Oddbean new post about login | logout What absolute clickbait fraud The Guardian is peddling. Meteorites add a near-continuous supply of conductive ions to the ionosphere, of greater aggregate mass than all the space junk. Most microwave backscatter is meteoritic sodium ions in the outer ionosphere, for example. Aluminum particles are conductive. Until they encounter the O- in the upper atmosphere. Alumina is a very poor conductor. Some aluminium particles will be too large to oxidize, those are also too large to remain suspended. If it was room temperature superconductors instead of aluminium, we still wouldn't care. Our ionosphere is not going anywhere, its been receiving conductive space junk on a massive scale for billions of years. And our magnetosphere is a dozen orders of magnitude too powerful for traces of plasma to affect. If Starfish Prime couldn't hurt it... The subject of the article knows all of this, even if the journalist does not. Someone is bitter about SpaceX, has zero professional pride, and is desperate for grant money. And knows well how innumerate and ignorant Guardian journalists are. He should run for public office instead...
i should just mention that there is a lot of instability in the earth's magnetic field, for a decade or so now it has been moving around a lot more than since records were kept, and that recent research has determined there is a cyclical polarity shift that propagates out from the centre of our galaxy that passes across us every 12500 years or so recently there has been strong signs of a greatly weakening field and a comensurate increase in stellar radiation getting to ground than normal as well, and increasing auroral activity even more emphatically than you are, all of that says that nothing that humans are doing matters one iota if the galactic field is gonna flip, we are just gonna have to roll with that, and learn how to live for several decades without electricity, while many of us get washed away or die of cancer (possibly the lack of poisoned food might reverse that trend even with increased radiation) they are just creating a cover story for phenomena that credible astrophysicists are already sounding alarm bells about and they want to make sure they get their doomsday bunkers in all the right places before the grids all fuse and the cities full of democrat voters suffer from more than a week of starvation and start eating each other
Ill have to read up on synchronised galactic field changes, but magnetic field reversal on Earth happens at least once every few million years. A reversal will suck, but I don't believe it would stop us using electricity, or even long-distance transmission. Induced currents would be annoying, but within tolerances for even distribution voltage. Venus has no intrinsic magnetic field, but it has an ionosphere and a weak induced field thanks to the action of the charged solar wind on its upper atmosphere. Ditto for radiation - there'll be an uptick, but ten tonnes per square meter of atmosphere is a pretty good shield even without a magnetosphere. Satellites would be f--ked completely, though...
it's not synchronized, it's like a spiral wave, propagating through all the ferromagnetic matter as it rotates... it's part of the reason why our galaxy is shaped this way, there are several other types of patterns that relate to the rotational velocity of the magnetic field yes, a pole shift will kill electricity because it entails the magnetic shield coming down and that means everything conductive is going to be blasted with massive amounts of solar energy, just like the recent big auroras the atmosphere is nothing without the magnetic field really, why do you think there is no obvious life on mars? magnetic field
We have an atmosphere roughly 2000x denser than Mars, so we win an induced field free of charge, and 10t/m2 of matter shielding if that fails. Not saying we'll be fine, but it'll be politics that kills us during a reversal, not physics.
Hit 0 too many times. Its 200x.
haha, politics no, it's not a reversal, it's a shift... the projections suggest the new poles will be somewhere around the carribean and somewhere in china, the rotation axis is going to be roughly 90 degrees that in west africa and the antipodes it has happened before, we know there was forests in antarctica once and maybe there will be again, and there is other parts of the world where this is clear, many fixated magnetic materials pointing the wrong direction, and i also would add, because i am quite sure that the mass of this planet has been increasing, and that all celestial bodies either eventually shatter or keep growing and become stars - so whatever happened 12k years ago is not gonna be the same inertial force as this time, or the time before it, due to differences in mass and thus the threshold force and how far that force can push us around anyway, the many ancient flood stories tell you something about what is coming, it's not just a pole shift it is also likely to induce changes in motion of meteor clusters like the taurids which will move differently due to moving poles as well anyhow, i for one look forward to not having these flickering lights in my face all the time for now it's where i work, and i would love it to be otherwise