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Exploding stars may have caused mass extinction on Earth: study
- SeanFerree 6y agoGreat article. I wish Stephen Hawking could give his insight. Would love to hear what he thought about this
- tribeofone 6y agoThere is never a bad time to plug Egan on HN. Diaspora is one of his novels around just this topic. If you decide to read it, strap in, you're going for a mind bending ride. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156785.Diaspora https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156785.Diaspora
- arethuza 6y agoIf I remember correctly part of the book is set in a universe with 6 spatial dimensions - and that's possibly one of the relatively straightforward parts.... A great book.
- czbond 6y agoThank you for the mention, it looks worth reading. I'm not into SciFi - but the concept seems a relative given outcome of the future of humanity.
- anbende 6y agoI love this book. It opens with a beautiful description of the creation of an artificial mind. Worth reading for that alone.
- netcraft 6y agoAnother recommendation for this book - I am pretty sure its my favorite fiction novel and I have read it many times. So many interesting and thought provoking parts.
- sosuke 6y agoI feel that rereading a book is the height of praise. So you've hooked me I'm going to pick up Diaspora. Returning the favor I've reread "A Fire Upon the Deep" a few times now. Vernor Vinge scifi author who taught comp sci and mathematics at university.
- RobertoG 6y agoI like Vinge very much, but Egan is really in another level. I have read Diaspora three times and I can't decide if I like it more than my favorite other book by him: Permutation City.
- strig 6y agoThe first chapter is available to read on Egan's website: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html
- gorgoiler 6y agoThe first chapter is utterly uninspiring. I almost put the novel down due to the cheesiness of the cyberspaceness of it. Well thank goodness I didn’t. This novel was eye opening as a treatise on small and large scale mortality. One of the most thought provoking pieces of science fiction out there.
- dnautics 6y agoThat's a pretty fantastic book; I'd put in as just above stranger in a strange land in terms of mind-opening experiences for me, personally.
- doctoboggan 6y agoIll chime in and say that Egan is my favorite author alive right now. He is absolutely producing the best hard sci-fi there is and I have consumed everything he has written that I can get my hands on. I would also suggest reading Permutation City and the Clockwork Rocket trilogy by him.
- sgillen 6y agoReading permutation city right now. Egdan is a master at what he does, just don’t except strong characters, that’s not what he’s about!
- ptrincr 6y agoI've not read Diaspora, but I have read Schild's Ladder. I found it difficult to follow in parts ( the science explanations ) but some of the themes it touches on are absolutely fascinating. Fans of hard science fiction novels will enjoy.
- brainless 6y agoHere is the original paper titled "Supernova triggers for end-Devonian extinctions" by Brian D. Fields and others: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/08/17/2013774117 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/08/17/2013774117
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoThey speak of "a 300,000-year decline in biodiversity leading up to the Devonian-Carboniferous mass extinction" Is this a real thing? I ask, because paleontologists have had a bad record of interpreting statistical samples around an event. I.e. misinterpreting the mean interval between the last recorded fossil before an event as evidence of 'gradual extinction'.
- novalis78 6y agoAdd a bullet point to Boring company’s mission plan.
- redis_mlc 6y agoCue the scifi fanbois. It would be 1,000,000x easier and cheaper to just use caves on earth, than struggling on the Moon or Mars. Also, are you arrogant enough to think you'd be picked for those missions out of 8 billion people? If you're that lucky, go buy some lottery tickets.
- wetpaws 6y agoWe all know it was caused by Death Stranding
- danieldrehmer 6y agoWhat about the fringy hypothesis of solar mini-novas to explain the extinctions? Would appreciate some thoughts on the plausibility of this. There’s a growing internet movement of people pushing this and they sound geekier than your usual conspiracy theorist.
- sgt101 6y agoWe can see very large populations of sun like stars, and there are no observations of this kind of behaviour, so it seems unlikely. The large full sky survey telescopes coming on-line in the next few years will rule this out our in after a decade or so though. If billion sun like stars are watched for five years at least fifty should pop in a micro nova if the theory has any legs.
- KKPMW 6y agoAs far as I am aware there are observations of this behaviour. Several are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova#Recurrent_novae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova#Recurrent_novae
- cowboysauce 6y agoAre any of those from sun-like stars? The ones listed all seem to involve white dwarfs.
- perl4ever 6y agoI have no pre-existing knowledge of the subject, but a quick search turned up something about the Sun being much less active than similar stars: https://phys.org/news/2020-04-sun-similar-stars.html https://phys.org/news/2020-04-sun-similar-stars.html If this is accurate, then it raises the question of whether the Sun is inherently and always less active or whether it just happens to be quiet while human civilization has arisen.
- czbond 6y agoWatched enough 'PBS Space Time' to not be illiterate, but still a CompSci background so take my physics with a huge grain of salt. ;) Is there some way we could tell a distinction between a local event and a long range event with a method (for example: an alignment of particles or minerals in rocks in a particular direction)?
- simonh 6y agoIt looks like there's no risk from this now as there are no supernova candidates near enough to have that strong an effect. With stellar drift though. That could change in the course of tens or hundreds of millions of years with stellar drift. What could we do to mitigate this though. Would enclosed habitats, greenhouses and pastures covered by UV blocking screens be enough to maintain habitability and a sustainable agriculture?
- Nursie 6y ago> That could change in the course of tens or hundreds of millions of years with stellar drift. Not worth worrying that much about it then - in a mere billion years (IIRC) the sun's output is predicted to have increased enough that it's unlikely liquid water could exist on the surface of the earth, effectively ending most life. Though it's possible that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will have dropped enough to make photosynthesis impossible for most plants in around half that time.
- yourapostasy 6y agoSo we only have about 500 megayears to both attain a K2 scale civilization and find a way to use that power to protect our cradle world (or work around the extinction of life as we know it). Got it. No pressure.
- EForEndeavour 6y agoBear in mind that our species has only existed for a rough upper limit of 500 KILOyears. The first electric motor was built only ~200 years ago, and we've only been technically spacefaring for ~60 years. We went from first heavier-than-air flight to first space station in 70 years. Our species has a thousand times our current age to figure things out. To unironically quote Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny: we haven't peaked. We haven't even begun to peak. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS7ifk26tJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS7ifk26tJc)
- simonh 6y ago
- rbanffy 6y agoAfter the initial UV/X/Gamma hit, we'd have a good couple thousands of years to build a parasol to protect us from the slower particles.
- londons_explore 6y agoYou and I both know that any event that is 1000 years away nobody will put any effort into protecting against today... And in 1000 years, humans will have forgotten the XRay blast (do you remember the mysterious plague of 1020AD where lots of people died of cancer? No - didn't think so...), and therefore won't prepare.
- wing-_-nuts 6y ago>do you remember the mysterious plague of 1020AD where lots of people died of cancer? I'd love to have a source on this? Particularly in relation to cancer rates at the time? I googled but the only thing I could find was a ref to an outbreak of bubonic plague in germany in 1022AD.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rhacker 6y agoIt's great to see articles like this. but I encourage people to treat things like this, and the other thread making rounds about how all the stars that have been made are most that will ever be made as having a chance of being correct at 0.000001%. Not that this percentage isn't an amazing breakthrough, but just don't turn this into - the debate is settled in 5 years.
- lolc 6y agoNice how they provide testable predictions (radioisotope signatures) for their theory.