Linking Mass Extinctions To the Sun's Journey In the Milky Way 199
schwit1 writes "In a paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint service, astronomers propose that as many as eleven past extinction events can be linked to the Sun's passage through the spiral arms of the Milky Way. (You can download the paper here [pdf].) From the paper: 'A correlation was found between the times at which the Sun crosses the spiral arms and six known mass extinction events. Furthermore, we identify five additional historical mass extinction events that might be explained by the motion of the Sun around our Galaxy. These five additional significant drops in marine genera that we find include significant reductions in diversity at 415, 322, 300, 145 and 33 Myr ago. Our simulations indicate that the Sun has spent ~60% of its time passing through our Galaxy's various spiral arms.'"
Oort cloud? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oort cloud? (Score:5, Interesting)
That is how I read it, or simply wandering comets, asteroids, broken free of what ever they were orbiting. Even interstellar dust concentrations perturbing our own asteroids might be enough.
But I was more surprised to learn the Sun was not traveling in rough unison with a (relatively) fixed spiral arm. Is this normal for all stars?
If all stars are wandering why do spiral arms exist at all? Why wouldn't the Milky Way simply be a disk?
Re:Oort cloud? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oort cloud? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, such clarity.
Have you told those clowns at Harvard [harvard.edu] about this?
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The Harvard article in no way contradicts what TapeCutter said. Please clarify your point.
Re:Oort cloud? (Score:5, Interesting)
“We find they are forming spiral arms,” explains D’Onghia. “Past theory held the arms would go away with the perturbations removed, but we see that (once formed) the arms self-perpetuate, even when the perturbations are removed. It proves that once the arms are generated through these clouds, they can exist on their own through (the influence of) gravity, even in the extreme when the perturbations are no longer there.”
No mention of Shock waves, or even a hint of what might cause such shock, or how such shock could be transmitted in the vacuum of space.
Density waves, (shock waves) another term for Stochastic Star Formation theory, is no longer the leading theory of the existence of spiral arms. Its not the 1960s any more.
This shock wave theory suggest that stars are relatively uniformly distributed, even in the inter-arm gaps, but because of density waves inducing star birth at their leading edge and star death at their trailing edge, the arms simply appear brighter.
Hubble pretty much put that theory to bed. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_1300 [wikipedia.org] The inter-arm gaps are real.
Further the so called shock wave theory (Stochastic Star Formation) postulates that stars on average do not actually leave their "arm", and the visual effect of the arm at any give place pretty much spans the life of a star. (born on the leading edge, dead by the trailing edge). Yet this story suggests the Sun has wandered through the arm(s) several times.
Further, even when perturbations from a passing galaxy might have triggered them via gravity, the arms persist. and in some galaxies even after
the perturbations disappear. So what is driving these? What would cause "shock waves"?
The 60's are calling, and they want their theory back.
Re:Oort cloud? (Score:5, Informative)
No mention of Shock waves, or even a hint of what might cause such shock, or how such shock could be transmitted in the vacuum of space.
Via the interstellar medium [wikipedia.org], of course. It's pretty tenuous, but most certainly is capable of sustaining phenomena like shock waves. Which isn't to say that that's necessarily the particular process that is dominant in the galactic arms; it could also be something relating to magnetism, as the physics of a flowing magnetically-coupled medium is viciously difficult to work with (i.e., highly non-linear). And I've got no idea what happens at the phase change boundaries between the parts of the ISM which are plasmas and the parts which are conventional (tenuous) gasses; phase changes can do "interesting" things.
As for what's powering it all, you've got some exceptionally powerful energy sources out there. Black holes in particular can pump vast amounts of energy into the surrounding volume of space. The stellar wind from very high mass stars would be another interesting source.
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Re:Oort cloud? (Score:4, Interesting)
Man, do I wish for mod points. I was thinking the exact same thing about our star wandering. If the spiral arms are hostile to life, that could *significantly* cut down on the number of stars capable of supporting life.
