magnetic poles flipping. It happens every one in awhile.
When the magnetic poles last flipped was probably around 800,000 years ago, well within human history, but before civilization was advanced enough to record much about it.
It happened a few times earlier then that too, still with plenty of homosapaniens about.
So whatever its impact, its not an extinction event, although the period while its flipping probably does make us more vulnerable to certain stela activity.

Ergo, its probably not a good idea sunbathing as there will probably be an even higher chance of skincancer.

Wait, does that mean compasses will start pointing south now?

yup

Omg for reals?!

That'd be so cool! So when does it happen?

Found this on the web:
(source: here)

Can anyone confirm?

WRONG! the biggest estimates say that homo sapiens first started appearing 200 000 years ago. The most proof based ones say tell us of 120 - 150 000 years.

Also, the lack of a magnetic field would mean first that the solar wind be free to send some part of the atmosphere into space. Also, the amount of radiation received outside would be lethal, to not get ill from t you'd have to sit in shielded buildings.

However, if the magnetic field doesn't disappear entirely, we might "just" get off with a lot higher risks of skin cancer. And there will be major ecological trouble, with plants and animals dying out.

The magnetic shield is what's making life possible. If it goes away, earth becomes mars.

Ok so does life end in 2012 or doesn't it?

Unlikely.

Ok good. Because I want to be alive for when compasses start pointing south, it'd be so freaking awesome :D

Well, its more the in-between time where they start pointing all over the place. Thats "interesting".

meh, ok, Mr Pedantic :P
The homo genius or whatnot then.
We arnt that different.


Also, mass extinctions simply don't seem to align to magnetic pole reversals, so whatever happens, it dosnt significantly interfere with life.

Well, it's not about interfering with life, or even extinction, because as you pointed out pole reversals don't coincide with mass extinction.

However, all you need for big trouble for us if some of the solar wind gets through and ionizes the power lines. With a busted electricity supply system, humanity would get pushed into a dark age for months if not years. the giant transformers at switching stations take months to build, and no country on earth has enough backups.

Also, satellites in LEO (low earth orbit) may not be properly shielded for the event.
There is no proof for saying that humanity would die out, however our civilisation is in such a delicate state right now, that an event like that might ruin everything that has been built so far. Or significantly hinder it.

Mars Science Laboratory is freakin' awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyM1bgKWzng&fmt=
Destined to get to Mars in 2011

It's a huge rover armed with a laser capable of shooting rocks and using it's spectrometer to detect their composition from the thus generated cloud of plasma!!

here's a photo of this awesome monstrosity with chairs for comparison:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ty_chassis.jpg

3 meters long, weighing 900kilograms. It will be powered by rtg's that will provide up to 80years of electricity. These rtg's will generate 2.5 kWh per day, and 140 watts.

Here's a photo comparing the sizes of martian rovers so far, the smalles one is sojourner, measuring 65cm:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...omparison_.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ver-metric.jpg

From Universe to Multiverse. Are You Ready? (Dr. Michio Kaku)
http://digg.com/d311dsS
YouTube Video

Thought I'd share.

Stopped watching as soon as they started talking about god and religion. But until then it was interesting :) New big bangs within our own 3 dimensions?

They did?
Where?! He only humoured that dude, by speaking to him with a language he'd understand.
It's weird to me that people actually have theological issues over science. Stupid mediaeval mumbling.

Well I did say "as soon". As in, on the second. Maybe I should give it another chance :p

wow, I'm getting behind on the videos/info here, got so much to catch up on.
I've been busy reading a load more AR related things. I posted some of my own ideas in a paper, and been busy replying to folks. (some from the AR consortium others from Layer and other related companys....thankfully, everyone seems to be keen for an open-standard).

I also got invited by someone to try out Google Wave, so I've been busy playing about with some high-tech of my own :)
Wave is very buggy at the moment. I can see it being fundamentaly a massive step for online communications, and very usefull for augmented reality as well as countless other things....but at the moment its no where near as slick as gmail, and they might have a hard time saleing it to the public untill it is. Still, hopefully I'll have some time to get really stuck in.
----------

Anyway ways....I really wanted to post this;

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/0...l-manipulation

Amazing robot hand thing.
Very very fast and precise.

Cool.
And yes, that is big O_o

Not as cool as the robot hand, but still nifty;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_3i2Q7rRpI

Expect that in shops pretty soon.

Awesome, I intend to switch all mirrors with this thing.

Not exactly high-tech, but I like this as a social idea;
http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot....p?app_id=27014

Could work well combined with advark.

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/0...l-manipulation

Um, wth! This robotic hand is amazing! It can open and close in 1/10th of a second! It throws a cellphone in the air and then catches it flawlessly!

I think I might be replacing my hands and eyes someday....

