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New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

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Re: New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

#131

Baseless wild speculation time: I don't think the timing quite matches up, but the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck is a little close to this. What if radiation from the sun actually sterilized something like 90% of neolithic men? Is that possible? This creates a selection pressure for men whose sperm just happens to be resistent to the sun's radiation to get with as many women as possible. So any groups that don't…

How could that worldwide event affect just humans and not any of our close relatives?

Re: New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

#132

Baseless wild speculation time: I don't think the timing quite matches up, but the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck is a little close to this. What if radiation from the sun actually sterilized something like 90% of neolithic men? Is that possible? This creates a selection pressure for men whose sperm just happens to be resistent to the sun's radiation to get with as many women as possible. So any groups that don't…

I'd never even heard of this until today, but from looking it up, it seems speculated this happened nearer to the dawn of civilization, like 5000-7000 BCE at worst, nowhere near 12000 BCE.

Re: New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

#133

Baseless wild speculation time: I don't think the timing quite matches up, but the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck is a little close to this. What if radiation from the sun actually sterilized something like 90% of neolithic men? Is that possible? This creates a selection pressure for men whose sperm just happens to be resistent to the sun's radiation to get with as many women as possible. So any groups that don't…

How would some sperm be resistant to radiation? Like what is the physical difference in that sperm that resists radiation? Your entire supposition rests on this being possible.

Re: New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

#134

Baseless wild speculation time: I don't think the timing quite matches up, but the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck is a little close to this. What if radiation from the sun actually sterilized something like 90% of neolithic men? Is that possible? This creates a selection pressure for men whose sperm just happens to be resistent to the sun's radiation to get with as many women as possible. So any groups that don't…

How would some sperm be resistant to radiation? Like what is the physical difference in that sperm that resists radiation? Your entire supposition rests on this being possible.

Being inside a cave or underwater maybe.

Re: New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

#135
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a bit pessimistic? Assuming machine natural language understanding and general reasoning improves dramatically (which seems possible, based on recent history), it is likely that (given that we still have the data) at some point in the future anyone will have the ability to acquire these skills, or that machine agents will be skilled enough to guide human or other types of agents to do things.

The post is about solar events, good luck getting machine agents working in case this happens... It is pessimistic yes, but what in recent history did happen to not have a pessimistic outlook on things?

The only things impacted would be long powerlines, not discrete electronics components, only things that look like very big antennas will have issues.

Re: New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

#136
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that the farther in the future you go, the less likely it is that any existing population will know how to fix what breaks? That strikes me as oddly pessimistic, and frankly unlikely.

With the state of how the ai agents stuff already is, if you don't think that most tech jobs will be automated away in our lifetime, I don't what to tell you. Within 10-15 years, AI research automates itself and no one ever has a software engineering job ever again. I think sometimes of how crazy it would be if we could send GPT 4.5 in the past somehow, what effect that could have, just a magical almost all knowing b…

I feel like you're coming from a place where GPTs value lies only in coding. I use it for planning all the time, saving me hours per week.

For example, the security team gave me a list of 100s of policies that need to be implemented. I was able to dump that list in and get a rollout plan over the next two months in a matter of minutes. This would easily have taken me half a day before GPT.

Re: New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

#137
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 3 month old son is twice as big as he was when he was born. He's on track to weigh 7.5 trillion pounds by age 10!

do you see meaningful reasons for it to not get there or are you just making a snarky comment

Computing power requirements and the fact that my subjective appraisal of the performance of these LLMs doesn't match the insane scaling curves that AI companies put out showing that their capabilities double every 6 months. Even if a 100x increase in computing power could equal a software engineer (and that's far from certain), that would be more expensive than a software engineer.

But really the burden of proof is on you here since you are making extraordinary claims of AI superintelligence replacing all jobs in 10-15 years. You are making the trillion pound baby argument, so you need to back it up.

Re: New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

#138
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guy once wrote a whole book about that. Unfortunately he started randomly killing people.

I don't condone what he did, but... 1. His intention wasn't to destroy in order to build resilience. 2. His targets weren't random.

I'm dense. Who are you two talking about?

Re: New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would some sperm be resistant to radiation? Like what is the physical difference in that sperm that resists radiation? Your entire supposition rests on this being possible.

Being inside a cave or underwater maybe.

[deleted]

Re: New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would some sperm be resistant to radiation? Like what is the physical difference in that sperm that resists radiation? Your entire supposition rests on this being possible.

Being inside a cave or underwater maybe.

I assume you mean that some humans happened to be in a protected place during a critical period... rather than some weird practice of (effective!) delayed artificial insemination using miraculous pottery.
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