Brightest flash ever disturbed Earth's atmosphere last year | Hacker News Reader

Brightest flash ever disturbed Earth's atmosphere last year

phys.org

74 pointswglb60 comments

Something that happened 2 billion light-years away is so enormously powerful that it can visibly affect Earth's atmosphere. Space never ceases to amaze me. Trying to imagine that is basically impossible, we think a volcano is a big thing :D... the sort of explosion we're talking about would make the whole Earth look like a grain of sand.

Not quite billions of light-years, but here's another example:

>Modern astronomers now consider its distance from Earth to be about 7,200 light-years or 2,200 parsecs.

>SN 1006 lies well beyond 1 kiloparsec, and it did not appear to have significant effects on Earth. However, a signal of its outburst can be found in nitrate deposits in Antarctic ice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1006 (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37783654)

One of the hypothesis for the Late Ordovician mass extinction event, which killed off about 85% of all marine species at the time, is an unfortunate burst of gamma rays, about 10 seconds long, from regions of space at least thousands of light years away. [1] One star goes boom and blanks out life on a planet thousands of light years away. The brutality of our universe cannot be overstated.

It's one of the many reasons life being multiplanetary is so important. There's no reason this, a giant asteroid, supervolcano, or any other of the million possible ways the universe can think up to kill us all off won't happen. In fact it will happen, sooner or later - and we're overdue. Of course the odds of it happening tomorrow are near zero, but that will be just as true the day before it happens. And the number of things that can wipe out two wildly different planets simultaneously is a small subset of all things that can wipe out 1. And the same is true as we expand on outward to new star systems, eventually even new galaxies, and perhaps further yet beyond that.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Ordovician_mass_extinctio...

Given that ~14 feet of water attenuates gamma rays by a factor of a billion[1], and it had to reach earth from 6,000 light years away, that's an absolutely gobsmacking amount of energy.

With the factors of power involved I don't think being on another planet would have helped that much. Even if we were a few light years away the hypothesized burst travelled thousands of light years to get here and we don't know what direction the next killing bolt will come from (I suppose we could go further away from the galactic core to reduce the highest odds, but still). And it still had enough power to cause decimation a billion times over if we weren't underwater.

[1] https://stemrad.com/cbrn-gamma-radiation/

It really shows how it is a massive waste to colonize Mars compared to stuff like preserving Earth and maybe researching ways of shielding from all sorts of radiation (that would also make interplanetary space travel possible without dying quickly after arrival, by the way, and living on planets without magnetosphere).

For the preservation of life in this single case it would be a waste but there as so many other scenarios where it would work. Plus there are so many other reasons to have a human civilization and terrestrial life spread to Mars. Humanity can do more than one thing at a time.

Even in this event Mars would have been a safe haven. Unlike Earth, the atmosphere on Mars is completely toxic with the planet exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation. Not exactly what one would call benefits, but in this case they would be, because human settlement on Mars would already entail the sort of lifestyle and technology that would render this sort of catastrophe relatively harmless.

Nonsensical argument, this shielding has to exist on Earth first (we are rolling the dice otherwise), deciding to colonize Mars adds nothing except a colossal waste of time and effort on other things.

Shielding isn't some distant future technology. Many simple compounds work as great shields, including water. That's been proposed as one of the ways to deal with extreme space weather events when traveling to Mars - using the water storage as an emergency shield. But of course you can't just put some giant shield up over the entire Earth for many reasons that I think should be pretty clear?

Unfortunately, Earth will literally never be safe from extinction. Nor will any planet. The first thing that should happen once we set foot on Mars is planning for the settlement of the next planet, or moon, to follow. That doesn't mean we should neglect any planet, most obviously including Earth, but the benefit of having 8 billion people is we're more than capable of doing more than one thing at a time.

> Shielding isn't some distant future technology. Many simple compounds work as great shields, including water

Wasn't it your own comment that there was a burst that killed 85% of marine species at the time. Water did not help did it?

> Unfortunately, Earth will literally never be safe from extinction. Nor will any planet. The first thing that should happen once we set foot on Mars is planning for the settlement of the next planet

Gamma bursts don't distinguish between planets or even entire solar systems. You'd need to go way further to be safe. So if you choose to colonize Mars, you are trading off the work that could allow that for a bunch of unrelated effort associated with colonizing Mars.

The gamma ray burst didn't just fry things (or at least half the planet would have been completely untouched), rather it fried the atmosphere. That set in stage a domino effect. If you strip the ozone introducing ultra high UV radiation everywhere, and then life starts dying from that including plants/animal in shallow water, creatures that depend on those creatures start dying, oxygen levels start shifting, and you get this lengthy domino effect everywhere. The 15% that survived were primarily from sea life that was deep enough to not just be shielded (which doesn't need to be that deep at all), but also to have a self sustainable cycle of life untouched by the life that was affected.

