This would not have been kind to any RF/EMF systems, be they GEO, LEO or terrestrial.
We'd have been walking around marvelling at st elmo's fire coming off any point-contact junction between metal or exposed metal structure, with the most fantastic skies at night.
On the other hand, would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover.
Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...
I spent my whole life only breathing through half a nostril on a good day. About 10 years ago I got surgery and Sublingual Immunotherapy drops, and the results have been life changing.
I sleep better, my mind is clearer, I feel like an entirely new person. I am not exaggerating when I say that I still occasionally think about how nice it is to be able to breathe clearly.
I tried nose strips but I don't like disposables. I now use silicone nostril openers - two little tubes attached at the base that you stick up your nose. It came as a set of 4 sizes so a bit of waste there, but one size fit me and one size fit my wife.
These work well, but I wonder about hygiene. I keep mine in a glass dish on my desktop and attempt to cleanse them in hydrogen peroxide on occasion.
Ultimately, surgery is the best option in my experienced opinion, but it also has diminishing returns over time (~20 years in my case). This occurred recently for me, and I am looking to consult with an ENT again, when I feel like taking the recovery leap. With that said, I am still functioning extremely better than I ever did when I couldn't breathe 20 years ago.
Flonase (fluticasone) has been a life changer. I have taken for granted how valuable breathing is in terms of speech, let alone sleep and general fatigue.
I have had bad allergies for a lot of my life. I probably have some sort of histamine intolerance behind it all.
Recently my allergist gave me a tip with regard to nasal congestion. First, you can use Flonase and Astepro together, apparently they work better when used together. Astepro has an antihistamine in it that can help. Second, moisturize the interior of your nasal passages with a drop of muciprocin in each nostril applied inside your nose at the tip of it, then squeeze your nose gently to distribute. This lets you use get the benefits of Flonase without drying out your nose (which can trigger congestion).
Same for me. I spent the first 45 years of my life breathing almost entirely though my mouth. Then I tried some nasal spray that was great, but made the situation worse when I inevitably overused it, so I went to a doctor. I had been told when I was a kid that I had polyps, so I went to see about getting them removed. She put me on Flonase, which at the time was prescription, and since then I've been able to breathe through my nose unless I'm sick. It has been a significant quality of life improvement for me.
Moving to the coast made me feel like I finally woke up, after growing up perpetually stuffy and sniffly. Turns out I'm not a mouth breather after all!
Just moving away from what your body decided to be allergic to when you were a kid with a bored immune system seems to help a lot, I moved from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast and my allergies receded a lot. I eventually moved back to where I grew up and they didn't really return except on days when the whole city's collective nose is running because all the trees are having an orgy up in there.
I’ve taken it for over 30 years now. It has indeed been a lifesaver and so much better than all the pills. One side effect is blurred vision and I have definitely noticed a slight blurring in the last couple of years. I gladly accept it as a small price to pay for decades of relief.
I feel like this is a trade-off not always understood and accepted in modern times; we expect our medicines to be perfect and our bodies to be restored to new condition, and when this isn't the case we feel betrayed.
I had a turbinate reduction, a deviated septum adjusted, and a balloon sinuplasty. I'm unclear on what the drops are specifically but they're sublingual immunotherapy.
How would this effect computers and everyday electrical devices? If we detected something like this heading towards us would we have to turn everything off for the day/week? That's just not possible though is it, can't just turn off nuclear power plants for the day.
Solar flares do NOT affect the devices on the ground. All the fast-moving charged particles are completely absorbed in the upper atmosphere. And to give you some perspective, the most energetic flares can produce 10^-3 W/m^2 flux at the Earth's orbit.
The flares do affect the geomagnetic field. And a changing magnetic field induces current, but it becomes non-negligible only for very long conductors. So long-distance power transmission lines might suddenly become biased with a persistent DC voltage, and some long optical cables might start experiencing over/undervoltage problems with amplifiers.
Solar flares consist of protons and electrons, that are pretty slow-moving by nuclear standards. So they get absorbed by the atmosphere completely.
