I wonder what effect this would have had on the sun itself — not like blowing in a fire, apparently.
Vanishingly close to no effect at all. It's hard to have an effect on something you could throw planets at without harm.
Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago
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Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago
#32are there no tree fossils from that era that can show one part of the year being different from the rest? I remember reading that dinosaur meteorite was discovered to have fallen in spring by those marks surely regular pattern of getting in-out of heliosphere be noticeable?
Interesting question! From the Dendrochronology article on Wikipedia it seems we can at most go 14k years into the past with tree rings:
> Bard et al write in 2023: "The oldest tree-ring series are known as floating since, while their constituent rings can be counted to create a relative internal chronology, they cannot be dendro-matched with the main Holocene absolute chronology. However, 14C analyses performed at high resolution on overlapped absolute and floating tree-rings series enable one to link them almost absolutely and hence to extend the calibration on annual tree rings until ≈13 900 cal yr BP."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology?wprov=sfti1#C...
Interestingly it seems that tree ring chronologies can be mapped to increases in cosmic radiation named "Miyake events".
Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago
#33Are there fossil records that correspond to higher levels of dense interstellar medium radiation 2-3M years ago? Punctuated equilibrium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
Punctuated equilibrium is not about higher mutation rates or even faster evolution, but about long periods of _stasis_ interrupted by "normal rate" evolution due to an upset in the equilibrium such as a sudden geographic isolation of two populations.
Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago
#34Why does this make me feel a little dirty and exposed ? Like, who knows what kinda alien DNA strands or spores are carried by the ISM?! I wonder if it would be possible to track biodiversity increases caused by the transit? Assuming there is biological material in the ISM, perhaps some of it made it into our biosphere! Very fun!
Maybe it was a large cloud of mushroom spores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
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Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago
#35Reminds me of the plot of "Exit Earth" by Martin Caidin where humanity has to evacuate the planet in an ark to survive passage through an interstellar dust cloud. Martin Caidin is known more for "Cyborg", the book that was used as the basis for the TV show "The Six Million Dollar Man".
Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago
#36Wait are they arguing this is what caused the last ice age, essentially????
Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago
#37That's when the aliens in the cloud modified the genome of primates and set us on the course that is today.
Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago
#38That's when the aliens in the cloud modified the genome of primates and set us on the course that is today.
curse*
Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago
#39Wait are they arguing this is what caused the last ice age, essentially????
seems a decent explanation
Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago
#40Why does this make me feel a little dirty and exposed ? Like, who knows what kinda alien DNA strands or spores are carried by the ISM?! I wonder if it would be possible to track biodiversity increases caused by the transit? Assuming there is biological material in the ISM, perhaps some of it made it into our biosphere! Very fun!
> what kinda alien DNA strands or spores are carried by the ISM?
None that we are aware (and would be fried by the earth atmosphere probably).
> Would be possible to track biodiversity increases caused by the transit
An entirely new set of new forms of life appearing from nowhere and without any known ancestor in a small line of the "evolutive script" would not be missed. This is the opposite that we observe in that age. Life evolving for the ice age, yes. A glaciation just would force the organisms to evolve or die. There is not need of any alien gardener to explain this.