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The Magnetar, nature’s ultimate superweapon
- ncmncm 4y agoAbility to sterilize a planetary system from 500 light years away from just a readjustment. Really, the sooner we can get clear of the galaxy, the safer we will be.
- dredmorbius 4y agoRemember: most advanced technological civilisation collapses occur in their home galaxies. Move to be safe!
- bergenty 4y agoI presume these exist in every galaxy. Unless you’re suggesting we live in ships in the space between galaxies.
- ALittleLight 4y agoAt least while we disassemble the various stellar objects and turn them into the computational substrate that powers our virtual reality paradise.
- ncmncm 4y agoDisassembled planets should be enough for anybody.
- ncmncm 4y agoThere are plenty of stars well distant from most everything else. But yes, by the time we are equipped to leave the galaxy we ought to be finished with living on planets. (Which have been known to have their own problems... Cf. Deccan Traps, Yellowstone Supervolcano, Siberian Traps.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jquery 4y agoI have a feeling we'll find that outside of galaxies are even bigger, stranger, more impossible horrors that our galaxy was protecting us from.
- ncmncm 4y agoMaybe, others who left first. But space is big. [citation needed]
- Shorel 4y agoThe collision between Andromeda and Milky Way will be very disruptive, to say the least.
- ncmncm 4y agoNot for most individual planets, excepting those that have a supermassive black hole come by. Odds favor you there.
- jpgvm 4y agoSpace sounds like Outback Australia, most of it's empty but the few things there are will just kill you. Doesn't sound very hospitable.
- bergenty 4y agoNeither does living in Scandinavia but technology can conquer a lot.
- jeffparsons 4y agoI like that analogy. Because if you bring a well-stocked caravan, tools and spare parts, a radio, and a bit of know-how, you'll probably actually be fine. Living "out there" for an extended period would be extremely difficult, but given what else sufficiently motivated humans have figured out, I think not the impossibility that many people imagine.
- ozim 4y agoI think not really and outback Australia in my mind is not bad - you have to struggle some but you still might survive. Snakes, dingoes will be mostly afraid of people if you put up a fire in the night wild creatures will leave you be. There is heat during the day that does not care and can burn you badly, but if you stay in shade and take enough water it might be still quite ok. But space in my mind is H. P. Lovecraft horror - it is empty but there are these unknown unknowns that don't care about what you are - they will just kill you without even noticing you were alive. Micro meteors, Van Allen radiation belts, random radiation like cosmic rays without atmosphere protection, exposure to the sun without atmosphere protection. It is not just some equipment, people can stay at ISS because there is loads of tech deployed to keep them safe.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoYeah, sounds easy enough, but people keep dying in the Outback when they get lost or their vehicle breaks down or gets stuck. Bit like Death Valley I suppose.
- 4y ago
- DeathArrow 4y ago>And here's the best part: They have the strongest magnetic fields ever observed, so strong they can melt you—literally dissociate you down to the atomic level—from a thousand kilometers away. Why should they destroy a human or anything that does not have an magnetic field or it's made from iron?
- colechristensen 4y agoYour entire experience of reality is almost exclusively electromagnetic.
- philipswood 4y agoFrom the article: >The problem is that atoms are made of positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. In weak magnetic fields, this doesn't make a bit of difference. But in strong fields, the electrons and protons respond differently. Atoms lose their traditional shape, and the electron orbitals become elongated along the direction of the magnetic field lines. > ... your individual atoms would only be 1 percent as wide as they are long. With atoms turning into needles, atomic physics as we know it breaks down. As does all the bonds that atoms use to glue themselves together into complex molecules. >In other words, the static magnetic field of a magnetar is strong enough to simply... dissociate you. All the molecules that you're made of simply come apart into oddly shaped atoms.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pvg 4y agoSubject was "[...] turned to steel in the great magnetic field" [1] [1] Iommi T., Osbourne O., Butler G., Ward B. (1970). A Ferrous Human Journal of Paranoia, t. 4.
- antod 4y agoOK, that was hilarious. Thanks for making my day better.
- deleted 4y ago
- jl6 4y agoSo we definitely need to visit one of these and harness it to drive high energy physics experiments.
- uejfiweun 4y agoI would love to do a 6-month rotation at humanity's magnetar research outpost. Seems like a great setting for a movie or video game.
- jl6 4y agoSince these things only last for a short amount of time (cosmically speaking), physicists of the future will be like today’s tornado chasers, planning thousands of years in advance in order to park their detectors at just the right spot for a chance to wind their windows down, stick their heads out, and get their hair Einstein’d in the passing star death shockwaves.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoI believe this was the premise of the star trek: tng episode "evolution" featuring Dr Kelso.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jcims 4y agoI saw an article a couple of weeks ago, possibly here, titled something like 'please don't build another large hadron collider'. It made me wonder if we could build a trap of sorts (like a large magnetic funnel, almost certainly in space) to direct exogenous (?) energetic particles to a target rather than accelerating them ourselves. Clearly nature can put more mustard on them than we can. My guess is the challenge would be the relatively low counts, but maybe with a large enough trap that wouldn't be a problem.
- elorant 4y ago
- thriftwy 4y agoA lot of stuff can kill you wimpy 1000 km away. How would you even get so close to a magnetar? Supernova may perhaps fry your planet a couple dozens light years away!
- hexo 4y agoStrongest magnetars would rip apart all molecules even 150gigameters away.
