The cliff's edge

The universe is a dangerous place.

Much of what we've created -- the whole superstructure of civilized life, really -- is built to give us a sense of security.  And it works, or well enough.  During much of human history, we were one bad harvest, one natural disaster, one epidemic from starvation, disease, and death.  Our ancestors were constantly aware that they had no real security -- probably one of the main drivers of the development of religion.

The world is a capricious, dangerous place, but maybe the gods will help me if only I pray hard enough.

When the Enlightenment rolled around in the eighteenth century, science seemed to step in to provide a similar function.  Maybe the world could be tamed if we only understood it better.  Once again, it succeeded -- at least partially.  Industrial agriculture and modern medicine certainly saved millions of lives, and have allowed us to live longer, healthier lives than ever before.  Further reassuring us that it was possible to make the universe a secure, harm-free place for such creatures as us.

And we still have that sense, don't we?  When there's a natural disaster, many people respond, "Why did this happen?"  There's an almost indignant reaction of "the world should be safe, dammit."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons svantassel, Danger Keep Away Sign, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This is why in 2012 a judge in Italy sentenced six geologists to six years in prison and a hefty fines for failing to predict the deadly 2009 L'Aquila earthquake.  There was the sense that if the best experts on the geology of Italy didn't see it coming... well, they should have, shouldn't they?  

That in the present state of our scientific knowledge, it's not possible to predict earthquakes, didn't seem to sway the judge's mind.  "The world is chaotic, dangerous, and incompletely understood" was simply too hard to swallow.  If something happened, and people died, there had to be someone to blame.  (Fortunately, eventually wiser heads prevailed, the charges were thrown out on appeal, and the geologists were released.)

In fact, I started thinking about this because of a study out of the University of California - Riverside that is investigating a technique for predicting earthquake severity based on the direction of propagation of the shock wave front.  This can make a huge difference -- for example, an earthquake on the San Andreas Fault that begins with failure near the Salton Sea and propagates northward will direct more energy toward Los Angeles than one that begins closer in but spreads in the opposite direction.

The scientists are using telltale scratch marks -- scoring left as the rocks slide across each other -- to determine the direction of motion of the quake's shock wave.  "The scratches indicate the direction and origin of a past earthquake, potentially giving us clues about where a future quake might start and where it will go," said Nic Barth, the paper's lead author. " This is key for California, where anticipating the direction of a quake on faults like San Andreas or San Jacinto could mean a more accurate forecast of its impact...  We can now take the techniques and expertise we have developed on the Alpine Fault [in New Zealand] to examine faults in the rest of the world.  Because there is a high probability of a large earthquake occurring in Southern California in the near-term, looking for these curved marks on the San Andreas fault is an obvious goal."

The thing is, this is still short of the ultimate goal of predicting fault failure accurately, and with enough time to warn people to evacuate.  Knowing the timing of earthquakes is something that is still out of reach.

Then there's the study out of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research that found that the Sun and other stars like it are prone to violent flare-ups -- on the average, once every century.  These "superflares" can release an octillion joules of energy in only a few hours.

The once-every-hundred-years estimate was based on a survey of over fifty-six thousand Sun-like stars, and the upshot is that so far, we've lucked out.  The last serious solar storm was the Carrington Event of 1859, and that was the weakest of the known Miyake Events, coronal mass ejections so big that they left traces in tree rings.  (One about fourteen thousand years ago was so powerful that if it occurred today, it would completely fry everything from communications satellites to electrical grids to home computers.)

The problem, once again, is that we still can't predict them; like earthquakes, we can know likelihood but not exactitude.  In the case of a coronal mass ejection, we'd probably have a few hours' notice -- enough time to unplug stuff in our houses, but not enough to protect the satellites and grids and networks.  (If that's even possible.  "An octillion joules" is what is known in scientific circles as "a metric shit tonne of energy.")

"The new data are a stark reminder that even the most extreme solar events are part of the Sun's natural repertoire," said study co-author Natalie Krivova.  "During the Carrington event of 1859, one of the most violent solar storms of the past two hundred years, the telegraph network collapsed in large parts of northern Europe and North America.  According to estimates, the associated flare released only a hundredth of the energy of a superflare.  Today, in addition to the infrastructure on the Earth's surface, especially satellites would be at risk."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to scare you.  In my opinion, the point is to emphasize the fragility of life and of our world, and to encourage you to work toward mitigating what we can.  No matter what we do, we'll still be subject to the vagaries of geology, meteorology, and astrophysics, but right now we are needless adding to our risk by ignoring climate change and pollution, and encouraging the ignorant and ill-founded claims of the anti-vaxxers.  (Just yesterday I saw that RFK Jr., who has been nominated as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is pursuing the de-authorization of the polio vaccine -- an extremely low-risk preventative that has saved millions of lives.)

Life's risky enough without adding to it by listening to reckless short-term profit hogs and dubiously sane conspiracy theorists.

