Sun May Disrupt Spacecraft and Satellites In Coming Decades 70
dtjohnson writes "A newly published study (abstract) predicts that solar storms are going to become increasingly disruptive to satellites and communications in the coming decades as the sun cycles towards a minimum of activity. 'The work, published in Geophysical Research Letters, predicts that once the Sun shifts toward an era of lower solar activity, more hazardous radiation will reach Earth. The team says the Sun is currently at a grand solar maximum. This phase began in the 1920s — and has lasted throughout the space age....The evidence seems to indicate that although there are fewer solar storms once the Sun leaves its grand maximum, they are more powerful, faster and therefore carry more particles.'"
It is time for electromagnetic shielding then. (Score:2)
Just like Earth, a nice electromagnetic layer around spacecraft will do the trick.
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But shouldn't this protection require massive amounts of energy to maintain?
Re:It is time for electromagnetic shielding then. (Score:4, Informative)
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You just need to reverse the polarity of the neocronic (or whatever the particle of the week is) shield. At least that's the way it works in the Star Trek universe.
Re:It is time for electromagnetic shielding then. (Score:4, Funny)
Polarize the hull plating
at least til we invent shield technology
we could also reconfigure the main deflector dish.
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Fuck you, Oracle!
Reminds me of a hypothetical Microsoft purchase of Sun Microsystems. The headline would have read, "Microsoft Buys Sun", and thousands of people would look up into the sky and think, "I hope it doesn't crash..."
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If they would all just quit driving those SUV's, and switch to using two large $1.2M Canadian Buses instead, then all this GW stuff would stop.
Re:corepirate nazi execrable censoring /. (hidden) (Score:5, Insightful)
We really should have a "-1, Incoherent Babbling" mod option.
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That wouldn't terribly useful unless you could also moderate articles.
Sun? Oh how the mighty have fallen... (Score:5, Funny)
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The punchline to the joke, "How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?" comes to mind...
None. They just declare darkness the new standard...
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It was prophesied to happen.
I knew Larry Ellison was evil.... (Score:2)
First the Java mess, and now this... :(
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not all bad tho. (Score:1)
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In other news... (Score:1)
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Argh. beat me to it!
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Oh, like the investigation of Earth's crust hasn't revealed that the global temperature has risen and fallen over and over again at an almost steady rate since before the first layer of dinosaur fossils.
Crap happens in the universe and we're affected, too. We aren't the cause of "global warming"; we can only be a slight catalyst. Given the trends as compared with past activity before Humans even existed, we've hardly exacerbated the effects.
Do I think we should pollute? Hell no. Do I think that resource
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I donno, that might have been a very gouda pun...
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If the moon was made of cheese would it still be outside Earth's rochefort limit?
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The slight cooling effect will likely be overwhelmed by CO2 warming happening at the same time.
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Upon what do you base your assertion?
Show me the math. Show me a computer that starts at 1900 with known solar activity, atmospheric and sea surface temperature observations, and CO2 levels, then accurately tracks observations through 2011, and I will believe you. If a model can't yield results that we've already observed, the model is wrong and cannot be trusted to yield correct predictions.
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Here [agu.org] is a peer reviewed paper that says if the Sun's activity level returned to a new grand minimum like the Maunder minimum it would reduce the projected temperature rise in 2100 by no more than 0.3C. I think that's a reasonable basis for the assertion.
Since the paper is paywalled you can see a summary of it here [skepticalscience.com].
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When "being prepared" means "changing the way the entire global economy works" and "the government forcing everyone to deeply alter much their lives" and "transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to generalissimos who blame Westerners for their own tribal civil wars", yeah. Absolute, inarguable proof is demanded.
If a computer model can't achieve observed results with an observed dataset, the model is WRONG. No amount of self-loathing white-mans-burden bullshit or profiteering on carbon-credit exchanges wi
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Of course the Sun affects the climate on the Earth. The global warming tenet you're talking about is that the Sun has not changed its output enough over the past half century plus to account for the changes we're seeing.
I thought Sun was sold off to Oracle... (Score:2)
Boy... That Larry Ellison....
We are already seeing the effect of this... (Score:3)
In the past few years we have seen more and more hits of our communication systems because of flare-ups from the Sun. Heck, just last year we had a pretty major television sattelite "Galaxy-11" knocked out and left for dead because of a solar flare (they have since been able to regain control of it after declaring it as space-trash and getting it ready to burn it up in the atomosphere). So much of our communications systems are tied to sattelites and long-range RF communication systems that are vunerable to these flare up that this will become more and more of a problem as time goes on...
Obvious BS (Score:1)
The climate change deniers would certainly like there to be increased solar activity, so clearly this information has to be the product of a oil company PR department.
We can't possibly have increased solar activity, but we can have increased interference with satellites caused by carbon emissions from power plants, cars, boats and airplanes. It must be all those stray carbon atoms that are causing problems rather than the sun.
