9 ms·

The Worsening Cosmic Ray Situation

156 points by scarhill 9y ago

eximius 9y ago
Is the increase fully accounted for by weakening solar protection, magnetosphere, and atmosphere? What are the causes for reduced protection in the latter two?
- igor47 9y ago
  from TFA, it seems all of the increase is explained by the dud maunder maximum of the past few years. the magnetosphere and atmosphere are unaffected, but more rays are getting through the weakened solar wind. they anticipate a record-setting maunder minimum in 2019-2020 that will intensify the problem
- i_am_nomad 9y ago
  The earth’s magnetic field has fluctuated and reversed throughout geological history. Recently, the field has been decreasing in strength and may be poised for a reversal. It’s bad timing insofar as it coincides with an impending solar minimum.
  - ringshall 9y ago
    Magnetic field reversals happen on a completely different timescale than solar minima/maxima. Reversals take a long time to happen: ~1 to 10 ky. Quick on a geological timescale, though.
    - Steel_Phoenix 9y ago
      The most recent one is thought to have occurred more on the timescale of a human lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunhes%E2%80%93Matuyama_reversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunhes%E2%80%93Matuyama_rever...
aaron695 9y ago
> Cosmic rays are bad–and they’re getting worse. Obviously it can't be getting worse as far as the sun/solar system is concerned per se. Assuming the data is correct we probably are in a downwards part of at best a cycle I'd assume. It could also be random I guess. So to predict the future is hard/impossible since we can't be sure when the cycle or randomness will mean it'll increase again.
geuis 9y ago
> The problem is, as the authors note in their new paper, the shield is weakening: “Over the last decade, the solar wind has exhibited low densities and magnetic ﬁeld strengths, representing anomalous states that have never been observed during the Space Age. As a result of this remarkably weak solar activity, we have also observed the highest fluxes of cosmic rays.”
tyingq 9y ago
To bring it a little closer to home for HN, there was, at one time, a big controversy with Sun Microsystems and cosmic rays creating memory errors on their servers. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10/816-5053-10.pdf https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10...
- slededit 9y ago
  Sun cheaped out and didn't put ECC on the cache of their very expensive UltraSparc servers. I suppose the outrage is pointless now that they are gone, but it was a ridiculous cost cutting measure on a very expensive piece of hardware.
  - ataturk 9y ago
    Sort of like all the ridiculous cost cutting measures at Apple. Soldered on RAM, really?
  - murph-almighty 9y ago
    I skimmed through this comment and thought it was a sarcastic disparagement of the Sun at first, not Sun Microsystems. I understood after second read.
  - ianai 9y ago
    Surely not the last time a pointy haired boss got his/her way to the doom of everyone else involved.
- sslalready 9y ago
  I remember how our Sun representatives would go to almost any length to avoid admitting a hardware problem. Instead they tried to blame the problems on cosmic rays or the fact that the servers wasn't running in an environment with a very narrow temperature and air humidity window. Funny how they wouldn't admit to a hardware problem but still had data that showed that the problems were less likely to surface if the temperature and humidity was X and Y..
- dwyerm 9y ago
sq_ 9y ago
Tangential question, but does anyone have any idea why, based on the first graph in the article [1], NASA's allowable radiation limits for women are so much lower than for men? [1] http://spaceweather.com/images2014/06dec14/missionduration.jpg http://spaceweather.com/images2014/06dec14/missionduration.j...
- corndoge 9y ago
  Birth defects
  - mirimir 9y ago
    In vertebrate females, all oogonia mature to oocytes before birth. In males, spermatogonia mature to spermatocytes continuously after puberty. I gather that oocytes and spermatocytes are more sensitive than spermatogonia to radiation damage. Damaged spermatocytes and sperm get replaced after a few weeks. But there's no replacement for damaged oocytes. So yes, birth defects.
    - teslabox 9y ago
      > But there's no replacement for damaged oocytes. That was the old thinking, but now there's evidence that women can probably generate 'new' eggs: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/07/evidence-suggests-womens-ovaries-can-grow-new-eggs https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/07/evidence-sug... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120726180259.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120726180259.h...
      - mirimir 9y ago