What solar flares do, they deform the Earth's magnetic field so that more cosmic rays (from outside the Solar System) can reach the surface. But the cosmic ray flux is not that high to begin with. And electronic devices certainly won't self-destruct if the radiation is slightly higher than normal.
After all, you experience far more cosmic ray radiation when you're flying on an airplane than during one of these events!
The panic about these is way out of proportion with the real risks. Modern systems have all sorts of over-voltage protection, and we no longer use "telegraph wires" directly connected to vulnerable electronics like speakers and amplifiers.
All modern telecommunications are over fibre or radio links.
How much do wire distance, intended voltage matter? All the power electronics are almost certainly protected by caps, but are big office ethernet runs long enough to cause issues? What about coax cables? It seems like with how many more cables we have now, that one of them probably has a design that would cause notable inconvenience.
You need at least hundreds of kilometers for the effects to become significant (as in "tens of volts"). Nothing on the small scale will be affected.
Power lines might be the most vulnerable part, actually. The geomagnetic field can induce current that will bias the core of transformers, causing them to overheat. This can lead to blackouts if the networks are close to capacity, and it's suspected that the 2003 North East Blackout was at least partially caused by them.
Geomagnetically induced currents generally become a problem over hundreds of kilometers. Long range electricity transmission lines are the main worry I believe and solar storm events have knocked off large grids occasionally.
I have no idea what the correlation is between particle flux (the metric reported here) and actual geomagnetic variation which induces the current (varying magnetic field causes voltage). Basically the charged particles zoom past earth, then loop back from the magnetotail towards the poles. The magnetohydrodynamics cause effects large enough to modulate the magnetic field on earths surface.
”We have this long conducting loop” is the issue. The Earth is one component of the loop.
Essentially, components that kick in when a voltage exceeds a certain limit to allow that excess voltage to shunt to ground instead of continue to build up in the circuit.
Similar devices in pneumatics or hydraulics are pressure relief valves [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_valve], and they provide similar functionality - giving a easier/lower resistance path for the high voltage/pressure, so delicate things downstream don’t fail.
> They won't affect your phone or laptop, but transformers along the longer ranges of the grid are unprotected.
They actually are. Protection against lightning strikes and atmospheric electricity is a part of the design for the high-voltage lines.
CMEs might cause enough additional load on the lines to cause them to trip if they are close to failure already, and this is well-recognized and can be mitigated by load-shedding early.
> would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover
> How did research on the solar event find a layer deposited in what is undoubtedly surface not upper atmosphere?
FTFA: "Solar particle storms can greatly enhance the normal production of cosmogenic isotopes like radiocarbon (14C) in the atmosphere by galactic cosmic rays. Such enhanced production, preserved in annual tree rings, serves as a clear cosmic timestamp making possible absolute dating of tree samples."
Aren’t smaller microprocessor die sizes more vulnerable to this? Should we be building integrated circuits with larger feature sizes now that we have power and performance figured out?
The article notes it is. The article seems to focus on the new discovery of just how strong the particular event seems to have been compared to the others, not the initial discovery of the event itself.
I hope it doesn't take so long to happen again that we have nobody around who remembers how to fix what it breaks. If so it'll be back to the stone ages for humanity.
You think that the farther in the future you go, the less likely it is that any existing population will know how to fix what breaks? That strikes me as oddly pessimistic, and frankly unlikely.
I wouldn't be so sure, it's wildly common. Reverse engineering products to figure out how to make them again is its own sub-industry in every manufacturing field, especially anything tool & die.
There's an enormous chasm between when companies started mass producing things and the digitization of blueprints. More often than not it isn't even the original company, it's one of their customer's customers 50+ years after they went out of business.
Im more convinced we are heading that way every year. Certainly not anytime soon, but 100, 200, 1000 years from now? Seems plausible to me. Most people don't even know how their house electricity system is setup or works, or how their plumbing system works despite being incredibly simple, not to mention more advanced technologies. We are surrounded by internal combustion engines and yet less and less people actually understand them each day and it becomes more and more specialized knowledge. How many people know how a refrigerator works despite being incredibly simple technology and the basics necessary to understand it covered by atleast freshman highschool science class if not earlier?