I suppose the CO2 from Earth could be reaching out to the Sun and causing it to i
Drake Equation (Score:2)
So if stars have a window in which space travel is possible for life on planets in the goldilocks zone, and that window can close cutting those planets off from space travel (or severely restrict it), how does this effect the Drake Equation for being able to find other intelligent life in the universe? Life would need to advance at a rate such that it can exploit space effectively at the right time or become planet-locked.
Attack the Sun! (Score:2)
It is obvious that we need to launch a multinational military expedition to subdue the Sun and bring it under control for the safety of our satellites and spacecraft.
Of course, for the protection of our troops, this operation will have to be carried out at night.
it hasn't happened, worry, (Score:2)
Uhuh, something that hasn't ever happened yet will be a major problem in the future. Hide in fear, everyone.
Like we'd ever let space radiation take out all of civilization. If it started to become a problem -- especially gradually over-decades if at all -- welcome to science. See a problem, work to solve it, solve it eventually. And with all of the money that would go in to solving that particular problem, I imagine it'd be solved within 2 years, which would mean that it wouldn't ever grow to be a consu
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Umm, here is some information on the solar storm of 1859 [wikipedia.org] that did disrupt telegraph lines as well having other spectacular effects around the world. The world is massively more wired today than it was back then so I would expect the effects on civilization to be massively greater too. Of course it's hit or miss whether we get a direct hit like we did in 1859 so maybe you're right but if we do get hit like that I expect it will take several years and maybe even a decade to fully recover from.
I had to laugh
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Heh, that is funny.
It won't take years to fully recover. I'd bet that if every satelite were destroyed on the same day, within 1 month we'd have them all replaced. Think about all of the companies currently profitting from satellites. They'd all pay to get things back up and running.
So we'd have a month of no mobile phones. You'd buy landlines. Things wolud change, drastically, for a month. It'd be fine.
But still, it won't happen in a single day. We'd lose only half of the satellites -- the other hal
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It won't take years to fully recover. I'd bet that if every satelite were destroyed on the same day, within 1 month we'd have them all replaced.
My, aren't you optimistic. Do you think there are a bunch of spare satellites just laying around waiting to be launched from spare rockets waiting to launch them? Rrriiiggghhhttt! If every useful satellite in orbit were destroyed it would probably take at least 5 years to replace them. It takes more than a year just to build most of them and there's not enough production capacity to build that many at once.
We'd lose only half of the satellites -- the other half would be shielded by an entire planet: the Earth itself.
Many of the useful satellites are orbiting in geosynchronous orbit. Most satellites are powered b
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Ever heard of supply-and-demand curves? Zero supply and huge demand results in enormous production capacity, immediately.
Excess voltage in the wiring isn't stopped by electronics, it's stopped by a fuse. All household-level safety measures are physical/mechanical ones, for that very reason. My house won't burn down.
The electric grid would most certainly fail, but any gas-generator can solve that problem. And gas generators can be built in minutes and sold door-to-door. There are even adapters to make y
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Yes, the demand may be huge but to think that satellites could be replaced in a month or two is ridiculous. There aren't that many firms with the expertise and talent to build satellites around and it takes time to ramp up that sort of capacity.
The electromagnetic effects of a solar flare certainly could reach your car in it's garage. They could reach the replacement electronics sitting on the shelf. It's like an electromagnetic pulse. A fuse is not necessarily going to protect you if it's strong enough
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It is out of the realm of possibility because we're not talking about three houses catching fire. We're talking about enough houses catching fire that we need to talk about them. And that, you agree, isn't going to happen. Which means that for this conversation, it won't happen.
Same goes for everything else. On the spectrum of insignificant to worst case scenario, the mean will be light damage. And that can be dealt with in a few months.
My point was actually to your last statement. Earthquake and floo
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Well, you're talking best case scenario, I'm talking worse case scenario. Actual results are likely to be somewhere in between if we get an event like the 1859 solar storm. Here's an article from March 2011 in National Geographic [nationalgeographic.com] on the subject. Some of the comments are interesting too.
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It is out of the realm of possibility because . . . it won't happen.
It has already happened once in the Solar Storm of 1859 [wikipedia.org]. We're not sitting around discussing how we'll survive when the sun begins fusing helium in 5 billion years, or when a nearby supernova goes off in a million years, or when the Andromeda Galaxy collides with our galaxy in roughly 3 billion years, or a hypothetical impact event that occurs only once every 50 million years. We're talking about a real, non-negligible chance of a large solar flare like was witnessed 150 years ago on their primitive telegra
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You're not reading. We're not talking about solar storms. We're talking about solar storms wiping out technology as we know it. That, my friend, has never happened.
You're trying to relate an event 150-years old and compare what it might do today if... ...if it happened today ...if it happens the same way ...if nothing stops it -- like jupiter gets in the way this time ...if we understand how it would interact with today's technology ...if our observations then were accurate -- without todays instruments
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Mobile phones don't use satellites. Those are sat-phones, and you don't have one (though you could, if you cared).
If we lost ALL the sats, we'd be pretty fucked for awhile, much longer than a month, and the replacements wouldn't be up there quickly if they were gonna get blasted again. Also note that landline transmission is as likely as a cellphone to be transferred over satellite.
But yes, it would be recoverable. Eventually.