        Wow, that's amazing. But on the other hand, using a chemotherapy drug to ovulate seems a little iffy.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- baybal2 9y ago
ggm 9y ago
Buy shares in ECC memory suppliers.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Didn’t help Sun Microsystems much: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10/816-5053-10.pdf https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10... Their ECC systems got hit too.
siavosh 9y ago
I just had the horrific thought of what if some nearby interstellar event zaps all of earth with a deadly blast of fatal radiation killing all life in a matter of days. Is this possible and is there anything in the archaeological record hinting this may have happened?
- solomatov 9y ago
  There're theories that this happened in the past: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070420-extinctions.html https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070420-exti...
  - jake-low 9y ago
    > "The movement [of the Milky Way] is not edge-on like a Frisbee," Melott noted. Instead, he said, it is flat, "like a pie in the face." Huh, I didn't know that, and now I have a great mental picture to accompany that fact. For anyone who skimmed and is wondering "How long before another mass extinction, according to this theory?", the answer is in the last sentence (on page 2): we've still got 10 million good years.
- Rifu 9y ago
  Gamma ray bursts can happen at anytime![0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    I remember learning about this. I wonder if Earth was enveloped in such a burst, if we'd go out quickly, peacefully, like a heart attack in our sleep. Most life wiped out on our planet in an instant. It makes you wonder how many world out there contain the empty structures of civilizations that went out in an instant, with a whisper.
    - stjohnswarts 9y ago
      I just hope we can even find a xeno microbe to put another nail in the coffin of organized religion.
doinkdoink 9y ago
Plugging one of my favorite podcasts that recently covered spaceweather! http://weatherbrains.com/weatherbrains/?p=6720 http://weatherbrains.com/weatherbrains/?p=6720
tzs 9y ago
Do cosmic rays that reach the surface leave any traces or make any changes that persist over geological timescales and can be dated, so that we can see how they have changed over very long times?
- _rpd 9y ago
  Yes, you can read about it here ... http://www.leif.org/EOS/McCracken10Be.pdf http://www.leif.org/EOS/McCracken10Be.pdf tl;dr: Be-10 isotope levels in ice cores.
maccam94 9y ago
I wonder if it'll get bad enough to spur consumer hardware to switch to ECC. I can't believe the price difference is very significant, especially if it starts being produced in even higher volumes.
- mark-r 9y ago
  I used an Athlon in my latest PC build so that I could use ECC. And that was just the kid's gaming computer! I'm a big believer in ECC.
  - Asooka 9y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I looked into it, AMD's CPUs support unbuffered ECC RAM, which is really hard to come by and much more expensive than the usual buffered ECC RAM.
    - nwah1 9y ago
      True, but it seems unlikely that there's a fundamental reason why unbuffered should have a higher manufacturing cost. It seems to just be an accident of history. Thus, maccam94's point still stands.
    - dmm 9y ago
      Newegg has plenty of unbuffered, ecc ddr4[0]. The cheapest registered 16gb ddr4-2133 module is $192. The cheapest unbuffered 16gb ddr4-2133 module is $189. So the price is about the same. [0] https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007952%20601190338%20600006161%20600006164%20600082361&IsNodeId=1 https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N... [1] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIABYY5227067 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIABYY5227... [2] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP6WX1150 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP6WX1...
    - mark-r 9y ago
      Yes there are fewer choices, but that would change if more people were buying them. I found mine at Micro Center.
EGreg 9y ago
Cue the Republican jokes about this being manmade :)
Kunsang 9y ago
Soon: Cosmic Ray-Ban
gigatexal 9y ago
Wait so what does this mean for cancer rates? Are they related?
- imglorp 9y ago
  Shockingly, there are some cardiac effects correlated to cosmic ray activity. See four references in the article.
  - gigatexal 9y ago
    Whoa. I only skimmed it but I’ll have to re-read it.
acidburnNSA 9y ago
Tangentially related, taking a Geiger counter on a trans-Atlantic flight is a pretty good time [1]. Some good low-dose radiation data we have comes from flight crews. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2014-05-17-radiation-on-flights.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2014-05-17-radiation-on-fligh...