And this zero sum notion of work is a bit off. Nearly all work is spent doing completely pointless to harmful tasks. Unimaginably vast sums of money and manhour are spent doing things like trying to make people watch ads they don't want to see, or far worse. Yet, somehow, this sort of 'optimization of labor' only seems to come up when talking about doing petty things like make humanity a multiplanetary species. I find it to be neither compelling nor made in particularly good faith.

That was 6000 ly away. If another one happens 3000 ly away, whatever water thickness you cover your entire Martian base may easily not be enough. Or 1000 ly. Or 100 ly. You can hope but you are still rolling dice wherever you are in solar system or out.

If you want to protect humanity's survival from gamma rays, you can add the same protection on Earth more easily. The rational reason to colonize Mars is so that you can escape there when things go bad on Earth. Which is especially funny because the 1% who escape there are the ones responsible for most of the pollution right here.

Again, the rays themselves did not directly cause the death and destruction. Rather they messed up the atmosphere. On Mars, where the atmosphere is already toxic, this would be irrelevant. And there's no way to shield Earth against this at all. And nobody's going to be escaping to Mars. The wealthy and powerful already have their doomsday bunkers and hideouts; even a post-apocalyptic (such as after WW3) Earth would generally be a much more hospitable place than Mars will be.

Okay, I see how I was wrong re GRB impact on life. Should've looked it up before!

To reduce radiation in interplanetary travel, you could surround the passengers with water.

By which I mean, the inner skin of your hull would be full of water.

You could do similar on the surface of a planet for the habitat.

The original comment said 85% of marine life on Earth was wiped by a gamma burst some time ago. Marine

That might well be true but not by direct radiation.

Consider reduced light reducing photosynthesis and the knock-on from that. Eco-system collapse.

Fair enough. Can there be direct radiation threat if it happens within 100 ly away though? I mean if yes then we'd be still rollin the dice...

Sure, if you're only concerned with this one specific hypothetical cosmic event. If we open the floor to, say, asteroid impacts (which I'd guess is much more likely, given we're pretty sure we've seen one in the past), then colonizing Mars would be a benefit.

Put differently, events that can destroy life on a multiple planets are much less common than those than can destroy life on one.

> Put differently, events that can destroy life on a multiple planets are much less common than those than can destroy life on one.

That doesn't strike me as intuitively true. More numerous perhaps, but I don't know that gamma ray irradiation isn't 1000x more likely than an asteroid impact. Light waves would seem, intuitively, more far reaching than a solid mass.

As mentioned elsewhere, even from this event Mars would have been safe. The main hypothesis for what the gamma ray burst did was basically wreck the atmosphere and ozone, exposing everything to massive radiation and starting a domino effect.

But on Mars you're already ambiently exposed to high levels of dangerous radiation, and the atmosphere (for what there is) is highly toxic. So life will have to develop in a way such that it cannot depend on the atmosphere, and protection from ambient radiation is a daily part of life.

In all probability a gamma ray burst event on a Mars colony would be relatively harmless.

Yeah, I was wrong on this I think.

You don't go to Mars because life support is easier (than even a catastrophe-damaged Earth.) You go to Mars so the starving mass of human survivors can't reach you to steal, and probably inadvertently destroy, whatever habitat you're living in. That's the only way Mars makes any sense as a backup plan.

I'm not sure. You're saying instead of protecting Earth from outside threats like gamma burst they work to create a backup place to go when Earth is destroyed from inside.

Result: still no protection from outside threat or radiation but more contamination of Earth adding up to its destruction.

I’m saying there are plenty of places on Earth that will still be more hospitable than Mars after a GRB or even a massive asteroid/comet impact. You could operate multiple colonies underground or underwater for a fraction of the cost of a Mars colony. Mars is so inhospitable that the only conceivable reason for using it as a backup plan is (1) you’re planning for events that completely destroy the Earth’s surface and oceans to a depth of hundreds of meters on all sides (this is not GRBs) or (2) you’re correctly worried about eight billion starving and well-armed humans trying to get in.

It (is hypothesised that) wasn't that gamma radiation that directly killed the plankton, it damaged the ozone layer so that normally-blocked solar UV killed the plankton.

I wonder if this was responsible for any bitflips

For some reason I dkubt it

What I've not found anywhere is whether this resulted in a detectable increase in background gamma radiation at ground level for the few minute period of this event - and the radiological maps I found don't provide historical data going back more than a month.

Does anybody have any more info on this?

> But one with the brightness of the BOAT is estimated to come around once every 10,000 years.

How is this estimated, given that they're looking for those only the last sixty years or so (afaiu, this event didn't leave an observable trace afterwards)?

"Is estimated" is pretty weak. Estimated by whom? Since the estimate is "with the brightness of BOAT", they must have made this estimate since BOAT. It follows that the estimate must be based on a single event.

I don't like the writing in phys.org.

It is the passive tense invisibility cloak. A fantastic tool. A related cousin of the "under the carpet" magic broom.