We have built a disposable society so people most people never have to learn how anything works. They press a switch or button and it doesn't work? Throw it away and buy a new mass-produced model. And as time goes on we only need less and less people to understand a technology to mass produce it and sell it.
What a strange attitude. It certainly is not anyone else's job to maintain the home I own and live in. That is my job. If something breaks, I don't get to tell someone else that they have not done their job. I am responsible for fixing it. Yes, I can delegate a specific fix to a professional electrician or plumber, but that is a project-by-project choice.
If people want to approach life by hiring out every little thing, they can certainly do so, but those choices do not make my home maintenance someone else's job.
Yeah, but he is extrapolating something going from common knowledge to specialist knowledge as a step towards it being something that nobody knows, and that's just not what it is at all.
It's not that I think that future generations are dumb or anything like that, it's just that the longer an assumption is held, the less likely people are to be prepared for it being invalidated.
Many of the people who designed our electrical infrastructure are still alive. Far fewer are needed to keep it running. If we must rethink our priors, I'd rather have both groups in the room while we do it.
With the state of how the ai agents stuff already is, if you don't think that most tech jobs will be automated away in our lifetime, I don't what to tell you.
Within 10-15 years, AI research automates itself and no one ever has a software engineering job ever again.
I think sometimes of how crazy it would be if we could send GPT 4.5 in the past somehow, what effect that could have, just a magical almost all knowing being from the future
Computing power requirements and the fact that my subjective appraisal of the performance of these LLMs doesn't match the insane scaling curves that AI companies put out showing that their capabilities double every 6 months. Even if a 100x increase in computing power could equal a software engineer (and that's far from certain), that would be more expensive than a software engineer.
But really the burden of proof is on you here since you are making extraordinary claims of AI superintelligence replacing all jobs in 10-15 years. You are making the trillion pound baby argument, so you need to back it up.
It's not, this isn't a lawsuit, it's a casual discussion, and I don't really care whether I'm convincing you or not, I'm taking about this because I enjoy it. I can tell you though that DeepSeek R1 & RL approaches do have shown the power to scale coding and reasoning much further without increasing model size or data requirements much, & that new improvements come non stop in the field from the billions being ingested and all the minds being focused on this all day long as it's so obvious to everyone that it's powerful
I feel like you're coming from a place where GPTs value lies only in coding. I use it for planning all the time, saving me hours per week.
For example, the security team gave me a list of 100s of policies that need to be implemented. I was able to dump that list in and get a rollout plan over the next two months in a matter of minutes. This would easily have taken me half a day before GPT.
Isn't that a bit pessimistic? Assuming machine natural language understanding and general reasoning improves dramatically (which seems possible, based on recent history), it is likely that (given that we still have the data) at some point in the future anyone will have the ability to acquire these skills, or that machine agents will be skilled enough to guide human or other types of agents to do things.
The post is about solar events, good luck getting machine agents working in case this happens...
It is pessimistic yes, but what in recent history did happen to not have a pessimistic outlook on things?
As far as I am aware, the vast majority of electrical components will still function during an extreme solar particle event. The major risk is to electrical distribution, but, as you are surely aware, there are other ways to access electricity off grid.
I didn't read the comment in that way, but rather that it's better to kill electronics while we still have people alive who know how to build back better rather than that it strikes us in a situation where robots make everything from food to food-making robots
He saw a tech-dependent society as being fragile. Towards the end of the book he talked about subverting the current system which he clearly wanted to destroy before it got out of hand.
Isn't it amazing that we have an in-silico model that goes back thousands of years and can even tell us about atmospheric conditions 12,000+ years ago? We can confirm this via miyake events which are registered as growth in the tree rings. One just cuts down 13,000 year old trees to confirm the model, and we're good!
The article casually mentions a "notorious" 775 AD event which I'd never heard about (insert relevant XKCD here), so here's Wikipedia:
The event of 774 had no significant consequences for life on Earth, but had it happened in modern times, it might have produced catastrophic damage to modern technology, particularly to communication and space-borne navigation systems.
