A few trivia items from the BBC QI elves: "Jupiter’s magnetic field has two south poles." "Roughly every 11 years, the magnetic field of the sun reverses, north becomes south, and south becomes north. The same thing happens on Earth, but only about once every 300,000 years." "The magnetic North Pole is moving about 55km per year at the moment. Last year it wandered over the international dateline and ended up in the…
Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?
101–110 of 133 posts
Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you say the pressure conditions can be recreated for milliseconds, is this using a diamond anvil or some other technique? Beyond that, I just wanted to thank you for this post, and your reply to someone else higher up in the thread. Reading the views of subject matter experts is what drew me here in the first place.
Diamond anvil tech is just advancing into the realm where the pressure of the surface of the outer core can be held for long enough for chemical reactions to reach equilibrium. That is, to be highly useful to see what might be happening in the core. Heating up to high temperatures at the same time is an added difficulty and can only be done for a shorter time periods. I'm not an expert on diamond anvils, but follow t…
Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nukes and solar flares can be protected against: just seal your electronics in a good faraday cage. Putting them in an underground bunker in a lead-lined room should do it. Your paper books won't last as long: today's paper is acidic and falls apart within a century.
I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted. I have begun to wonder if I am the only sane man remaining. Can the others not see?
Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah whoever made this site is bat-shit crazy. But there is tons of great information here. Anything from making soap the old fashioned way to brushed and brushless DC motors. Its really cool and wouldn't be the worst thing to have printed off and saved in a fallout shelter.
I've always thought it might be cool to package up a bunch of literature on a stack of SD cards and package them with a low power e-ink reader and a solar panel to charge it, then market as a "reboot civilization" kit. The hardest part is actually finding a generic e-ink reader with an sd card slot that doesn't cost $500. It shouldn't need to run full android, just show a PDF or TXT, that's all it needs to do. An off…
Finding a e-ink reader like that is very easy: just go to eBay, and grab any of the used Nook Simple Touch on sale. Can be had for less than $20 if you look around, and it has an SD card slot.
Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone that has messed with a Raspberry Pi will tell you that you don't want to hang the hopes of humanity being rebooted on a consumer-grade SD card. And since I'm nit-picking, any scenario necessitating the rebooting of civilization might very well involve something that fries SD cards and takes the silicon in your solar panel with it (nukes, big solar flare thingy). Boy Scout Field Guide and an Army survival manua…
Nukes and solar flares can be protected against: just seal your electronics in a good faraday cage. Putting them in an underground bunker in a lead-lined room should do it. Your paper books won't last as long: today's paper is acidic and falls apart within a century.
Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always thought it might be cool to package up a bunch of literature on a stack of SD cards and package them with a low power e-ink reader and a solar panel to charge it, then market as a "reboot civilization" kit. The hardest part is actually finding a generic e-ink reader with an sd card slot that doesn't cost $500. It shouldn't need to run full android, just show a PDF or TXT, that's all it needs to do. An off…
http://thewikireader.com/ update: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-distribute-wikireade... I don't have one - my phone contains an offline wikipedia dump (including images), offline maps of the world including geological maps, medical manual, and my book collection, including things like http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/ . I've got a vague plan to download the primitive technology youtube videos too.
Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah whoever made this site is bat-shit crazy. But there is tons of great information here. Anything from making soap the old fashioned way to brushed and brushless DC motors. Its really cool and wouldn't be the worst thing to have printed off and saved in a fallout shelter.
I've always thought it might be cool to package up a bunch of literature on a stack of SD cards and package them with a low power e-ink reader and a solar panel to charge it, then market as a "reboot civilization" kit. The hardest part is actually finding a generic e-ink reader with an sd card slot that doesn't cost $500. It shouldn't need to run full android, just show a PDF or TXT, that's all it needs to do. An off…
(Probably other formats too, but epubs are all I use)
Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was a rabbit hole i did not need to spend the last 30 minutes on. For those who don't have the time like I didn't Organite is a substance made of resin metals and quartz that balances and harmonizes Bio-energy (known as orgone). Orgone is analogous to chi or prana and is a type of bio-energy that reverses the effect of entropy[0] It seems to be a mix of crystal healing and EMF grounding (also known as earthing)…
> It is, of course, completely bogus. So sure are you, hmmm??
Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?
#109As it says in the article, we don't have anything to fear at the surface. Reversals have never been associated with increased extinction. When the field does reverse, it becomes increasingly disordered with higher-order moments dominating. If I recall, the dipole moment of Earth's magnetic field is normally over 90% of the strength. The higher-order moments dissipate faster, so it doesn't reach as far into space.
Given there are lots of species that use the Earth's magnetic field for navigation this is highly surprising. Perhaps there have been mass extinctions but they're not readily found, or our timings are wrong so they don't appear synchronised? I wonder if there wouldn't be more seismic activity?
And (possibly) one directly for hunting: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/01/1...
Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://thewikireader.com/ update: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-distribute-wikireade... I don't have one - my phone contains an offline wikipedia dump (including images), offline maps of the world including geological maps, medical manual, and my book collection, including things like http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/ . I've got a vague plan to download the primitive technology youtube videos too.
So once "the end" comes, you'll be set for a good 4 hours before your phone runs out of battery?
Also, I do have a solar cell, but yeah, modern phones aren't really designed for post apocalyptic conditions surprisingly.
Fortunately, all that is also useful in tunnels, underground bars, the countryside and when travelling abroad.