Someone Please Tell George Lucas "2012" Is Only a Movie

Lucas may well be regretting he's so famous that his utterings are instantaneoulsy transmitted to every corner of the blogosphere. Perhaps he and Spielberg should rethink their habit {NSFW - Kevin Smith alert} of inviting smart-alecks to their little get-togethers.

Done. (Kevin Smith should change his name to "Kevin NSFW Smith" to avoid any confusion.)

LOL agreed. The man can't complete a sentence without dropping the F-bomb at least once.

"Being taken on the Millennium Falcon" is obviously code for "work in Hollywood again", so Rogen had better enjoy The Green Hornet's box office while he can.

So everything worked out for the best in the end. What a great story!

yep, those nutty turn of the century europeans and thier desire to prove they were the most evolved human beings led to that.

What is the closest a supernova can be so it doesn't cause massive damage to Earth?

The closest star to ours is 4.3 light years away, but if it went supernova right now, it wouldn't affect Earth at all for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, unless a gamma ray burst happened to directly hit the planet.

If we dodge the GRB, then in a few hundred or thousand years, the shock wave and particulate matter from that star might intersect Earth's orbit, at which point it might nudge the planet into a different orbit, or it might simply dump more stellar dust than normal into the atmosphere, or it might have no effect at all. Since we've never actually witnessed the effects of supernovae on planetary bodies, at any distance, anywhere, we really have no way at all of knowing what, if anything, would happen.

But it's really the GRB that you'd have to be worried about, not a physical impact or interstellar fires. Gamma rays travel at the speed of light, so by the time you were aware of a GRB, it would already be here. Your skin wouldn't melt off, the oceans wouldn't boil away and the planet wouldn't be in any danger of suddenly exploding. Instead, the ozone layer would be strongly affected, depleted and thinned to such a degree that skin cancer rates would rise world-wide. Some species of plants and animals would be at risk of extinction, due to lack of tolerance or adaptability to higher UV levels. Smog and acid rain would increase as well, which also holds the potential to drive some species to extinction. And since some of those species which could disappear are directly linked to food sources used by humans and domesticated animals, starvation and hunger issues could rise significantly.

GRBs also emit very, very, very energetic particles, referred to as cosmic rays, which travel at nearly the same speed as gamma rays and light, and could penetrate our magnetosphere and contaminate living organisms (leading to radiation poisoning) and compound the atmospheric problems caused by the GRB itself, if it were relatively "close". But realistically, we don't actually know how close "close" is, or how much cosmic ray particulate GRBs generate, or how dense cosmic rays would have to be to overwhelm or penetrate our magnetosphere, or how cohesive they'd be over any given distance, or even if they'd follow the same path as the GRB. In fact, cosmic rays already rain down on our planet from all over the place (and are currently thought to be remnants of ancient supernovae), but they're mostly deflected by the magnetic field.

Even then, that's only under "ideal" circumstances. A GRB can emit as much energy in a fraction of a second as our sun can in its entire lifetime (10,000,000,000 years), and GRBs aren't actually infrequent events (they've become one of the best indicators of supernova activity and are a valuable tool for studying the universe), but in order for one to affect us that profoundly, it would have to be incredibly focused, so narrow as to equate to an interstellar laser (even that isn't really exact enough to explain how tightly focused the GRB would have to be, because even those apparently perfectly composed beams of light diffuse over distance). It would be like... shooting an arrow from the moon and hitting a bacterium on Earth. A GRB, and very likely the corresponding cosmic rays, would have to be that precise to affect us.

So essentially, the only answer your question is to say that distance isn't a factor. A star 10,000,000,000,000 light years away might have gone supernova and released a GRB aimed at Earth 9,999,999,999,999 years ago, and the effect would be the same as if that star 4.3 light years away went supernova 3.3 years ago. The supernova itself won't be what puts us at risk of extermination, it would be the GRB and corresponding cosmic rays, which aren't predictable and leave us no time or method of preparation.

The only star you really have to worry about exploding and destroying the planet is ours, Sol. And that's not going to happen. In a few billion years, the sun will enter its red giant phase, at which time Earth will be enveloped, charred to a cinder and consumed by the sun, leaving nothing to blow up dramatically.

Not from the explosion, but from the accompanying shock wave which accelerates particles to such a degree that they become cosmic rays (Fermi acceleration). The supernova ejecta itself would take so long to reach Earth that... well, matter expelled from a supernova travels at approximately 10% of the speed of light, so it would take over a decade for every light year of distance traveled (presuming no energy is lost or dissipated, which is unrealistic, but not something i know enough about to even attempt to factor). At a distance of 30 light years, you're looking at a minimum 322 years before the ejecta reached Earth. Even Proxima Centauri, if it were to blow right now, wouldn't "hit" us with material until ~41 years later, at the earliest.

Look at the Crab Nebula. In nearly 1000 years, ejecta has traveled less than 6 light years (11 light year diameter).

For cosmic radiation, as I said previously, where the responsible star goes supernova is less relevant than a host of other things, such as particle density or energy. If the source is visible, meaning the light has traveled far enough to reach Earth, then the cosmic rays are either also already at Earth, or they'll be there very shortly (on a universal time scale, of course).

I'm not putting any stock into the 30 light year guesstimate in that article. Matter from a supernova wouldn't be of any concern to us for so long that we'd find a solution, if one was necessary or possible, before it arrived, and cosmic radiation would be unavoidable regardless of how far away the source was.

Bosh and piffle, say I. Oh, and huzzah for bit.ly. This will show them!

Just don't forget to wrap your house in duct tape and garbage bags.

{Yet...}

Orion's arm will fall off.

I've said it before, but thank the gods for the Earth's spinning iron core.

It makes life so much easier.




-np

The wierdest thing? Apparently calling it a great load of bollocks doesn't get filtered =S

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

so no hope for joining a team with three other adventurous pilots and going on an outer space adventure and being hit by cosmic rays? *sigh* right, back to trying to get bit radioactive insects.

SCIENCE!

So true. Until the magnetic poles flip, then civilization crashes and burns and we all diiiiiiie.

Arthur C. Clarke once said that Jupiter's core may be a diamond the size of the Earth. In other news, one of the Real Housewives of Atlanta has already had a ring designed for it.

I wonder if it'll censor *****.

Yeah, it censors *****. So much for using French profanity