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Re:Oort cloud? (Score:4)
A good chunk of the galaxy is hostile to life. The galactic core and areas of extreme star formation for example. Both due to radiation, hot blue gigantic stars put out a lot of radiation and then go supernova and the stars are close enough that the odds of a close enough encounter to perturb a planets orbit go up. A large star may perturb the Earths orbit from a light year, or as others mentioned, trigger more objects falling in from the Oort cloud or such.
Many stars also have non-circular orbits that take them through the core periodically.
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You say that, but provide no evidence.
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They do wind up.
Don't tell me you are still thinking in terms of fixed radial arms?
Re:Oort cloud? (Score:4, Informative)
In the paper this is diiscussed as one possible explanation.
Such encounters would not pose a di- rect hazard to life on Earth by changing the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, but could pose a haz- ard by disturbing the Oort Cloud
Intergalactic space (Score:4, Interesting)
Assume it were possible to slingshot our sun out of the galaxy into intergalactic space. Would we be better off there, or does the Milky Way offer some sort of protection against whatever's out there (radiation, etc)?
Re:Intergalactic space (Score:4, Funny)
The reapers hide in intergalactic space, so we're probably not safe there.
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Peter F Hamilton if I recall but I can't remember the book/series...
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Commonwealth Saga?
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It could be worse.... we could simply be falling into the galactic core and passing within a few light years of the central galactic black hole every few million years. Instead, the orbit of the Sun is roughly circular and stays in the main galactic disk.
The other possibility is that the Earth could fly into intergalactic space and the Sun could go in a different direction. That would make things very comfortable.
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Nah... I'm pretty sure tath in a few years nobody would complain anymore.
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Re:Intergalactic space (Score:5, Interesting)
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You mean as opposed to Galaxies, which are free of black holes [einstein-online.info]?
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No, no, no. I'm just saying that there's no way to detect a black hole without any matter around for it to consume. We're much safer where we can see them!
Won't someone please think on the children?
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...Won't someone please think on the children?
A single typo, and suddenly you're on a few hundred watchlists....
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I'm just saying that there's no way to detect a black hole without any matter around for it to consume.
Incorrect. We can detect dormant black holes through lensing [wikipedia.org] as they pass in front of stars and galaxies. If we're in inter-galactic space then stars will be fewer but there's quite a few galaxies to still detect them with.
spiral arms? (Score:2)
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That was also my question.
Is this movement along the plane of the galaxy's disk, or oscillating above and below the disk? How sure are we that there even are spiral arms? If there were arms, then why would be be traveling through them, instead of with them? Why would an orbiting star system travel faster than other star systems in its proximity, and still remain in the same orbit?
Re:spiral arms? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, it wasn't clear from TFS or TFA what they were talking about, but further down in the discussion:
TL;DR: the Sun orbits the galaxy faster than the spiral arms, and when the solar system passes through gas clouds in the spiral arms, that can send more Ort-cloud comets at the Earth.
Re:spiral arms? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do the spiral arms move w/respect to all the stars like some sorta density wave?
That's exactly what the spiral arms are, they can't be the same stars orbiting together in that shape as that would imply a rigid body rotation. The situation where everything moves around together as if it were nailed to a rigid cosmic disc doesn't work because the orbit time of the stars at the centre of the galaxy is less than that of the stars at the edge. This is a consequence of the orbital physics, it's essentially the only way the forces can balance.
So, the stars in the centre whiz around quickly (in cosmological time anyway) whilst the ones at the edge take forever. The spirals are simply areas of higher star density but they are not the same stars all the time. This region does rotate but more slowly than the stars contained within it. So, why are there areas of increased star density? No-one's entirely sure but it seems likely that these are actually regions with higher rates of star formation, with many young, short-lived blue stars.
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And... the stars in the outer region orbit faster than you might otherwise think because of dark matter [wikipedia.org].
-l
"Published on a Preprint Service"... (Score:3, Insightful)
Before you read too much into this report, remember that a preprint service makes papers available to researchers in the field before the paper has undergone the peer-review process. This allows the results to be circulated amongst other researchers quickly as the peer-review process can takes quite some time.
