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>The burst even appears to have caused Earth’s ionosphere, the upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere, to swell in size for several hours. For a gamma ray burst fro
by zh3 4y ago
>The burst even appears to have caused Earth’s ionosphere, the upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere, to swell in size for several hours.
For a gamma ray burst from an object that's 2.4 billion light years away, that seems pretty worrying. If it had been in our galaxy (50k light years across, so about 50,000 times closer) I'd assume the consequences would be serious indeed.
- suggestion 4y agoIf I'm not mistaken, gamma ray bursts properly directed from a close enough entity are a realistic "wipe out all life on Earth" event, though extremely improbable.
- Moodles 4y agoIndeed, I think a supervolcano like Yellowstone erupting is much more likely.
- actionfromafar 4y agoThat would not even kill all humans. It would possibly destroy all of civilization though. But even then, the coming generations would have artefacts to study and be inspired by.
- Moodles 4y agoCall me selfish but I don’t make much of a distinction since there’s a good chance me and everyone I know are dead.
- thrown_22 4y agoWait 80 years and you'll get the same effect.
- actionfromafar 4y agoAnother question is, how selfish are your genes? Half-kidding. :) I suppose people in North America have very slim chances either way, though.
- brtkdotse 4y agoSure, but since we’ve used up all easily accessible oil and gas they’d have a hard time to find the energy required to level up a society.
- gibspaulding 4y agoThat's an interesting thought. ACOUP did a blog post a while back [1] outlining the very specific circumstances that led to the Industrial Revolution and arguing that it's hard to imagine another way it could have happened. I suppose a rebuild would have to find a completely new route. Perhaps fields of Don Quixote esque wind mills connected to giant led-acid batteries rather than coal! With a couple hundred years gap between Armageddon and a substantial human population making progress, at least there would hopefully be decent timber reserves to work through the early phases. [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
- hinkley 4y agoUsing recycled copper from scavenged wiring, because there’s no high grade copper ore anymore.
- ericbarrett 4y agoAll that copper went somewhere, though. A rising post-apocalypse civilization would probably mine our dumps and ruins, Rimworld-style.
- pchristensen 4y agoIn a rebuilding event, we'd have the advantage of knowing it was possible and desirable. This book, for instance, would be worth kingdoms in such a situation - https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Rebuild-Civilization-Aftermath-Cataclysm/dp/0143127047 https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Rebuild-Civilization-Afterm...
- kirykl 4y ago
- tambourine_man 4y agoProbably shouldn’t worry much about that: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fXb02MQ78yQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fXb02MQ78yQ
- Plasmoid 4y agoThey are. Luckily the only GRB candidate close enough to do that is eta carinae and it's probably pointing in the wrong direction.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dima_vm 4y agoSounds like it's a perfect case where "probably" is not enough.
- BurningFrog 4y agoIt's probably enough.
- lallysingh 4y agoEnough for what? Useless worry? I don't think there's much we could do about it.
- Beltalowda 4y agoI mean, not much you can do about it, can you? Either way, it's not likely to produce a GRB in the first place, it's too far away to really affect the earth in dramatic sci-fi story ways, and it's pointed in the wrong way. It's a "GRB candidate" in the same way you're a "lottery winner candidate" if you buy a ticket.
- echelon 4y ago> I mean, not much you can do about it, can you? Work to shed our biology faster. We'll get to that sometime in the next hundred years or so.
- suggestion 4y agoMate I've got some bad news for you
- throwawaymaths 4y agoProbably not? Half of the life on earth would probably survive the initial radiation burst, due to geography, and while there will be massive atmospheric chemistry changes that would be highly traumatic it seems like life would find a way, as they say.
- lostmsu 4y agoThe object is likely an active galactic core, so couldn't have been in our galaxy.
- zasdffaa 4y ago2.4 x 10^9 light years away, so not in our galaxy by a very large measure.