Such a prediction requires a model of the underlying processes or at least distribution of values from observations.

The distribution of values in a dataset might suggest that the process producing these values does so in a manner consistent with e.g. a gaussian distribution with a given expectation value and standard variation.

Now if a particular value is observed, this model can be used to estimate the probability of that value occuring.

If it is also known how often these events happen per year then it's possible to say how many years of observation would be needed to observe such a value with probability of e.g. 50%, 95%, or whatever threshold you choose.

This error right at the start initially made me suspicious that the article was generated: "in a way that has never before detected before"

At first I was suspicious at first.

Did you notice any other clues? I noticed that too and just attributed it to sloppy editing, but you might be closer to the truth.

In this case an early version of the AFP newswire article appears to be at fault; it's just that the claim of "proofread" (in "Editor's notes", top left above headline on phys.org) is perhaps somewhat exaggerated.

One can see the same "never before detected before" error on numerous other aggregators: <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22never+before+detected+before%22...>.

I wonder if that argues more to AI vs. Human "editing." It seems to me that an AI would be less likely to catch that when it's composing a story from sources in the Internet.

Honestly, if you are using one of the most recent LLMs, you do not get errors like that. In many ways typos or editing mistakes (like I suspect this is) are signs that a human wrote it, not an LLM.

They make errors like that if you tell them to make errors like that.

"Ensure your response contains at least 5 grammatical and 3 typographic errors"

that is the type of error humans make frequently but LLMs make rarely

So, the fair assumption would be to assume all content with too good to be true writing and grammar is AI written?

No, because many writers have editors whose role is to prevent mistakes like these from going to print

So, if bad grammar -> human. If good grammar -> could be both?

Mentioned elsewhere, bad grammar could be a human telling an AI to be plausibly bad.

I don't think there's any sure way to tell, and trying to do so in the past has massively disadvantaged people who have English as a second language & get accused of plagiarism via LLM (can't find source with a quick google, but there was an ESL student accused of plagiarism by an 'ai text detection' model).

I think we just have to embrace the fact that any text could be wholly/partially LLM generated. An LLM could be asked to introduce errors (or a human could edit the output, either to purposefully introduce errors, or naturally introduce errors as part of their process). We should focus on:

1. Developing our skills to verify people's claims (which has always been important)

2. Trying to understand the motivations/agenda behind the text (which I reckon is even more important still)

The above two steps insulate you from a wide range of propaganda/trickery, and are the sorts of things we should have been focusing on in schools for decades already.

Perhaps not yet, but surely a generation from now.

I make errors like that all the time when I write a sentence out, realize it reads awkwardly and then edit it incompletely, eg start with:

"In a way that has never before been detected"

(Sound it out in my head, sounds awkward... Decide it would read better as "in a way that has never been detected before" but edit it non-linearly to reduce the amount of cursor movement)

First change:

"In a way that has never before been detected [add: before]"

Second change:

"In a way that has never before [remove: been] detected before"

Oops, I meant to highlight the first 'before' and hit delete but I mistakenly highlighted 'been', probably because my lazy brain was satisfied with seeing 'be' while searching for before.

Hopefully I catch that on the 2nd edit, but if I'm in a rush maybe I don't.

Want to know more about that cosmic explosion. If it does this 2bn ly away, what would it be like for anyone within say a million ly?

> The worst-case scenario would be if such a powerful blast came from much closer to home—say, within our own Milky Way galaxy. That could "completely erase" Earth's ozone layer, he said.

The diameter of the Milky Way is 100,000 light years. 1 million is 100 times less powerful but it definitely wouldn't be fun.

So could you say that when we see such a gamma ray burst in a distant galaxy (which apparently occurs daily from our point of view), that's witnessing all life in that galaxy being wiped out?

This is pretty horrifying :/

Would such a burst travel through the body of a planet? If not, perhaps only half of the galaxy’s life would be wiped out.

Absolutely, as if it was basically not there.

Surely the Earth would be too thick for that?

We're dealing with incomprehensible amounts of energy. GRBs are powered by the violent deaths of massive stars. Orbiting planets are inconsequential.

Have a fun paper!

Stars Bisected by Relativistic Blades

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15347

I thought only neutrinos could do this?

It doesn't happen daily, does it? This one was a one in several thousand years event.

There are 100-200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. It may well be daily when you do the math.

A GRBs is observed around daily according to Wikipedia.

The one here was a one in a thousand year in brightness, but that might have been due to being closer to us?

As I understand it GRBs are highly directional because the magnetic fields involved in the explosion for us energy into narrow beams. We see the events as GRBs when we cross through the path of the beam. When we see the same type of supernova from the side we still see a bright burst but not nearly as bright as as GRB. If a supernova goes off in your stellar neighborhood you might be screwed if you're in the beam of the GRB or just mildly inconvenienced (minor mass extinction) if you get a side view.

So the events causing GRBs are slightly less horrifying than galaxy-sterilizing monsters.

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38326318

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