Cosmic Catastrophe

[freebeard]

This is off topic, but it's my thread.

So there's Anthropogenic Global Climate Change, and it represents some [possibly minor] threat.

But the Threat of AGCC? That another matter. Because.... it can be weaponized to depopulate the planet faster than mass climate refugees could ever do. Maybe in one generation.

Something Big Is Coming -- Russel Brand

The Union is one generation from turning into 'our democracy'.

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by freebeard

As soon as he mentioned Bright Insight in the intro I knew where it was headed.

Neither of them explain how the 6000 years ago greening appears in maps created in the 1600s.

I wonder what either of them would say about James Demeo's [Reichian] Saharasia. saharasia.org/

The bright line from climate change to neo-nazis.

Some old maps show Antarctica without ice, which is kind of weird.

[freebeard]

Has anyone mentioned that Anthropogenic Forcing of the Climate is hubristic?

Here's a story about that -- a discovery that Nature has a few cards up it's sleeve only to have it turn on whether it can be high-jacked for humankind's benefit:

phys.org/news/2022-06-secret-carbon-decisions-future.html

The secret carbon decisions plants are making about our future

New research from The University of Western Australia has revealed that plants make their own "secret" decisions about how much carbon to release back into the atmosphere via a previously unknown process, a discovery with "profound implications" for the use of plants as carbon stores.

Professor Harvey Millar, from UWA's School of Molecular Sciences and an author of the study published today in Nature Plants, said the findings mean plants of the future could be designed to meet the world's food needs while also aiding the environment.
...
"It shows that current discussions around carbon net zero and the role that crops, forests and grasslands can play, should also include conversations on what happens inside plants, alongside global financial decisions."

UWA researchers are now involved in long term international partnerships to find better ways to use energy from respiration in order to redirect carbon to biomass without limiting a plant's ability to grow and protect itself from pathogens or harsh environments.

[oil pan 4]

Should call it hubristic global warming. Works for me.

[freebeard]

Just today, Scott Adams was saying he thinks trees are smarter than people.

That's probably just the Psilocybin talking.

[freebeard]

This is off-topic, but I had brought up Scott Adams.

In order to keep my remaining brain cells awake I simultaneously listened to Scott Adams commenting on Artificial Intelligence on Is Google's AI, LaMDA, sentient? as I read garymarcus.substack.com: Nonsense on Stilts No, LaMDA is not sentient. Not even slightly.

I'm reminded of a quote from Godel Escher Bach on Zeno's paradox. Boys on one side of the dance floor, girls on the other. They halve the distance between them repeatedly; eventually they are close enough for 'all practical purposes'.

[aerohead]

NHK Television, Tokyo, Japan, mentioned this morning that, an increased incidence of solar flares has been forecasted for the near future, and industry warnings are being prepared in advance to give satellite GPS, and power plant operators, etc., as much advance warning as possible, once observations are made and trajectories questimated.

[freebeard]

Via Hacker News:

www.space.com: Wild solar weather is causing satellites to plummet from orbit. It's only going to get worse.
By Tereza Pultarova published about 9 hours ago
The change coincided with the onset of the new solar cycle, and experts think it might be the beginning of some difficult years.r

"In the last five, six years, the satellites were sinking about two and a half kilometers [1.5 miles] a year," Anja Stromme, ESA's Swarm mission manager, told Space.com. "But since December last year, they have been virtually diving. The sink rate between December and April has been 20 kilometers [12 miles] per year."

"There is a lot of complex physics that we still don't fully understand going on in the upper layers of the atmosphere where it interacts with the solar wind," Stromme said. "We know that this interaction causes an upwelling of the atmosphere. That means that the denser air shifts upwards to higher altitudes."

All spacecraft around the 250-mile altitude are bound to have problems, Stromme said. That includes the International Space Station, which will have to perform more frequent reboost maneuvers to keep afloat, but also the hundreds of cubesats and small satellites that have populated low Earth orbit in the past decade. Those satellites — a product of the new space movement spearheaded by private entrepreneurs pioneering simple, cheap technologies — are particularly vulnerable.
...
"Many of these [new satellites] don't have propulsion systems," Stromme said. "They don't have ways to get up. That basically means that they will have a shorter lifetime in orbit. They will reenter sooner than they would during the solar minimum."
...
By coincidence (or beginner's luck), the onset of the new space revolution came during that sleepy solar cycle. These new operators are now facing their first solar maximum. But not only that. The sun's activity in the past year turned out to be much more intense than solar weather forecasters predicted, with more sunspots, more coronal mass ejections and more solar wind hitting our planet.

"The solar activity is a lot higher than the official forecast suggested," Hugh Lewis, a professor of engineering and physical sciences at the University of Southampton in the U.K. who studies the behavior of satellites in low Earth orbit, told Space.com. "In fact, the current activity is already quite close to the peak level that was forecasted for this solar cycle, and we are still two to three years away from the solar maximum."

It turns out the Starlink constellation orbits higher than the International Space Station. I did not know that.

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by aerohead

NHK Television, Tokyo, Japan, mentioned this morning that, an increased incidence of solar flares has been forecasted for the near future, and industry warnings are being prepared in advance to give satellite GPS, and power plant operators, etc., as much advance warning as possible, once observations are made and trajectories questimated.

Anyone aware of the 11 year sun spot cycle could have told you that.

[freebeard]

By coincidence (or beginner's luck), the onset of the new space revolution came during that sleepy solar cycle. These new operators are now facing their first solar maximum. But not only that. The sun's activity in the past year turned out to be much more intense than solar weather forecasters predicted, with more sunspots, more coronal mass ejections and more solar wind hitting our planet.

.