Exploding stars may have caused mass extinction on Earth: study
phys.org
phys.org
"a 300,000-year decline in biodiversity leading up to the Devonian-Carboniferous mass extinction"
Is this a real thing? I ask, because paleontologists have had a bad record of interpreting statistical samples around an event. I.e. misinterpreting the mean interval between the last recorded fossil before an event as evidence of 'gradual extinction'.
A great book.
Returning the favor I've reread "A Fire Upon the Deep" a few times now. Vernor Vinge scifi author who taught comp sci and mathematics at university.
I have read Diaspora three times and I can't decide if I like it more than my favorite other book by him: Permutation City.
Well thank goodness I didn’t. This novel was eye opening as a treatise on small and large scale mortality. One of the most thought provoking pieces of science fiction out there.
I would also suggest reading Permutation City and the Clockwork Rocket trilogy by him.
What could we do to mitigate this though. Would enclosed habitats, greenhouses and pastures covered by UV blocking screens be enough to maintain habitability and a sustainable agriculture?
Not worth worrying that much about it then - in a mere billion years (IIRC) the sun's output is predicted to have increased enough that it's unlikely liquid water could exist on the surface of the earth, effectively ending most life. Though it's possible that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will have dropped enough to make photosynthesis impossible for most plants in around half that time.
Our species has a thousand times our current age to figure things out. To unironically quote Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny: we haven't peaked. We haven't even begun to peak. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS7ifk26tJc)
Even before all that, we're nowhere close to various practical limits we've calculated as theoretically possible in energy extraction, energy conversion, energy conservation, matter properties (compression strength, tension strength, torsion strength, and so on), computational density, information density, etc.
For most of our species' history in geological time, we've barely edged over from sentience to sapience. On that scale, we're still at the boundary layer edge, and have yet to really delve into and establish ourselves within the time stream into sapience.
However, there could be binary white dwarfs capable of causing a "double degenerate" type I SN, unless recent data has now ruled that out. As of 2002 there were estimated to be ~50 undiscovered white dwarfs within 20 parsecs on our solar system.
Don't we have blind spots though? Like in the direction of the center of the galaxy or behind bright stars?
And in 1000 years, humans will have forgotten the XRay blast (do you remember the mysterious plague of 1020AD where lots of people died of cancer? No - didn't think so...), and therefore won't prepare.
I'd love to have a source on this? Particularly in relation to cancer rates at the time? I googled but the only thing I could find was a ref to an outbreak of bubonic plague in germany in 1022AD.
Would appreciate some thoughts on the plausibility of this.
There’s a growing internet movement of people pushing this and they sound geekier than your usual conspiracy theorist.
https://phys.org/news/2020-04-sun-similar-stars.html
If this is accurate, then it raises the question of whether the Sun is inherently and always less active or whether it just happens to be quiet while human civilization has arisen.
Is there some way we could tell a distinction between a local event and a long range event with a method (for example: an alignment of particles or minerals in rocks in a particular direction)?