Cataclysmic' solar storm hit Earth around 2687 years ago, ancient tree rings reveal

[Admin]

If this colossal solar storm hit our technologically advanced world the effects would have been devastating.

Cataclysmic' solar storm hit Earth around 2687 years ago, ancient tree rings reveal : Read more

 

[m4n8tpr8b]

These space weather events are so rare that only 6 have been detected in the past 14,500 years, the most recent of which occurred just between 664 and 663 BCE.

You copied a mistake from the UofA press release. However, as correctly told in the actual scientific paper, there have been two more recent events in 774–775 CE and 993–994 CE.

EDIT: I see the mistake has been corrected both the Space.com article and its source, the UofA press release.

 

[Meteoric Marmot]

It would be useful to know if these events happened at the peak of the solar cycle, but I'm assuming there's no way to discern that so far into the past. Unless there's a low-amplitude background 11-year cycle imposed on the data from CMEs?

 

[m4n8tpr8b]

There is an 11,400-year reconstruction of sunspot numbers based on tree ring & radiocarbon data which doesn't resolve solar cycles but has 10-year bins. Below are the reconstructed mean sunspot numbers for the ten-year bins containing the five identified Miyake events within that period:

7176 BCE: 21.1 +/-10.8
5259 BCE: 7.1 +/- 8.0
664–663 BCE: 5.6 +/-7.1
774–775 CE: 8.9 +/-7.1
993–994 CE: 14.9 +/-8.1

Most of these values are for low mean sunspot activity. The mean number of recent cycles was multiples of even the mean for the ten-year bin containing the 7176 BCE event.

 

[fj.torres]

The sun is to all appearances a relative calm and stable star when compared to the majority of similar stars. Red dwarfs in particular are way more active.
What for the sun look to be rare events like Carrington and Miyake storms look to be regular if not frequent on most studied stars. Worse is possible.

Doesn't bode well for the SETI crowd.
And that is before Exoplanet Size distribution and orbital mechanics are factored in.
The case for rare Earth theory grows stronger almost daily.

 

[danR]

The sun is to all appearances a relative calm and stable star when compared to the majority of similar stars. Red dwarfs in particular are way more active.
What for the sun look to be rare events like Carrington and Miyake storms look to be regular if not frequent on most studied stars. Worse is possible.

Doesn't bode well for the SETI crowd.
And that is before Exoplanet Size distribution and orbital mechanics are factored in.
The case for rare Earth theory grows stronger almost daily.

The answer to the Fermi Paradox, rather than being a needle in a haystack, is turning into an embarrassment of riches:

Asteroid strike
AGW+willful ignorance
Super-Carrington event
Nuclear War
Unregulated-LLM insanity
Presumption of technological/social resilience

 

[fj.torres]

The answer to the Fermi Paradox, rather than being a needle in a haystack, is turning into an embarrassment of riches:

Asteroid strike
AGW+willful ignorance
Super-Carrington event
Nuclear War
Unregulated-LLM insanity
Presumption of technological/social resilience

Some of the "great filters" assume a *technological* civilization was able to rise up to start with.

A number of the emerging hurdles can prevent the emergence of anything but the most basic forms of life.

Instead of throwing up made up, wishful thinking numbers into the drake equation, the proper first step is identifying a significant number of stable sun-sized stars. Then identify the system planets and see how many reside in the habitable zone, have an atmosphere, and what kind of an atmosphere.
Then try to figure out how long that planet has been habitable.
Because for most of its 4.54B years, Earth itself was not habitable by our standards. Multicellular organisms only go back 600M years.

And then there is the matter of intelligence and its survival. The human lineage can be traced to a population bottleneck of a few hundred specimens. Entire lineages of hominids died out despite intelligence level comparable to homo sapiens sapiens. They didn't last long enough to develop any kind of civilization. And even today, there are pockets of humanity that never developed any but the most basic form of civilization.

By every known measure, we are outliers on a barely habitable planet in an oddball planetary system around an unusual stable star. Most stars are binaries. Most stars are red dwarfs. Even the sun's neighborhood in the galaxy is unusual within a low density bubble created by supernova explosions.