While not as bad as say having a press conference about discovering "Cold Fusion" before any peer-review only to find that the results could not be duplicated, take the papers contents with a grain of salt as the research has not been peer-reviewed.
You might think of it like the answers you get in the back of a textbook that have usually been done by an author's grad students. Most of them are probably correct, but nobody has gone over them with a fine-tooth comb to verify their correctness.
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Yes. Go look at some of the other titles. TFA is one of the more approachable ones . Your head will aslpode.
"Inflationary Instabilities of Einstein-Aether Cosmology "
"Simulation of homologous and cannibalistic CMEs produced by the emergence of a twisted flux rope into the Corona"
"ORIGAMI: Delineating Cosmic Structures with Phase-Space Folds"
"X-Shooter GTO: evidence for a population of extremely metal-poor, alpha-poor stars"
and of course, my favorite:
"The peculiar Raychaudhuri equation"
Nemesis: Debunked theory (Score:5, Interesting)
There has previously been a theory that these mass reoccurring extinctions would have been created by the near passing of a hypothetical star that we would have been unable to detect because it would be on the other side of the Oort cloud.
I suppose that this new finding will debunk that theory for good.
The hypothetical star had been named Nemesis [wikipedia.org]. I know of it only because I ready about it in a novel by Asimov [wikipedia.org] recently.
What we need to know... (Score:4, Insightful)
... is when we pass through the next one!
Re:What we need to know... (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Artist's_impression_of_the_Milky_Way_(updated_-_annotated).jpg [wikipedia.org]
The Poison Belt (Score:2)
By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poison_Belt [wikipedia.org]
Not exactly a new concept (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got a novel by John Brunner written in 1982 called The Crucible of Time (), which documents a (very non-human) species through its scientific awakening. Throughout the book they're discovering that their planet is getting closer to a cloud of debris dense enough to massively devastate the surface, possibly shatter the planet. In the end they manage to build enough arks to save the species. The foreward reads:
"It is becoming more and more widely accepted that the Ice Ages coincide with the passage of the Solar System through the spiral arms of our galaxy. ..."
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http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/articles/ShavivChapter.pdf [huji.ac.il]
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0906/0906.2777.pdf [arxiv.org] (2009)
Many more there, such as this on dinosaur extinction:
http://www.dinosaurhome.com/root-causes-of-extinction-events-219.html [dinosaurhome.com]
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A fine story. Got me wondering just how dense the dust was in a spiral arm, how great an effect on insolation. As I recall, not much but since the Sun itself is variable, then I suspect that the combo of lower Solar output and dust increases odds for extinction, which would conveniently explain those times that passing through an arm didn't result in extinctions. Never tracked down info on whether we could find out what the Solar output was during arm passages, though.
a competing hypothesis (Score:2)
A competing hypothesis [centauri-dreams.org] tries to show a correlation between mass extinctions and the times when our solar system is farthest to the "north" of the galactic disk. I've always found that hypothesis tantalizing and somehow compelling even though it cannot explain the KT event. Presumably there can be more than one cause of mass extinctions.
I guess I should have expected this (Score:2)
I just went and tried to read the research. I couldn't understand a word of it, but it probably means the Earth is going to be consumed in a fiery cataclysm.
Just my luck this would happen when the Bears are 2-0 and my fantasy team is in first place. Well, I guess it's time to run up the credit cards.
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Essentially it comes down to statistics - there's more junk floating around in the center of the spiral arm than at the edges so more risk of hitting something on the way through. Or having an asteroid or comet disturbed by a passing item.
In general meteorites hitting Earth have a speed of about 11 to 15 km/s, but that's only applicable for those that follows basically the same trajectory as Earth. If you meet something extrasolar then the speed can be a lot higher, which means that a smaller rock can cause
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So what you're saying is I shouldn't run up the credit cards, and the Bears are gonna win the Super Bowl? Thanks!