- actionfromafar 4y agoI think the meaning was more, that our galaxy can't produce such events, so that's one thing we don't have to worry about in our galaxy. Edit: a (to me) random site [0] says the Milky Way does not have an active galactic nucleus. 0: https://socratic.org/questions/does-the-milky-way-have-an-active-galactic-nucleus-is-it-or-is-it-a-type-1-or-ty https://socratic.org/questions/does-the-milky-way-have-an-ac...
- zasdffaa 4y agoOkay, missed that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_galactic_nucleus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_galactic_nucleus says "An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a compact region at the center of a galaxy that has a much-higher-than-normal luminosity over at least some portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with characteristics indicating that the luminosity is not produced by stars. Such excess non-stellar emission has been observed in the radio, microwave, infrared, optical, ultra-violet, X-ray and gamma ray wavebands. A galaxy hosting an AGN is called an "active galaxy". The non-stellar radiation from an AGN is theorized to result from the accretion of matter by a supermassive black hole at the center of its host galaxy." Do we? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A\ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A\* says "Sagittarius A*, abbreviated Sgr A* is the supermassive black hole[4][5][6] at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way" Front row seat! Get in!
- codethief 4y agoSgr A* isn't a very active black hole (meaning that it's accreting only very little matter), compared to black holes at the center of AGNs.
- zasdffaa 4y agoFrom the article "It’s also likely that the BOAT’s powerful jet was pointed toward us" The energy given out is(?) very non-isotropic. A random shot got 'lucky' and hit us.
- zycon 4y agoThere's a hypothesis that Ordovician-Silurian extinction cca 450 milion years ago, one of the big five mass extinctions, was caused by a GRB.
- xixixao 4y agoWould the Earth shield one side of itself? If yes by how much?
- usefulcat 4y agoSeems like that would only help if the duration of the blast was less than 24 hours
- phyzome 4y agoOr perhaps more like 12 hours, as half of the Earth would be exposed instantly. But even then it depends on whether it's the direct radiation that's the issue or something more indirect (atmospheric changes, etc.)
- jiminymcmoogley 4y agodoesn't this depend on the blast's origin relative to the Earth's axis?
- IAmGraydon 4y agoThe longest gamma ray bursts only last a few minutes.
- thfuran 4y agoJust how many nines reduction from peak intensity after a few minutes are we talking? Because I'd imagine 0.01% of a nearby gamma ray burst would still be bad news.
- DavidSJ 4y agoRotation around the axis doesn't expose the northern hemisphere to the southern sky, nor vice versa.
- danbruc 4y agoAnton Petrov discussed this [1] a bit, but the essence was that there still would not be any obviously noticeable immediate effects, but that it would kick off a chain of changes like changes in atmospheric composition that would unfold over a longer time span. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AWaqeUmQik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AWaqeUmQik
- elorant 4y agoAnd this answers the Fermi Paradox. The universe is an extremely hostile environment for life to evolve.
- Jweb_Guru 4y agoThis does not really answer anything. As far as we can tell (modulo the precision of our instruments), it's likely there are many, many stars like our sun and planets like Earth, even if they are not in the majority. It also seems like life sprang up almost immediately after the Earth cooled enough for it to be feasible.
- elorant 4y agoIf the universe is filled with violent incidents then it doesn't really matter how probable life is. It will take an extreme amount of luck to manage to survive through all those events. The Fermi Paradox doesn't exclude life, just the frequency of it. You could still have plenty of alien civilizations out there, but at a frequency of one every a thousand galaxies or so because everything else gets wiped out every so often.
- Jedd 4y agoEven with 'one every thousand or so' (which feels like a fantastically speculative number) the law of big numbers suggests this does not, in fact, 'answer the Fermi paradox'. FWIW my (comparably uninformed by more than one data point) money is on mitochondria.
- elorant 4y agoIf you take the Drake equation and start speculating on a conservative way, the one in a thousand galaxies estimation is very probable. It could be mitochondria, or it could be that the universe is still too young to be safe for life on a mass scale. We're just lucky to be one of the first.