Baseless wild speculation time: I don't think the timing quite matches up, but the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck is a little close to this.
What if radiation from the sun actually sterilized something like 90% of neolithic men? Is that possible?
This creates a selection pressure for men whose sperm just happens to be resistent to the sun's radiation to get with as many women as possible. So any groups that don't practice patriarchal polygyny are at a sudden and catastrophic disadvantage for not utilizing their men who are still fertile and get outcompeted in a generation.
Thousands of years later we're still unwinding the social ramifications of this.
Sure, but assuming humans are just "naturally" polygynous doesn't explain the actual observed range of human behavior or the Y-chromasome bottleneck I just mentioned.
I'd never even heard of this until today, but from looking it up, it seems speculated this happened nearer to the dawn of civilization, like 5000-7000 BCE at worst, nowhere near 12000 BCE.
How would some sperm be resistant to radiation? Like what is the physical difference in that sperm that resists radiation? Your entire supposition rests on this being possible.
I assume you mean that some humans happened to be in a protected place during a critical period... rather than some weird practice of (effective!) delayed artificial insemination using miraculous pottery.
Are there any cultural artifacts from these types of events? You'd think there would be stories of sky gods causing all kinds of mischief in areas where they are unaccustomed to aurora.
If this is C14 then this requires biological matter. Carbon dating depends on C14 so I’d assume that this needs to be tied to a chain of tree ring dates going back to tie these events down.
There’s no doubt evidence of stronger events further back, it would be interesting to see if theirs a loose record of suggested intensities for those.
I take it most of these details will be in the happy which I’ll need to study.
Around this time we know there was a rise in human migration and settlement across Europe in particular. A human Y-chromosone haplogroup associated with the Near East shows up in Italy, and Western Hunter Gatherers start to move across Europe replacing the Magdalenian cultures.
I wonder if this event prompted people to think about the World around them differently in any way.
If I notice an unusual and not predicted weather change I usually check for space weather news to see what’s the sun up to. Afaik no weather model can include solar flares reasonably which can temporarily change the weather on earth abruptly.
It's a Fibonacci sequence number of decades though
Just think: number of earth revolutions between this event and now minus the number of earth revolutions since Jesus Christ divided by number of fingers and thumbs on a human written out in base (number of fingers and thumbs on a human) is a sequence where each digit is the sum of the previous two digits.
For your specific case: maybe 1 in 10000. Or 1 in 5000 because "11230" would fit just as well.
So about 13 bits of improbability.
But your hypothesis took a lot more than 13 bits to encode! It would be better compressed to say "Just think: 12350. What are the chances?"
That an elaborate explanation can be found to fit a number is not that surprising when you consider how many possible elaborate explanations there are.
An international research team has identified the most extreme solar particle storm ever recorded, occurring approximately 14,300 years ago in 12350 BC.
wow that's cool. Given that the 12350 BC event was over 500 times more intense than the 2005 solar storm, what are the possible consequences if a storm of similar magnitude were to occur today?
Holy shit, is this the squatting man? (strangely similar stick figure cave drawings dating to the same timeframe all over the world, and reproduced apparently with high energy plasma experiment).
More fuel for the Fermi paradox. Our sun is a fairly calm well behaved star. Many stars, even if they allow life, might make anything using electricity very problematic.
Of course ours will eventually if we don’t prepare. Seems like this type of event would also doom any space settlements if it hit one.
Makes me wonder if going to the outer solar system further from the sun would be better than Mars.
The outer solar system is a pretty inhospitable place due to cold, darkness and cosmic rays. You'd need a lot of nuclear power plants to survive there, and it must be the most depressing existence living below ground.
> The findings revise our understanding of solar physics and space weather extremes. "This event establishes a new worst-case scenario," Golubenko notes. "Understanding its scale is critical for evaluating the risks posed by future solar storms to modern infrastructure like satellites, power grids, and communication systems."
…then proceeds to not explain anything about what that new, data-supported worst case scenario is.
The whole article is light on quantitative data, it’s a shame.