156 points by scarhill 9y ago

Is the increase fully accounted for by weakening solar protection, magnetosphere, and atmosphere? What are the causes for reduced protection in the latter two?

igor47 9y ago
from TFA, it seems all of the increase is explained by the dud maunder maximum of the past few years. the magnetosphere and atmosphere are unaffected, but more rays are getting through the weakened solar wind. they anticipate a record-setting maunder minimum in 2019-2020 that will intensify the problem
i_am_nomad 9y ago
The earth’s magnetic field has fluctuated and reversed throughout geological history. Recently, the field has been decreasing in strength and may be poised for a reversal. It’s bad timing insofar as it coincides with an impending solar minimum.
- ringshall 9y ago
  Magnetic field reversals happen on a completely different timescale than solar minima/maxima. Reversals take a long time to happen: ~1 to 10 ky. Quick on a geological timescale, though.
  - Steel_Phoenix 9y ago
    The most recent one is thought to have occurred more on the timescale of a human lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunhes%E2%80%93Matuyama_reversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunhes%E2%80%93Matuyama_rever...

aaron695 9y ago

> Cosmic rays are bad–and they’re getting worse. Obviously it can't be getting worse as far as the sun/solar system is concerned per se. Assuming the data is correct we probably are in a downwards part of at best a cycle I'd assume. It could also be random I guess. So to predict the future is hard/impossible since we can't be sure when the cycle or randomness will mean it'll increase again.

geuis 9y ago

> The problem is, as the authors note in their new paper, the shield is weakening: “Over the last decade, the solar wind has exhibited low densities and magnetic ﬁeld strengths, representing anomalous states that have never been observed during the Space Age. As a result of this remarkably weak solar activity, we have also observed the highest fluxes of cosmic rays.”

tyingq 9y ago

To bring it a little closer to home for HN, there was, at one time, a big controversy with Sun Microsystems and cosmic rays creating memory errors on their servers. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10/816-5053-10.pdf https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10...

slededit 9y ago
Sun cheaped out and didn't put ECC on the cache of their very expensive UltraSparc servers. I suppose the outrage is pointless now that they are gone, but it was a ridiculous cost cutting measure on a very expensive piece of hardware.
- ataturk 9y ago
  Sort of like all the ridiculous cost cutting measures at Apple. Soldered on RAM, really?
- murph-almighty 9y ago
  I skimmed through this comment and thought it was a sarcastic disparagement of the Sun at first, not Sun Microsystems. I understood after second read.
- ianai 9y ago
  Surely not the last time a pointy haired boss got his/her way to the doom of everyone else involved.
sslalready 9y ago
I remember how our Sun representatives would go to almost any length to avoid admitting a hardware problem. Instead they tried to blame the problems on cosmic rays or the fact that the servers wasn't running in an environment with a very narrow temperature and air humidity window. Funny how they wouldn't admit to a hardware problem but still had data that showed that the problems were less likely to surface if the temperature and humidity was X and Y..
dwyerm 9y ago

sq_ 9y ago

Tangential question, but does anyone have any idea why, based on the first graph in the article [1], NASA's allowable radiation limits for women are so much lower than for men? [1] http://spaceweather.com/images2014/06dec14/missionduration.jpg http://spaceweather.com/images2014/06dec14/missionduration.j...

corndoge 9y ago
Birth defects
- mirimir 9y ago
  In vertebrate females, all oogonia mature to oocytes before birth. In males, spermatogonia mature to spermatocytes continuously after puberty. I gather that oocytes and spermatocytes are more sensitive than spermatogonia to radiation damage. Damaged spermatocytes and sperm get replaced after a few weeks. But there's no replacement for damaged oocytes. So yes, birth defects.
  - teslabox 9y ago
    > But there's no replacement for damaged oocytes. That was the old thinking, but now there's evidence that women can probably generate 'new' eggs: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/07/evidence-suggests-womens-ovaries-can-grow-new-eggs https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/07/evidence-sug... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120726180259.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120726180259.h...
    - mirimir 9y ago
      Wow, that's amazing. But on the other hand, using a chemotherapy drug to ovulate seems a little iffy.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
baybal2 9y ago

ggm 9y ago

Buy shares in ECC memory suppliers.