Re:Rubish (Score:5, Insightful)
**might** be explained
Isn't that pretty much what "correlation" means?
Re:Rubish (Score:5, Funny)
It means every time a mass extinction occurs on Earth, a galactic spiral arm is contructed.
Re:Rubish (Score:5, Insightful)
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the only thing that gets constructed is a lousy Vogon hyperspace bypass?
I almost took the time to create an account with Dolphin in the name to say: thanks for all the fish
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It means every time a mass extinction occurs on Earth, a galactic spiral arm is contructed.
This sounds very reasonable to me, especially if it is just a "correlation".
Re:Rubish (Score:5, Insightful)
Areas of star formation are more radioactive due to massive blue stars and resulting supernovas when the massive star dies. More star formation happens in the arms.
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Re:Rubish (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I agree with everything you wrote till this. Obviously a huge sub planet sized object and we are done. But something like a comet a few miles across how would that cause technological collapse planet wide? Lose 1/2 or 2/3rds of the population wouldn't do that. A technological regress requires a fragile society not just a sudden jolt.
We ARE a fragile society (Score:5, Insightful)
A technological regress requires a fragile society not just a sudden jolt.
But we are a fragile society. Without even having to bring up the Idiocracy [imdb.com], the fact remains that we're mostly a society of specialists, dependent on the other cogs in the machine for our survival, stupidly mocking the "preppers" who are really just trying to be generalists. A comet strike could easily disrupt this machine and cause it to grind to a halt.
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Certainly a few specialities by chance might get hit particularly hard. And the information used by those specialists are in libraries, are known by professionals, are known by other specialists are in computers.... How difficult would it be to replace those specialists in a generation?
Remember the claim was another dark ages not a deep recession.
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Certainly a few specialities by chance might get hit particularly hard. And the information used by those specialists are in libraries, are known by professionals, are known by other specialists are in computers.... How difficult would it be to replace those specialists in a generation?
Remember the claim was another dark ages not a deep recession.
If you are talking about a major impact that does not cause human extinction, we could still be talking about loss of a significant proprtion of the species through a very very long winter. If we had a 20 year long global winter, we'd probably still be able to grow food in equatorial and tropical regions. Guess its a good thing we have invested in making sure the best infrastructure and the brightest minds are in places like central Africa, Equador, and south Asia. We'll only lose all the hangers on and laz
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If you are talking about a global winter lasting a year you are talking 20km asteroid which is incredibly rare. I can't imagine what causes a 20 year global winter and doesn't heat the surface well beyond the survival point. So I'd reject your scenario.
But even if it were the case. You would have a huge shift in temperature forcing a large scale migration from the northern regions into the Southern. You would also have mass death. You might drop down to 100m or so on the planet. I still don't see a da
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Just from the perspective of the US but I bet it is the same or worse in at least the rest of the western nations. The shelves of every retail store, empty within a few weeks. Processors, memory, storage chips, pretty much all electronics manufacturing capability gone in a day. Most of the worlds oil supplies gone. Most of the rare earth minerals gone so no more things like solar panels. It then becomes a race between building this kind of infrastructure up in our world a
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We can't lose all of Asia. We'd lose some capacity in some places. We could lose a chunk of Korea but Thailand would be fine. We lost Thailand but Taiwan is fine, etc...
But let's assume we did lose all of Asia, which is impossible. First off we've had falloffs in international trade before. We had a massive drop in trade after WWI from about 1/3rd of the economies of western nations to a few percentage points, which is more drastic than your Asia situation and that didn't cause a return to the dark a
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While technology and technological knowledge could certainly weather a large portion of the population vanishing, what do you think of the economic implications of a significant impact event?
How would the global economy react to a mile-wide rock hitting Manhattan? Or Hong Kong? Berlin? Tokyo? Any large city?
I have the feeling that there would be a global economic upset the likes of which has never been seen.
