On the topic of "Adams Event" and Hitchhikers, I actually find these topics really entertaining from a literary angle. Cave-dwelling post-apoc isn't a type I've done. Does anyone know of any works themed around magnetic breakdown? I've quite liked the Red Rising series which I guess is similar? Bobiverse/Enders Game/Hell Divers etc? Recommendations welcome :)
Been a while since I read them, and I don’t think it was magnetic reversal, but Silo series involves prolonged life in underground silos.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(series)
It’s driven by nuclear war, but check out Metro 2033 by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It takes place in the Moscow Metro where people live after a prolonged nuclear winter (with mutants). There is a subsequent video game series derived from the book.
I never understand this sentiment. I get that "we" is "the human species" but in practice it just means "some people." A magnetic pole reversal would be nobody's fault, but knowing that some humans survived off-planet wouldn't make me feel better about it.
I in turn don't understand this sentiment. What are you trying to say? That you don't care about the continued survival of humanity beyond your own demise? You would be perfectly happy for everyone to be wiped out the day after you die?
Hmm. Something like, "humanity serves humans, not the other way around." If there are no humans around to enjoy the fruits of humanity, I don't assume that something is lost or wasted.
The problem I have with the "eggs in a basket" line of thinking is that it raises extreme moral hazard to say we don't have to care about everyone as long as a few people are saved. Losing a basket of billions of eggs to save a dozen is cold comfort.
(Yes, I realize magnetic pole reversal isn't the same as nuclear holocaust, but I still don't feel my scepticism is misplaced.)
sigh But you have feelings now, and are presumably capable of having feelings about events beyond your immediate experience.
If someone offered you 5 bucks, with the caveat that if you take it then the Earth is destroyed the moment you die - you're a terrible person if you take the money.
(Incidentally, there's not really any difference between not experiencing something because you're dead, and not experiencing it because your back is turned. Are you fine with atrocities in general, provided you don't find out about them?)
I think it would be a great shame if the only self-aware life in the observable universe dies out before it can find out the mechanisms behind all of this.
Sometimes when I'm trying to doze off at night, I think about how strange our existence is. Not even the smartest people on this planet have any idea how or why the universe exists. We might never find out. We might be a simulation operated by higher beings, but that raises even more questions. Argh, what I would give to know.
Certainty without humans or other spacefaring life all other species on Earth will go extinct.
Does that really matter in the grand scheme of things or is it just ego?
edit: To take it further, without some super-intelligent / supernatural beings it seems likely all structure in the universe will eventually disappear due to a heat death or a big crunch. Does even that matter?
My take is that we are just too young to have any idea what really matters in the grand scheme so the best approach is just try to survive.
It would negatively affect virtually every value system ever created. If human extinction isn't "bad", then nothing is "bad". Anyone that nihilistic clearly lacks any framework to assign value judgements to anything, and therefore has no business participating in any decision-making discussion (such as "should we travel to the stars").
What would 'survival' look like if such an event would happen today. Large underground bunkers, with nuclear reactors for power, could be pretty self sufficient, but is there any less dystopian way we could survive?
UV wouldn't be much of an issue for concrete buildings, but anything plastic would be a no-no. How could we protect against other types of stellar particles?
Be worried, but don't assume this is an earth-ending event. How magnetic fields impact UV penetration is a complex process involving both physics and chemistry. One thing humans have proven very good at is modifying our atmosphere. Before we all retreat into caves we will try to boost our ozone layer. Artificial injection of ozone into the upper atmosphere is well within current technology. It isn't currently economical but would be cheaper than living like mole people.
And don't worry about nuclear power. Getting sufficient solar power won't be a problem with all those higher-energy particles getting through.
Survival just means we live long enough to reproduce. Humanity would be fine, have a child the die of skin cancer in everyone’s late 20s, life would just suck for any individual human though.
It would look like COVID a lot of the time: life indoors. There would also be a lot of protective clothing and probably an end to practices like sunbathing.
The real disaster would be in agriculture where climate shifts and increased UV would play havoc. A lot of people would starve and there would be refugee crises and wars all over the world. Indoor farming or farming under plastic sheeting shields would become a big thing in the developed world.
Much of the evidence of this event comes from tree rings. So at least those trees survived the event to tell the tale. Agriculture would certainly change but it wouldn't be over. A reordering of the climate would certainly change what is grown where but plants would still be able grow, that least that was what happened last time.
I dunno, surviving the isolation of lockdown from COVID-19 is challenging enough (as those who have had to live through strict lockdowns can confirm). Humans need more than water and food.
Magnetic reversal events are fairly common often happening multiple times within a million year period. All life has gone through this multiple times. It may cause some disruptions to some species but most will not really notice much change. I’m skeptical that a reversal would lead to the extinction of Neanderthals unless they were already on the brink of extinction already.
Our own civilization might suffer more as we are dependent on specialized agriculture that could be disrupted. At the very least you would want to invest in a good parasol and some sunglasses.
Underwater habitats could probably be made with plastic still. Under a few hundred feet, radiation will probably drop off enough to not cause damage. Of course corrosion becomes a new problem to fight.
>> Under a few hundred feet, radiation will probably drop off enough to not cause damage.
At a few hundred feet, a structure able to hold off the water pressure would probably be thick enough to hold off the radiation if installed on the surface. In rough numbers, the mass of air above us now is equivalent to about 10m depth of seawater. A few hundred feet, call it 100m, would be like having ten atmospheres worth of radiation absorption above us. We need not go that far. Relatively thin engineered coatings on glass/plastic sheets would be as effective at blocking the extra UV.
Isn't water a ridiculously effective radiation shield? I thought I saw a web comic once claiming that you could swim in a pool with radioactive waste and be just fine as long as you stayed X feet away, where X was on the order of a couple feet.
It is one of the better ones, at nuclear plants the spent fuel is typically kept in what amounts to swimming pools as a cheap way to shield from the radiation.
It depends on the exact nature of the radiation. Note those pools. The dangerous radiation is blocked very well, but you can still see the stuff in the tank because light passes through water. Electromagnetic radiation isn't blocked by water as effectively as alpha/beta particles.
True, the pictures look pretty eerie (I had a professor whose first career was in nuclear reactors and he liked to show us pics). I imagine radiation that's dangerous is dangerous because it can impact a human body at a high speed, and we're mostly water, so...
UV radiation is moving that the speed of light. So is infrared light, which is blocked by water rather well. What is dangerous are those things that are both fast and heavy, particles from radioactive decay.
It's sinking and raising of the continents that's the problem. There's little point in hiding in a underground bunker if that bunker ends up in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.
apparently Mars people have been cracking jokes for over 20 years wrt "Linux being used on Mars before anyone will ever use it on the Desktop", and now the joke isn't funny anymore.
further some unpatched and critical vulns in systemd might actually prevent Peserverance from fulfilling its mission. I propose we send Lennart Poettering personally and at once (!) on a mission to sort it out.
It’s amazing that so much ocean life has survived these transitions. That means a small percentage of those creatures that find the ocean’s surface using magnetic fields actually swim the wrong way and die for tens of thousands of years, until they are the ones going the proper way :)
I understand the usefulness of sensing the magnetic field to navigate north/south/east/west; what I find hard to believe is a need to use the magnetic field to navigate up/down.
It's expected that earth's magnetic polarity has reversed about 170 times during the last 76 million years[1]. I remember hearing a hypothesis that Mars could have lost its atmosphere due magnetic polarity reversal in some TV documentary for what its worth.