My point here is that the chaotic nature of the universe shouldn't freeze us into despairing immobility; it should galvanize us to protect what we have.  The unpredictable dangers are a fact of life, and for most of our evolutionary history we were unable to do much about any of them.  Now, for the first time, we have figured out how to protect ourselves from many of the risks that our ancestors faced every day.  How foolish do we as a species have to be to add to those risks needlessly, heedlessly, rushing toward the edge of the cliff when we have the capacity simply to stop?

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Lights out

Regular readers of Skeptophilia may recall a post I did about a year ago about the Miyake Events, seven wild solar storms that occurred over the past ten thousand years that were powerful enough to alter the atmosphere's carbon-14 balance, leaving distinct traces in the composition of tree rings.  The last, and the only one that occurred during modern times, was the 1859 Carrington Event, which (even though it was one of the weakest of the recorded Miyake Events) was bad enough to short out telegraph lines, causing sparking and numerous fires, and triggered auroras as far south as the Caribbean.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Arctic light - Frank Olsen, Aurora Borealis I, CC BY-SA 3.0]

If anything like this happened today, it would be nothing short of catastrophic for the entire technological world, and I can say with little fear of contradiction that we are completely unprepared for any such eventuality.  A Miyake Event would very likely cause a near-total collapse of electrical grids, massive failure (or complete destruction) of satellites, and power surges in electrical wires that would almost certainly trigger widespread fires in businesses and residences.  Computers -- from home computers to massive mainframes -- would be fried.  Airline navigation systems and air traffic control would shut down pretty much immediately.  The disruption, and the cost, would be astronomical.

Well, a paper last week in The Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences describes evidence of a solar storm 14,300 years ago that makes the known Miyake Events look like gentle spring zephyrs.

The study focused on a site containing partially-fossilized tree trunks along the banks of the Drouzet River in Hautes-Alpes département, France, up in the Alps near the city of Gap, the location of which is coincidentally only ten miles from the tiny village (St. Jean-St. Nicolas) where my great-grandfather was born.  The carbon-14 levels in one ring in the tree trunks indicate the most powerful solar storm on record, consistent with a coronal mass ejection hundreds of times more powerful than the Carrington Event.

The worst part is that no one knows what causes solar storms.  They show no apparent periodicity -- the spacing between the known Miyake Events varies from a little over two hundred years to well over four thousand.  Even more alarming is that solar astronomers don't know if there's any warning prior to the storm occurring, or if we'll just be sitting here on our computers looking at funny pictures of cats, and suddenly be engulfed in a shower of sparks.

The damage from even a weak Miyake Event -- not to mention the one 14,300 years ago that was the subject of last week's paper -- is hard even to guess at.  "Extreme solar storms could have huge impacts on Earth," said Tim Heaton of the University of Leeds, who co-authored the study.  "Such super storms could permanently damage the transformers in our electricity grids, resulting in huge and widespread blackouts...  They could also result in permanent damage to the satellites that we all rely on for navigation and telecommunication, leaving them unusable.  They would also create severe radiation risks to astronauts."

Also unknown is how long it would take to repair the damage.  A conservative estimate is months.  Can you imagine?  Months with no computers, no email, no cellphones, no texting.  No online banking or business transactions.  No travel by airplane except for short hops.  No GPS.  No satellite contacts for television or radio... or national defense.  Restoring electrical grids would undoubtedly be first priority, and they'd likely be easier to repair, but still -- probably weeks with no electricity.

The result would be chaos on an unprecedented scale.

We've become so dependent on our high-tech world that it's hard to imagine what it would be like if suddenly it all just... went away.  I'm reminded of the last scenes of the brilliantly funny (if dark) Simon Pegg movie The World's End, where it turns out that the whole technological shebang is being run by a moderately malign intelligence (played to weary, long-suffering perfection by Bill Nighy) called The Network, who argues that humans need someone smart in control because we're just too idiotic to manage on our own:

The Network:  We are trying...

Gary:  Nobody's listening!

The Network:  If you'd only...

Gary:  Face it!  We are the human race, and we don't like being told what to do!
The Network:  Just what is it you want to do?

Gary:  We wanna be free!

Andrew: Yeah!

Gary:  We wanna be free to do what we wanna do!

Andrew:  Yeah!

Gary: We wanna get drunk!

Steven: Yeah!

Gary:  And we wanna have a good time!  And that's what we're gonna do!

The Network:  It's pointless arguing with you.  You will be left to your own devices.

Gary (incredulous that he's actually won the argument):  Really?

The Network:  Yeah.  Fuck it.

At which point The Network shuts down -- taking all of the world's technology with it.

Well, it looks like we might not need to fight The Network to destroy the whole superstructure of electronics we depend upon -- all it'd take is one good solar storm, and it'll be lights out for the foreseeable future.

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A real cosmic storm

When I was a kid, I absolutely loved the show Lost in Space.