We don't know enough to be even pretending to know why we exist , much less wondering why we seem to be alone. Occams Razor suggests that absent indisputable evidence to the contrary, we appear to be alone because we are alone.

As we work to learn more and more about our place in the universe and how we got here, the evidence piling up points to us being a low probability outcome, lucky to have survived even this far.

And we're not done; it is just that now we can start worrying about surviving our own Great Filters.

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

A Miyaki event produces an order of magnitude more C14 than the technology interrupting Carrington event (~ 10 % vs 1 % annual increase).

You copied a mistake from the UofA press release. However, as correctly told in the actual scientific paper, there have been two more recent events in 774–775 CE and 993–994 CE.

The paper is hard to read but it lists six events and then refer to them as Miyake type events (and mentions several other smaller events).

Since that time, there have been numerous studies confirming these two events [e.g., 6,7,8,9] as well as identifying additional events at ca. 660 BCE10, 5259 BCE, 7176 BCE11 and 12,450 BCE12. Six of these events are clearly tied to solar cosmic-ray events, as 10Be has been independently measured at these times in ice cores13,14,15, and they have been termed “Miyake Events” (ME). Other smaller events not clearly tied to solar proton events (as they are not confirmed independently by 10Be content in ice cores) have also been reported.

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

The case for rare Earth theory grows stronger almost daily.

The "rare Earth" filters are daft since they are untestable. just add more factors until you get the answer you want to have. Almost as dumb as calling the opposite to Fermi's answer to "where are they" his "paradox". Fermi noted that we don't know if interstellar travel is possible, until we do there is no paradox.

The evolution process that split biology from geology was easy, both rapid and strongly diversifying. The ~ 4.3 billion year old half alive first cells were already at ~ 4.2 billion years ago an advanced DNA LUCA that lived in an ecology of other cell populations and viruses. [Weiss, M., Sousa, F., Mrnjavac, N. et al. The physiology and habitat of the last universal common ancestor. Nat Microbiol 1, 16116 (2016). Moody, E.R.R., Álvarez-Carretero, S., Mahendrarajah, T.A. et al. The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system. Nat Ecol Evol 8, 1654–1666 (2024).]

Here we infer that LUCA lived ~4.2 Ga (4.09–4.33 Ga) through divergence time analysis of pre-LUCA gene duplicates, calibrated using microbial fossils and isotope records under a new cross-bracing implementation. Phylogenetic reconciliation suggests that LUCA had a genome of at least 2.5 Mb (2.49–2.99 Mb), encoding around 2,600 proteins, comparable to modern prokaryotes. Our results suggest LUCA was a prokaryote-grade anaerobic acetogen that possessed an early immune system. Although LUCA is sometimes perceived as living in isolation, we infer LUCA to have been part of an established ecological system.

So life cannot be rare, if the universe is habitable.

That Earth is likely alone or at best with very rare analogs is likely not due to "filters" but because evolution of specific traits, such as language capable species, in a combinatorially diversifying branch process happens once in a blue moon.

 

[fj.torres]

The "rare Earth" filters are daft since they are untestable. just add more factors until you get the answer you want to have. Almost as dumb as calling the opposite to Fermi's answer to "where are they" his "paradox". Fermi noted that we don't know if interstellar travel is possible, until we do there is no paradox.

The evolution process that split biology from geology was easy, both rapid and strongly diversifying. The ~ 4.3 billion year old half alive first cells were already at ~ 4.2 billion years ago an advanced DNA LUCA that lived in an ecology of other cell populations and viruses. [Weiss, M., Sousa, F., Mrnjavac, N. et al. The physiology and habitat of the last universal common ancestor. Nat Microbiol 1, 16116 (2016). Moody, E.R.R., Álvarez-Carretero, S., Mahendrarajah, T.A. et al. The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system. Nat Ecol Evol 8, 1654–1666 (2024).]

So life cannot be rare, if the universe is habitable.

That Earth is likely alone or at best with very rare analogs is likely not due to "filters" but because evolution of specific traits, such as language capable species, in a combinatorially diversifying branch process happens once in a blue moon.

I wasn't referring to the rare earth factors as filters.

Just that the proponents of the Great Filters are pre supposing that technical civilizations are common enough for them to come into play. With no evidence to suggest any of the pre requisites are met.