this question by talking about Mars or some other hostile environment as perfect for the type of co-operative commune they imagine humanity could be, one where people must rely on each other or die. I don't see a qualitative difference between that environment and the deserts of the American West, where the climate was harsh and water scarce.

Those migrations didn't bring utopia, either to the participants or the rest of humanity.

I agree that utopian predictions have a long history of failure and should be taken with a Mars-sized grain of salt. However, I would argue that the difference is that there is not likely to be complex life on Mars or any other location in our solar system. This makes it quite a bit different from the North American example, in which immense suffering was inflicted upon the existing inhabitants of the region. If any planet or moon was found to contain life-forms capable of experiencing suffering, I and (hopefully) most people would be against human settlement there.

Not a significant difference in safety between Mars and Earth when it comes to interstellar sources of radiation. In fact Mars lacks a magnetic field and an atmosphere, two useful radiation shields here on Earth.

We'd do better to build out some element of human society underground, if interstellar radiation is our fear.

Actually, water is very good at stopping radiation, so if there was a massive gamma ray burst that killed all surface life on Earth, some small groups of humans would survive: deployed submarine crews.

Sealabs pose novel engineering challenges, could provide experiments in sustainable enclosed habitats, wouldn't risk microgravity or radiation, but would risk high pressures.

They'd also help species survivability in the event of some extinction-level asteroids, climate change, or interstellar radiation.

I think it's an even money bet whether it'd be easier to build a comfortable habitat for x people underwater or in space (for most definitions of comfort, x, and space).

Hopefully it’s less than 1 day in length, so those on the far side of earth are shielded.

We humans are going to have to do more science and engineering if we are going to survive longer in this dangerous universe.

First we must survive ourselves. The earths immediate problems are nuclear weapons and human generated climate change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovician%E2%80%93Silurian_ex...

The one time working inside a nuclear plant probably puts you in a environment with lower than ambient levels :)

Buy shares in ECC memory suppliers.

Didn’t help Sun Microsystems much: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10...

Their ECC systems got hit too.

Plugging one of my favorite podcasts that recently covered spaceweather!

http://weatherbrains.com/weatherbrains/?p=6720

Do cosmic rays that reach the surface leave any traces or make any changes that persist over geological timescales and can be dated, so that we can see how they have changed over very long times?

Yes, you can read about it here ...

http://www.leif.org/EOS/McCracken10Be.pdf

tl;dr: Be-10 isotope levels in ice cores.

Wait so what does this mean for cancer rates? Are they related?

Shockingly, there are some cardiac effects correlated to cosmic ray activity. See four references in the article.

Whoa. I only skimmed it but I’ll have to re-read it.

Cue the Republican jokes about this being manmade :)

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