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Comment by fy20 | Hacker News Reader

What would 'survival' look like if such an event would happen today. Large underground bunkers, with nuclear reactors for power, could be pretty self sufficient, but is there any less dystopian way we could survive?

UV wouldn't be much of an issue for concrete buildings, but anything plastic would be a no-no. How could we protect against other types of stellar particles?

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Be worried, but don't assume this is an earth-ending event. How magnetic fields impact UV penetration is a complex process involving both physics and chemistry. One thing humans have proven very good at is modifying our atmosphere. Before we all retreat into caves we will try to boost our ozone layer. Artificial injection of ozone into the upper atmosphere is well within current technology. It isn't currently economical but would be cheaper than living like mole people.

And don't worry about nuclear power. Getting sufficient solar power won't be a problem with all those higher-energy particles getting through.

I am pretty skeptical that humans simply holed up in caves until this was all over, as the article suggests.

In fact I'm skeptical UV would be a big problem for humans at all. Aside from holing up in our houses and offices most of the day, we wear clothes.

And yet, so many get skin cancer when a big chunk of the population is vitamin D deficient through lack of exposure to the sun.

Survival just means we live long enough to reproduce. Humanity would be fine, have a child the die of skin cancer in everyone’s late 20s, life would just suck for any individual human though.

It could be that our alphabet was the key to scale.

On a side note is it a coincidence Golang has exactly 27 first class functions?

Actually, some plastics are radiation shielding and they're off the shelf. First link has them by the palette it seems.

https://marshield.com/borated-polyethylene-neutron-shielding

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01685...

It would look like COVID a lot of the time: life indoors. There would also be a lot of protective clothing and probably an end to practices like sunbathing.

The real disaster would be in agriculture where climate shifts and increased UV would play havoc. A lot of people would starve and there would be refugee crises and wars all over the world. Indoor farming or farming under plastic sheeting shields would become a big thing in the developed world.

> an end to practices like sunbathing

Thanks fo making me chuckle as I remembered the Sunblock 5000 ads[0] in the original Robocop movie.

It's interesting to see how nobody worries about the ozone layer anymore, but somehow we may end up in the same place.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCTSCAQzY9k

Much of the evidence of this event comes from tree rings. So at least those trees survived the event to tell the tale. Agriculture would certainly change but it wouldn't be over. A reordering of the climate would certainly change what is grown where but plants would still be able grow, that least that was what happened last time.

I dunno, surviving the isolation of lockdown from COVID-19 is challenging enough (as those who have had to live through strict lockdowns can confirm). Humans need more than water and food.

Magnetic reversal events are fairly common often happening multiple times within a million year period. All life has gone through this multiple times. It may cause some disruptions to some species but most will not really notice much change. I’m skeptical that a reversal would lead to the extinction of Neanderthals unless they were already on the brink of extinction already.

Our own civilization might suffer more as we are dependent on specialized agriculture that could be disrupted. At the very least you would want to invest in a good parasol and some sunglasses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal#:~:text=T....

Underwater habitats could probably be made with plastic still. Under a few hundred feet, radiation will probably drop off enough to not cause damage. Of course corrosion becomes a new problem to fight.

>> Under a few hundred feet, radiation will probably drop off enough to not cause damage.

At a few hundred feet, a structure able to hold off the water pressure would probably be thick enough to hold off the radiation if installed on the surface. In rough numbers, the mass of air above us now is equivalent to about 10m depth of seawater. A few hundred feet, call it 100m, would be like having ten atmospheres worth of radiation absorption above us. We need not go that far. Relatively thin engineered coatings on glass/plastic sheets would be as effective at blocking the extra UV.

Isn't water a ridiculously effective radiation shield? I thought I saw a web comic once claiming that you could swim in a pool with radioactive waste and be just fine as long as you stayed X feet away, where X was on the order of a couple feet.

It is one of the better ones, at nuclear plants the spent fuel is typically kept in what amounts to swimming pools as a cheap way to shield from the radiation.

It depends on the exact nature of the radiation. Note those pools. The dangerous radiation is blocked very well, but you can still see the stuff in the tank because light passes through water. Electromagnetic radiation isn't blocked by water as effectively as alpha/beta particles.

True, the pictures look pretty eerie (I had a professor whose first career was in nuclear reactors and he liked to show us pics). I imagine radiation that's dangerous is dangerous because it can impact a human body at a high speed, and we're mostly water, so...

UV radiation is moving that the speed of light. So is infrared light, which is blocked by water rather well. What is dangerous are those things that are both fast and heavy, particles from radioactive decay.

This one? https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

Yup that looks like the one I had in mind.

It's sinking and raising of the continents that's the problem. There's little point in hiding in a underground bunker if that bunker ends up in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

Yeah we'd have to live underground like mars people.

Let's see how Mars people like the holes that Peserverance is about to drill into their ceiling.

apparently Mars people have been cracking jokes for over 20 years wrt "Linux being used on Mars before anyone will ever use it on the Desktop", and now the joke isn't funny anymore.

further some unpatched and critical vulns in systemd might actually prevent Peserverance from fulfilling its mission. I propose we send Lennart Poettering personally and at once (!) on a mission to sort it out.

Isn't Linux running on the experimental helicopter, that also uses an off-the-shelf Snapdragon SoC? The rover itself is supposed to be running a RTOS.

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