Not only did I think the stories were exciting, there was the comic relief from Dr. Smith (overacted by Jonathan Harris) and the fact that I had a life-threatening crush on Judy Robinson (played by Marta Kristen).  Now, with the perspective of time, I'm struck by how ridiculous most of the plots were, and also how fast and loose they played with science, even stuff that was known and understood at the time.  A few of the goofier ones:

• A comet making a close pass to the Jupiter 2, and Professor Robinson explaining how they'd be okay as long as they "didn't get too close to the comet's extreme heat and light"
• An episode where they ended up going faster than the speed of light because of "chemical impurities in the fuel," and the result was going back in time
• A character who was involved in an accident which damaged his heart, so the aliens removed his heart and replaced it with a lettuce heart, thereby turning him into a half-human, half-plant
• An alien who gets the Robot drunk by pouring tequila on his circuit boards

A recurring theme was the sudden appearance of a "cosmic storm."  What about them was "cosmic" was never explained, because usually all that happened is there was about forty-five seconds of wind, which blew around styrofoam rocks and stage props made of cardboard, and the Robot went around flailing his claws and shouting "Danger!  Danger!  A cosmic storm!"  Whatever these cosmic storms were supposed to be, they always heralded the appearance of one or more aliens, which included an extraterrestrial biker gang, a space cowboy, a magician (played by Al Lewis, best known for his depiction of Grandpa on The Munsters), a pirate (complete with an electronic parrot), a bunch of hillbillies (whose spacecraft looked like a wooden shack with a front porch), and in one extremely memorable episode, Brünhilde, who proceeded to yo-to-ho about the place, resplendent in a Viking helmet and riding a cosmic horse who unfortunately appeared to be made of plastic.

What's kind of a shame about all this is that the writers missed an opportunity (well, three seasons' worth of opportunities, really) to use actual science as a plot point.  Because there are cosmic storms, or at least something like them; they're called coronal mass ejections, and occur when a blob of plasma erupts off the surface of the Sun.  Small ones happen pretty much every day, but some of these things are freakin' huge, most notably the "Carrington Event" of 1859, which if it occurred today would have fried satellites and knocked out most of the world's power grid.  (As is, it caused sparking from telegraph lines that resulted in a number of fires.)

It turns out that even the Carrington Event is on the small side of what CMEs are capable of, judging by a paper last week in Nature Astronomy.  Scientists at the University of Colorado were studying a star called EK Draconis, which is rather like the Sun except much younger, and they saw it produce a CME that was ten times more powerful than anything we've ever seen the Sun do.  As it left the surface of the star, the burst of plasma was traveling well over a million kilometers an hour.

Any planet in the way would be in serious trouble.  Some scientists believe that a CME of that magnitude might be part of why Mars has such a thin atmosphere; a large CME aimed in its direction could well have stripped most of its atmosphere away.  

The question, of course, is, whether the Sun is capable of such an outburst.  The answer is "we're not sure, but probably."  Like I said, EK Draconis is fairly Sun-like; but it's far earlier along in its stellar evolution, and is more or less what the Sun looked like 4.5 billion years ago.  So its massive CME could be because it's in its turbulent youth, and the Sun has now settled down into comfortable middle age so it won't be quite so likely to blow plasma in our general direction.  But even so, the Carrington Event shows that the Sun is still capable of some serious pyrotechnics.  At present, there's no way to predict when they'll happen, or where on the Sun's surface; to do significant damage, the CME would have to be aimed toward the Earth.  We do know they're connected with the eleven-year sunspot cycle.  Solar flares and other surface disturbances are more common when sunspots are at their maximum (the next solar maximum is predicted to be in 2024).  But lots of sunspot cycle maximums come and go without any catastrophic CMEs, so there is still no sure way to predict the turbulence that precedes the storm.

The authors write:

Our findings can therefore provide a proxy for the possible enormous filament eruptions on young solar-type stars and the Sun, which would enable us to evaluate the effects on the ancient, young Solar System planets and the Earth, respectively.  Further, it is also speculated that stellar mass loss due to filament eruptions/CMEs can affect the evolutionary theory of stellar mass, angular momentum and luminosity more importantly than can stellar winds.  At present, frequency and statistical properties of CMEs on solar-type stars are unknown, but important insights into these factors will be obtained by increasing the number of samples in the future.

So I think we can all agree that this is much more impressive than Lost in Space-style cosmic storms, even without the alien Vikings and what-have-you.

It also highlights how powerful and unpredictable our universe can be.  On a calm, sunny day, it's easy to forget what a turbulent inferno the Sun actually is.  Me, I think it's a good idea when humans are reminded periodically that on the universal scale, we're really small.  There are potential disasters we can't predict or prevent -- CMEs being one example -- but maybe if we have impressed upon us how vulnerable we are, how dependent on our clement world, we'll finally start taking better care of what we have and averting the disasters we can prevent.

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I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

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