The story is about scientists establishing that over 10,000 years ago, there was a spike in carbon-14 production that's higher than anything previous recorded. Figuring this out was already complicated enough (see actual study below), but going from that into modelling what kind of flare could have produced this is a whole new level of speculation.
We'd have been walking around marvelling at st elmo's fire coming off any point-contact junction between metal or exposed metal structure, with the most fantastic skies at night.
On the other hand, would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover.
Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...
I sleep better, my mind is clearer, I feel like an entirely new person. I am not exaggerating when I say that I still occasionally think about how nice it is to be able to breathe clearly.
I use nose strips, and I'm addicted now too.
Ultimately, surgery is the best option in my experienced opinion, but it also has diminishing returns over time (~20 years in my case). This occurred recently for me, and I am looking to consult with an ENT again, when I feel like taking the recovery leap. With that said, I am still functioning extremely better than I ever did when I couldn't breathe 20 years ago.
Silicones are common in cooking utensils and used at temperatures way beyond what you'd need for your hygiene purpose.
Recently my allergist gave me a tip with regard to nasal congestion. First, you can use Flonase and Astepro together, apparently they work better when used together. Astepro has an antihistamine in it that can help. Second, moisturize the interior of your nasal passages with a drop of muciprocin in each nostril applied inside your nose at the tip of it, then squeeze your nose gently to distribute. This lets you use get the benefits of Flonase without drying out your nose (which can trigger congestion).
Solar flares do NOT affect the devices on the ground. All the fast-moving charged particles are completely absorbed in the upper atmosphere. And to give you some perspective, the most energetic flares can produce 10^-3 W/m^2 flux at the Earth's orbit.
The flares do affect the geomagnetic field. And a changing magnetic field induces current, but it becomes non-negligible only for very long conductors. So long-distance power transmission lines might suddenly become biased with a persistent DC voltage, and some long optical cables might start experiencing over/undervoltage problems with amplifiers.
But locally? You won't see anything unusual.
Not necessarily?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset
Some Miyake events are also thought have lasted a year or longer. I think there could be a very bad time if an event like this lasted a year?
What solar flares do, they deform the Earth's magnetic field so that more cosmic rays (from outside the Solar System) can reach the surface. But the cosmic ray flux is not that high to begin with. And electronic devices certainly won't self-destruct if the radiation is slightly higher than normal.
After all, you experience far more cosmic ray radiation when you're flying on an airplane than during one of these events!
https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the...
All modern telecommunications are over fibre or radio links.
Power lines might be the most vulnerable part, actually. The geomagnetic field can induce current that will bias the core of transformers, causing them to overheat. This can lead to blackouts if the networks are close to capacity, and it's suspected that the 2003 North East Blackout was at least partially caused by them.
I have no idea what the correlation is between particle flux (the metric reported here) and actual geomagnetic variation which induces the current (varying magnetic field causes voltage). Basically the charged particles zoom past earth, then loop back from the magnetotail towards the poles. The magnetohydrodynamics cause effects large enough to modulate the magnetic field on earths surface.
”We have this long conducting loop” is the issue. The Earth is one component of the loop.
Essentially, components that kick in when a voltage exceeds a certain limit to allow that excess voltage to shunt to ground instead of continue to build up in the circuit.
Similar devices in pneumatics or hydraulics are pressure relief valves [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_valve], and they provide similar functionality - giving a easier/lower resistance path for the high voltage/pressure, so delicate things downstream don’t fail.
An X-class flare won't do anything. But in the size of the article? Localised temporary blackouts would be entirely unsurprising.
They actually are. Protection against lightning strikes and atmospheric electricity is a part of the design for the high-voltage lines.
CMEs might cause enough additional load on the lines to cause them to trip if they are close to failure already, and this is well-recognized and can be mitigated by load-shedding early.
Not exactly both though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle
How do solar flares render pollen groundborne?
FTFA: "Solar particle storms can greatly enhance the normal production of cosmogenic isotopes like radiocarbon (14C) in the atmosphere by galactic cosmic rays. Such enhanced production, preserved in annual tree rings, serves as a clear cosmic timestamp making possible absolute dating of tree samples."