tyingq 9y ago
Didn’t help Sun Microsystems much: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10/816-5053-10.pdf https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10... Their ECC systems got hit too.

siavosh 9y ago

I just had the horrific thought of what if some nearby interstellar event zaps all of earth with a deadly blast of fatal radiation killing all life in a matter of days. Is this possible and is there anything in the archaeological record hinting this may have happened?

solomatov 9y ago
There're theories that this happened in the past: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070420-extinctions.html https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070420-exti...
- jake-low 9y ago
  > "The movement [of the Milky Way] is not edge-on like a Frisbee," Melott noted. Instead, he said, it is flat, "like a pie in the face." Huh, I didn't know that, and now I have a great mental picture to accompany that fact. For anyone who skimmed and is wondering "How long before another mass extinction, according to this theory?", the answer is in the last sentence (on page 2): we've still got 10 million good years.
Rifu 9y ago
Gamma ray bursts can happen at anytime![0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I remember learning about this. I wonder if Earth was enveloped in such a burst, if we'd go out quickly, peacefully, like a heart attack in our sleep. Most life wiped out on our planet in an instant. It makes you wonder how many world out there contain the empty structures of civilizations that went out in an instant, with a whisper.
  - stjohnswarts 9y ago
    I just hope we can even find a xeno microbe to put another nail in the coffin of organized religion.

doinkdoink 9y ago

Plugging one of my favorite podcasts that recently covered spaceweather! http://weatherbrains.com/weatherbrains/?p=6720 http://weatherbrains.com/weatherbrains/?p=6720

tzs 9y ago

Do cosmic rays that reach the surface leave any traces or make any changes that persist over geological timescales and can be dated, so that we can see how they have changed over very long times?

_rpd 9y ago
Yes, you can read about it here ... http://www.leif.org/EOS/McCracken10Be.pdf http://www.leif.org/EOS/McCracken10Be.pdf tl;dr: Be-10 isotope levels in ice cores.

maccam94 9y ago

I wonder if it'll get bad enough to spur consumer hardware to switch to ECC. I can't believe the price difference is very significant, especially if it starts being produced in even higher volumes.

mark-r 9y ago
I used an Athlon in my latest PC build so that I could use ECC. And that was just the kid's gaming computer! I'm a big believer in ECC.
- Asooka 9y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I looked into it, AMD's CPUs support unbuffered ECC RAM, which is really hard to come by and much more expensive than the usual buffered ECC RAM.
  - nwah1 9y ago
    True, but it seems unlikely that there's a fundamental reason why unbuffered should have a higher manufacturing cost. It seems to just be an accident of history. Thus, maccam94's point still stands.
  - dmm 9y ago
    Newegg has plenty of unbuffered, ecc ddr4[0]. The cheapest registered 16gb ddr4-2133 module is $192. The cheapest unbuffered 16gb ddr4-2133 module is $189. So the price is about the same. [0] https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007952%20601190338%20600006161%20600006164%20600082361&IsNodeId=1 https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N... [1] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIABYY5227067 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIABYY5227... [2] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP6WX1150 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP6WX1...
  - mark-r 9y ago
    Yes there are fewer choices, but that would change if more people were buying them. I found mine at Micro Center.

EGreg 9y ago

Cue the Republican jokes about this being manmade :)

Kunsang 9y ago

Soon: Cosmic Ray-Ban

gigatexal 9y ago

Wait so what does this mean for cancer rates? Are they related?

imglorp 9y ago
Shockingly, there are some cardiac effects correlated to cosmic ray activity. See four references in the article.
- gigatexal 9y ago
  Whoa. I only skimmed it but I’ll have to re-read it.

acidburnNSA 9y ago

Tangentially related, taking a Geiger counter on a trans-Atlantic flight is a pretty good time [1]. Some good low-dose radiation data we have comes from flight crews. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2014-05-17-radiation-on-flights.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2014-05-17-radiation-on-fligh...