Re:Rubish (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe a mile wide asteroid destroys everything for about 100 miles and would be killing 200 miles on out. So for example a mile wide asteroid hitting New York kills most everyone in Philadelphia. So let's assume that happens. Note you are picking an almost worst case scenario with the eastern seaboard. We instantly kill say 20m people. GDP would drop a minimum of 10% but the dislocation is bad and say it drops more like 30% instantly (i.e. 27% per capita) That's an incredibly deep depression in the USA. So things are bad. Globally that's going to hit other countries in terms of trade. So UK, China... lose say .3*.2*.25 = 1.5%. We'll make it 2% drop for our trading partners so they have a normal moderate recession.
But... the we know how to fix supply chains. I'd assume we have growth on the order of 8% or more annually from that depressed level easily in the USA and similarly globally as we fix that dislocation. It might even be faster than 8% since 30% is such a depressed level.
A return to the dark ages would be something on the order of a 98% drop per capita that we don't recover from. You can see it is not even close.
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I agree with you that there are probably gravitational perturbations to the Oort cloud or inner asteroid-belt that result in extinction-events but I also expect that there is another phenomena: the varying levels of cosmic rays as we pass through the galaxy's arms.
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Cosmic rays are from the cosmos, not from this galaxy. There is no reason to believe they aren't pretty much constant.
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Even those ejected by supernova and such?
Re: Rubish (Score:3)
Strong. Cosmic rays are just very high speed particles of different types, masses and speeds. Some come from extragalactic sources but the majority come from new stars and novas in the local vicinity. This data actually matches observations by Henrik Svensmark some years ago. He also observed correlation with the solar system's position relative to the galactic plane. The solar system moves up and down through the plane. Times when we are closer to lots of stars such as when we are in an arm or in the p
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A real test would be to use such transitions to look for another one not associated with any mass extinctions, and then go look if one actually happened.
I don't know if such would have lain undiscovered so far, but it would make for a good predictive test.
Re:Rubish (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to see what I'm talking about, just search the science sites about it.
Yes, it is an intriguing idea, but No, it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
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Re:Rubish (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. "Correlation is not causation" is a statement reminding people that "B causes A" and "X causes A and B" are alternative explanations to "A causes B" when one observes a correlation.
In this case, the only reasonable choice is "galactic orbit causes extinctions" or "the correlation is accidental"; none of the other alternatives are reasonable.
Re:Rubish (Score:5, Insightful)
We use the most up to date Milky Way model and solar orbit data
in order to test the hypothesis that the Sun's galactic spiral arm crossings cause
mass extinction events on Earth.
That is how the authors of this paper reported their findings in the actual article's abstract. As for how some random Slashdot poster reported this idea, does it really matter? If you are complaining about Slashdot itself and lame editorship on the part of those who review these stories on the Slashdot staff, that is something else entirely and not something to complain about to the paper's authors.
Besides, they claim it is a causation, or that events which somehow happen during those crossings in turn trigger these extinction events. Unfortunately we have a data sample of one solar system to compare against right now to see if there might be any substance to the mechanism.
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Because correlation is not causation and because they use the word "explain" Nothing has been explained.
The proper way to report on this would be to say that these extinctions "(appear to) coincide with ..." and that this may be sufficient ground for further investigation,
"Furthermore, we identify ve additional historical mass extinction events that might be explained by the motion of the Sun around our Galaxy."
Where is the claim to have explained everything? I think there is an inherent suggestion in the above that further investigation is warranted. The paper does propose more than one possible mechanism, and I would guess that it could be that there have been more than one respnsible for historical events. I see this paper as merely saying that interesting stuff can ha
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At best they have found a correlation in time.
So, you're saying they've found precisely what they claimed to have found -- a correlation.
Explanation is elsewhere (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm getting worried here.
Spiral galaxy arm transits.
Cosmic ray fluctuations.
Killer Asteroids.
I think somebody out there doesn't like us much (not that I blame them).
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So, God wants to play at being Michael Bay?
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Well, I'm not a God, but I play one in evolutionary simulations sometimes.
Without catastrophic or otherwise challenging events, life seems to become complacent - evolution often plateaus.