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/allergies-are-common...
No idea how valid that research might have been. In retrospect, it almost borders on phrenology.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event
[2]. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02624...
a topic infected by bullshit
Why jump right to the impact hypothesis?
There's an enormous chasm between when companies started mass producing things and the digitization of blueprints. More often than not it isn't even the original company, it's one of their customer's customers 50+ years after they went out of business.
We have built a disposable society so people most people never have to learn how anything works. They press a switch or button and it doesn't work? Throw it away and buy a new mass-produced model. And as time goes on we only need less and less people to understand a technology to mass produce it and sell it.
If people want to approach life by hiring out every little thing, they can certainly do so, but those choices do not make my home maintenance someone else's job.
what happens if there's no one left who knows about plumbing and electrical wiring?
but yeah, i dont think that's gonna happen like that
Many of the people who designed our electrical infrastructure are still alive. Far fewer are needed to keep it running. If we must rethink our priors, I'd rather have both groups in the room while we do it.
Within 10-15 years, AI research automates itself and no one ever has a software engineering job ever again.
I think sometimes of how crazy it would be if we could send GPT 4.5 in the past somehow, what effect that could have, just a magical almost all knowing being from the future
But really the burden of proof is on you here since you are making extraordinary claims of AI superintelligence replacing all jobs in 10-15 years. You are making the trillion pound baby argument, so you need to back it up.
For example, the security team gave me a list of 100s of policies that need to be implemented. I was able to dump that list in and get a rollout plan over the next two months in a matter of minutes. This would easily have taken me half a day before GPT.
1. His intention wasn't to destroy in order to build resilience.
2. His targets weren't random.
https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S02624079230189...
The event of 774 had no significant consequences for life on Earth, but had it happened in modern times, it might have produced catastrophic damage to modern technology, particularly to communication and space-borne navigation systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774%E2%80%93775_carbon-14_spik...
Interestingly, the identification of the cause of the 775 AD event with a huge solar flare came from the same researchers as this story.
What if radiation from the sun actually sterilized something like 90% of neolithic men? Is that possible?
This creates a selection pressure for men whose sperm just happens to be resistent to the sun's radiation to get with as many women as possible. So any groups that don't practice patriarchal polygyny are at a sudden and catastrophic disadvantage for not utilizing their men who are still fertile and get outcompeted in a generation.
Thousands of years later we're still unwinding the social ramifications of this.
There’s no doubt evidence of stronger events further back, it would be interesting to see if theirs a loose record of suggested intensities for those.
I take it most of these details will be in the happy which I’ll need to study.
I wonder if this event prompted people to think about the World around them differently in any way.
This person’s definition of “worst-case scenario” is much different than mine.
We don’t know with certainty what the universe will throw at us.
We just do the very best we sensibly can.
Why should we assume that the worst thing that could happen to us happened within the past 20K years?
Just think: number of earth revolutions between this event and now minus the number of earth revolutions since Jesus Christ divided by number of fingers and thumbs on a human written out in base (number of fingers and thumbs on a human) is a sequence where each digit is the sum of the previous two digits.
What are the chances?
So about 13 bits of improbability.
But your hypothesis took a lot more than 13 bits to encode! It would be better compressed to say "Just think: 12350. What are the chances?"
That an elaborate explanation can be found to fit a number is not that surprising when you consider how many possible elaborate explanations there are.
See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-ga...
"New SOCOL:14C-Ex model reveals that the Late-Glacial radiocarbon spike in 12350 BC was caused by the record-strong extreme solar storm".
That would be interesting to know, I was at the May 11th 2024 event taking photos. It was probably the strongest in the last 30 years.
https://medium.com/@rajkumarrr/history-mystery-the-squatting...
Of course ours will eventually if we don’t prepare. Seems like this type of event would also doom any space settlements if it hit one.
Makes me wonder if going to the outer solar system further from the sun would be better than Mars.
…then proceeds to not explain anything about what that new, data-supported worst case scenario is.
The whole article is light on quantitative data, it’s a shame.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X2...