- MattPalmer1086 4y agoTrue, but the point to me was that magnetic fields alone can pull your molecular structure apart, which is something I didn't know. Not so much the distance, more magnets!
- credit_guy 4y agoLight years are huge distances. One light-year is 63 thousand times larger than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Even a mighty supernova would not fry you from a distance of a light-year or more. Here's a quotation with the effects of a supernova by distance [1] An Earth like planet would be reduced to a cinder and thrown into interstellar space, even if it were thousands of times further from its star than Earth is from the Sun. Further out… At 2 to 5 light years: A bright blue point of light appears in the sky, growing to sun-like brightness over 14 to 30 days. Effects include increased surface temperatures, wildfires, extreme weather, melting of ice caps, lethal radiation levels, total ozone layer loss, and chemical changes to the atmosphere. At 20 to 50 light years: The blue light outshines a full moon a thousand times. Radiation levels cause cancers, sterility, birth defects, massive ozone layer loss ( 50% +) , high altitude nitrous oxide smog, increased cloud cover, loss of satellite networks, and lethal radiation dose to astronauts. Other possible effects include an worldwide lightning storms and dementia in humans and animals. At 100 to 250 light years: The blue light is comparable to full moon, and radiation causes a measurable spike in cancer and birth defect rates. Other effects include satellite disruption similar to the worst solar storms, increased frequency of lightning strikes, erratic behaviour and memory loss in mammals, and disruption to circadian rhythms. A world within 20 light years of the supernova may be engulfed in the expanding cloud of radioactive debris. This will cause more long term effects, including global cooling and an increase in background radiation levels. [1] https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/572882/ https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/572882/
- roscoebeezie 4y agoI reading the article I think the ships from The Expanse were aptly named
- JorgeGT 4y agoI sometimes wonder how far is Musk from naming something Voice of the Whirlwind.
- pilsetnieks 4y agoWhy would he be very far from that? Also, I haven't read the book but from the synapsis it doesn't seem particularly disruptive. He already has ships named Of Course I Still Love You, Just Read the Instructions, A Shortfall of Gravitas. If anything, I'd expect him to name a ship No More Mr Nice Guy or Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, or for that matter, the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath
- WJW 4y agoMusk has his moments, but I don't think he's building spaceships kitted out for war just yet.
- germinalphrase 4y agoWell, now - that probably depends on what you think War is.
- WJW 4y agoWar on a scale that deserves a ship name from the Culture is as yet out of reach for humanity. Didn't the "Mistake Not ..." (or one of its siblings) slice a star in half at one point? There's also a point in Excession where one of the Minds notes that a point blank supernova is not really problematic for ships of its class.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- arthurcolle 4y agoAlso the name of a credit hedge fund during the GFC. I wonder if they are still around
- Agamus 4y agoThey sure are: https://www.magnetar.com/ https://www.magnetar.com/ It was famously suggested that they caused the 2008 market crash: https://www.propublica.org/article/all-the-magnetar-trade-how-one-hedge-fund-helped-keep-the-housing-bubble https://www.propublica.org/article/all-the-magnetar-trade-ho... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar_Capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar_Capital
- arthurcolle 4y agoYeah they are pretty legendary. Frankly, I think it is pretty unlikely that they would have selected CDO components but it is certainly firmly in the realm of possibility. Separately, I just checked their careers page and no software engineering positions. Seems like there would be a lot of automation and systems work to do there, but I guess it is possible that they just aren't hiring for those roles right now.
- phendrenad2 4y agoImagine a beowulf cluster of those!
- gleenn 4y ago"They have the strongest magnetic fields ever observed, so strong they can melt you—literally dissociate you down to the atomic level—from a thousand kilometers away." So horrifying and yet I love the author's enthusiasm.
- walrus01 4y agoPaging Admiral Duarte....
- jquery 4y agoLove me some magnetars. Gonna nitpick here, a piece of the article claims that if you fell off a neutron star mountain 1-2cm tall, by the time you hit the ground you'd be traveling at half the speed of light. This appears to be false. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star#:~:text=The%20gravitational%20field%20at%20a,invisible%20rear%20surface%20become%20visible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star#:~:text=The%20gra.... "If an object were to fall from a height of one meter on a neutron star 12 kilometers in radius, it would reach the ground at around 1400 kilometers per second".
- cbozeman 4y ago"If an object were to fall from a height of one meter on a neutron star 12 kilometers in radius, it would reach the ground at around 1400 kilometers per second". Good to know... instead of being instantly obliterated into dust, I just get liquified.
- jjcm 4y agoI think the wikiped article is citing the velocity you’d have purely under the gravitational pull. That calculation likely doesn’t include the additional velocity given from the magnetic pull of magnetaurs. Given that magnetism is a stronger force, I don’t think the claim is disproven by the citation on Wikipedia.
- jquery 4y agoThat by itself would be extremely interesting, but the article text is: “What happens inside a magnetar is a matter of pure speculation. Physicists think that the surface of a magnetar is covered in a shell of heavy atomic nuclei and free electrons. Because of the intense gravity [em. added], these surfaces are incredibly smooth; the highest "mountains" will only be a couple of centimeters tall. But don't think of them as trivial. If you were to fall off one of those mountains, by the time you reached the bottom, you would already be traveling at half the speed of light” Such a paragraph doesn’t give me confidence they did the math including magnetism, especially considering the extraordinary claim it would imply… that the magnetic field would have multiple orders of magnitude more strength than gravity. I think it doesn’t pass the sniff test, such immense downward force would instantly turn the neutron star into a black hole.