Run two simulations for an equal amount of time, keep one in "Goldilocks" conditions the whole time, and whack the other with a 90% to 99% extinction cataclysmic event and/or climatic shift every time that life builds up to a nice robust stage. With billions of species out there, periodically challenging the top dogs allow
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"Without catastrophic or otherwise challenging events, life seems to become complacent - evolution often plateaus."
And this is a bad thing... exactly how?
Evolution happens by random mutation and selection of the better fitted.
On a stable environment, reaching a local optimum is expected to eventually happen and then, further mutations have a very hard time to produce better fitted individuals/populations than those currently in place. But then again, that's a bad thing... exactly why?
Idiocracy. Nuff said. (Score:2)
"Without catastrophic or otherwise challenging events, life seems to become complacent - evolution often plateaus."
And this is a bad thing... exactly how?
I think Idiocracy [imdb.com] did a pretty good job of explaining why it's a bad thing.
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Carl Icahn put out a nicely worded take on why CEOs only promote people who are less intelligent than themselves...
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http://gradspeeches.com/2008/2008/carl-icahn [gradspeeches.com]
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If life plateaued as a particularly tenacious single celled slime - would that be a bad thing?
Slime is efficient at doing what it does, and can be highly anti-competitive to new forms of life that might be more complex but less efficient, at least during their first evolutionary steps away from slime.
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"If life plateaued as a particularly tenacious single celled slime - would that be a bad thing?"
The point is that evolution is not finalist, it doesn't pursue any goal. If life plataeued at a single celled slime, that's neither bad nor good; it'd be just the way it'd be.
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Spiral galaxy arm transits.
Cosmic ray fluctuations.
Killer Asteroids.
Worst Haiku ever.
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All of science is built on correlations and the assumption that the nature of reality is unchanging therefore things will behave tomorrow as they did today. So far it is mostly true. Things will probably behave tomorrow as they did t
Re:Rubish (Score:4, Funny)
You laugh, but in 50 years the atmosphere gets so hot that it excites the molecules to light speed, at which point it creates a rift in space time that tears back through time, sending hot jets of atmospheric gases ripping through the atmosphere and extinguishing life at periods in the past.
Also, the midwest will be completely covered in 200ft of popcorn.
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Re:suuuure (Score:5, Insightful)
in other news...many people die in hospitals, therefore hospitals may cause death.
And indeed they do.
http://www.health-care-reform.net/causedeath.htm [health-care-reform.net]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital-acquired_infection [wikipedia.org]
So don't be so quick to dismiss the possibility of causation, simply because it was discovered by correlation.
Falsely assuming no-causation is every bit as much as a statistics induced error as falsely assuming causation.
With correlation you have a reason to look for causation. Without correlation, looking for causation is just shooting in the dark.
Correlation does not rule out causation (Score:3)
Correlation is not causation, but correlation by itself does not rule out causation. Not sure why people have a tendency to discount that possibility. Is that an online thing, or does it happen in real life too?
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I think its a Slashdot thing, usually mentioned by the same people who talk in terms of Gravity Wells, and such.
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Statistically significant correlation between "A and B" almost certainly implies causation somewhere, it just doesn't always imply "A causes B"; "B causes A" or "X causes A and B" are the alternatives.
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Is this some sort of inside joke? A reference to a Time Cube-style crackpot of whom I'm not aware?
Oh dear. I suspect you're serious.
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Maybe an Electric Universe [electricuniverse.info] disciple.
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And your link contains a pretty convincing refutation of the whole idea of the Sun having a significant surplus of charge. If it were true the solar wind would consist of particles witch charge of one sign moving much faster than particles of the other sign.
"The solar wind is a flow of protons and electrons, away from the sun, in all directions, both at the same speed. Now, if the first "major property" of the electric sun model were true, we would expect the positively charged sun to repel positively charg
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Are you sure it ins't closer to next Tuesday? I could swear that man on television asking me to send him money said it was next Tuesday.