But who is worried? Nobody. Who is raising a call to action? Nobody. Why not? Because there is nothing to be done. This was pretty comical, it reads not unlike the premise of one of my favorite worst high-budget science fiction films to date. Long story short, yeah, the atmosphere is kept in place by the Earth's magnetic field, and here's what happens when your planet doesn't have a magnetic field. Like francopoli mentions in the resulting thread, this ain't the first time the field has flipped. Apparently nobody told Mikey. It generally happens every million years-ish, so if Earth's 4 billion years old, it's happened roughly thousands of times. For more details, see the thread. So is there cause for concern on the subject? Yes and no. Things will change, but any engineering challenges presented by the lack of a strong dipole magnetic field aren't immediate enough to raise any alarm bells from where I'm sitting. The timescale over which this will become a problem isn't as immediate as global warming, and perhaps more importantly, humans have not affected the process (unlike Anthropogenic global warming). He was kinda right though, there's nothing we can do about the magnetic field. Except make shitty sci-fi that's tangentially related to the subject. And as everyone here knows, the reason why we raise such a racket about global warming is because there are practices we humans can adopt to curb it. Edit: Also, I'd like to mention that I've never seen any analysis on the effects of magnetic field reversal on global temperature/climate. It's uhhh... it's a bit complicated.The other thing I will mention to you is that during the last 100 years, while the average temperature on the globe has increased just .3 C, the magnetic field of the earth declined by 10%. This is a much larger effect than global warming and potentially far more serious to life on this planet. Our magnetic field is what keeps the atmosphere in place. It is what deflects lethal radiation from space. A reduction of the earth’s magnetic field by ten percent is extremely worrisome.
I remember that story, and I apologize for ignoring your invitation to discuss the economics of magnetic pole reversal. It sounds ... expensive ... but maybe more a curiosity than a catastrophe. But just for those of us who do not carry giant telescopes in the trunk, or think that plasma is something you can donate to the Red Cross, I would like to confirm that gravity is what keeps the atmosphere in place, and the magnetosphere makes it harder for the sun to blast it away. I wonder if Crichton knew about this.here's what happens when your planet doesn't have a magnetic field
Someday we might get to this. I'd need to invest a lot of time researching for it, and god knows I don't have any.I remember that story, and I apologize for ignoring your invitation to discuss the economics of magnetic pole reversal.
"NASA Attack", hahah! Like I mentioned before, I have been thinking about it, and have come to a fairly deep-seated philosophical hurdle in the conversation. You have placed an infinite amount of worth/value on a human life, and I'm not so sure that I do (maybe I'm competing for Hubski's King Asshole title). I'll flesh this out better in the thread you linked to someday soon. Maybe.
If you are referring to feeding starving kids, I wouldn't say the value is infinite, but it is surely non-zero. The entire justification for collecting taxes to fund NASA is to pay for benefit X, right? Call X whatever you want, but it also has some non-zero value. I ask: who enjoys the benefit of X? Who pays for the benefit? When you get around to it. And don't miss the video!an infinite amount of worth/value on a human life