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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

#61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None! The Sun has a forcefield called the heliosphere to protect it, and this protects the planets as well. This paper is arguing that the interstellar medium may have been dense enough to shrink the heliosphere to within the orbit of some planets, but it'd take a helluva lot more to shrink it down to the Sun's surface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere

I understand, but given the dramatic change I'd expect some things to "bend" a little. Perhaps literally, like solar flares? Does "holding them closer" increase/decrease surface temperature?

Fair enough, I'm sure "none" is a slight exaggeration.

Two effects I could see (but have no source for) are:

1. A slightly increased return radiation due to the increased proximity of the heliopause and the the increased collision rate with the denser interstellar medium. The radiation from this should reach the surface of the Sun and slightly increase surface temps, but this effect would be dwarfed by the amount of radiation already coming from the Sun itself.

2. A tighter coupling of the Sun's magnetism to the stellar wind and interstellar magnetic field. This would slow down the Sun's rotation slightly, and it if increased differential rotation it could cause an increase in solar flare activity.

Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago

#62
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I think that you're misunderstanding what I meant by a impact on the biosphere. We wouldn't see all new species. We might see some new genes in a few species, which would have started arriving around 3 million years ago in the genomic record, and would not be explained by the ordinary arrival of new genes through mutations, either because the arrival rate would be too high or the genes arriving would be too diffe…

The problem is that people confuse science with science fiction. Is the same problem each time somebody says the name "spider" here. Oh "Children of time" tell us all about how smart are spiders"... hem. Not. There aren't known spores found out of earth. Only on the books. But histories in those books aren't real. Biology is real. There is not any reason to assume that a earth fungus or a fern could made a spore able…

Hmm. This is not a productive conversation. Can we fix that?

Here are my concerns.

It's sounding like you have not worked much with genomics, given that you put "genomic experiments" in scare quotes, speak in terms of analogies with computer code, and don't seem to be aware of work in genomic archeology. We don't know exactly where random genes came from, but with mutation models we can indeed get some inkling about when a gene has arrived, and how it mutated. But your're acting like genomic archeology methods just don't exist, or as if you've never read even a paper in genomic archeology. Let me know if you want me to link you to papers here, that stuff is actually really cool.

You also ignored the idea that termination shock could help things get into the atmosphere, suggesting that you think about atmospheric entries in sciences fiction terms of "everything burns up", rather than considering all the possible physical trajectories that matter could take where it wouldn't burn up (especially if it's shielded by rock - more on this later).

You also make a bad assumption about the spores. They would need to survive millions of years in space, and they could have evolved in conditions much different from terrestrial ones, including in systems where space travel would have been routine.

You're also unaware of the xenobiological work here, and might not even think xenobiology is real biology. Namely, when you say there's no reason to think spores could survive space, you are either unaware of or discount the xenobiology work on spatial spores:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Panspermia%20spore&btnG...

For example, one of the papers in the list above suggests that 40 to 100% of bacteria would survive a planetary strike scattering them up into space. And that's bacteria! It turns out that tiny things are very very resistant against high accelerations, suggesting that spores might be able to make the landing too, especially if shielded by rock.

Then you're hand waving the idea that even if there was some biological contribution it would surely be wiped away by evolution and predators. Again, why? We're talking about microbes and fungi, which share their genes pretty prolifically. There are methods to look at a microbe population's genetics, backtrack the genes, calculate when they appeared and mutated, etc. A whole field of science you are just discounting.

There's there's no kind of precision to your hypothesizing, no citations or nods to existing work. It's impossible to have a scientific conversation like this - you are making pseudoscientific speculation of the kind that you're trying to fight.

It would be nice if you could say that you're not very interested in biology/genomics/xenobiology, and disengage the topic if you don't like theorizing, brainstorming, and consulting scientific literature. I understand that you are motivated to reduce the pseudoscience on HN, which is a noble goal. The problem is that you don't know enough science to tell science from science fiction / pseudoscience. And you're cramping my style, turning a potentially fun scientific conversation into pseudoscientific hand waving and muddling. I don't like that, and request a more scientific conversation from you if you please. We can have some kind of constructive and educational discussion if you want.

Either way I do hope that you have a good day!

Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago

#65
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you accept that we're all made of stardust, with a little sprinkling of ISM, it should make you feel more connected to the universe, not less. :)

The more I think about it the more I agree with you. I don't know why I initially felt unsettled but now that I'm thinking we might be able to actually detect if it happened (through advanced genomics techniques), I am starting to warm up to the theory. There's even a fun tie-in with stoned ape theory (which I don't endorse, but is a fun theory). In one version of the theory, humans eat magic mushrooms and become con…

I agree that it's a fun theory. I wouldn't discard it, considering mycelia are some of the strangest organisms we have on Earth.

Re: Possible exposure of Earth to dense interstellar medium 2-3M years ago

#66

Just a comment, I sent this to my advisor who was an astrophysicist a few years back (he and I are in plasma physics today) and here's something he pointed out, "[...]Abraham Loeb is about as controversial of a figure in astronomy as you can find. He is also the head of a UFO monitoring project and he still insists that the rod like object that telescopes saw pass through the solar system about a decade ago had an ex…

As a the child of 2 astrophysicists, I can affirm. This guy is most well known for generating the academia equivalent of clickbait (popular science).
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