Dude, I posted that a few posts up :P
And yes, its fantastic.

The camera tracking is also great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp8Y2yjV4fU

O_o
Its amazing this stuff can be done with a (relatively) cheap generic parts sold as a toy.

Wow it takes forever...

Where were mindstorms when I was a small kid though? :(
Man I want a hole box of them!

I used to have a Lego Technique Control Center.
No where near as cool as mindstorms though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv35ItWLBBk&fmt=

A Toyota robot that runs fster then Asimo.

LHC getting back up and running this November.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgLdI...e=channel_page
welcome to Zeelich!
:P

So up until now it still didn't run? Cool, looking forward to see what happens.

About that video, I think it was a bit arrogant of her to say things like "this is one of the coldest places in the galaxy, and this is one of the hottest places in the universe" and other similar stuff. Who the hell does she think she is?! Other than that it was a nice video.

Cool, imagine that with the ultra-fast hand from earlier.

Chaosfish, well, seeing that nothing gets colder then absolute zero, and the superconducting magnets and materials used there are damn near, I say she's right.

Afaik It's impossible to know what is the minimum or maximum value in heat. The vibration of the particles can always be stronger or weaker for all we know. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

The absolute zero is the temperature in which particle "vibration" equals zero. And since temperature is caused by particle movement... it's only logical then with zero movement you get absolute zero.

Ok, you obviously know more than me about that. But why's the "" around "vibration"? And how is it possible to know when it equals zero (and not 0.000000000000~~1)?

(Oh shit I thought El just quoted my last post. I have to make another avatar.)

As I understand it, defining temperature gets a bit weird at extremes anyway.
When your talking about a billion particles hardly moving at all, or a large region of vacuum with one partial moving moderately....which do you call colder?
I believe we just refer to the average over an area, but when your talking about mostly-empty space, it gets confusing.
Can one particle even *have* a temperature?

Anyway, theres no real upper limit as clear as the lower one. You can have no movement, but you cant really have infinite movement.

I've got vague memory that 0 degrees Kelvin can't ever be reached.

Good point...
The question now is, is the movement of one particle that's moving moderately in a vacuum affecting the particles near it?

As far as I know - and I don't know much - in theory, everything is vacuum. Matter is just zero-dimensional points scattered across space affecting one another. Come to think of it, maybe space itself is an illusion created by the interaction between the points. Sort of a way to keep the connections in a certain organized way.

Well, nuh-ah.

It is postulated that everything is energy, and that there is a theoretical particle that is responsible for giving other particles the properties we know as mass (the higgs bozone) in that respect that at some point energy stops being energy and starts being mass.

Calling particles zero-dimensional points would't be accurate, as I understand it, they're more of an area of some sort of an effect taking place. And we categorize the particles, by that effect.

The near vacuum in space has a few particles per square meter. I remember reading something about areas of the universe where an ideal vacuum exists, and that even light slows down while travelling through them.

Darkflame, you cannot have infinite movement, at least as lng as you stick to general relativity. The upper limit is the speed of light. Anyway, it's not about physical movement, but about energy transfers, the lower the temperature the smaller the energy transfers and vice-versa.

An absolute zero is almost impossible, because you would have to shield the place you are trying to create it in from all outside influence. So, even if you create a space in which there are absolutely no particles of anything, you will still have energy transfers going through it (like photons zooming through it, or neutrino's) that will prevent it from achieving an absolute zero temperature.

Yeah i wonder, lol maybe it will fail agian... haha maybe this whole thing wasn't meant to work lol. Totally flawed design haha. :lol: Now that would be funny.
Well no matter what she is saying: it still sounds like some bad Zeelichian propaganda. -thats why I posted this one.:p

Yes, the LHC is actually really a device designed to harvest Earth's energy and make Stephen Hawking an all powerful god Muahahahaha!

I find it easiest to picture atoms as small fuzzy blobs :p

You could see their components as solid, but only if you think in terms of probability clouds of where the component particles would be, rather then as the school-children "like planets orbiting" analogy.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure if the difference between "little small things we cant see where their fields are interacting" is much different from the idea there is only fields interacting.

Both of those Id count as particles. The only way it wouldnt be absolute zero if it was a "true" vacuum would be if there was an ether of some sort.
That theory goes in and out of fashion like a yo-yo :P

On a fundamental level the universe could be not particals at all, but more like waves in 4dimension space, with their tips merely looking/acting like particles. (the tip of a 4d wave is a sphere)

In that case there would be no lower bound, or upper bound.
However, if quantom-theory is correct/fundamental, as I understand it, there is indivisible "quantoms" of energy. So, the universe would be kinda binary and thus absolute zero is possible.

Under current understand, energy transfers are happening due to the collisions of particles*. Hence, it is about their movement once you start looking on a sufficiently small scale.
*(ok, collisions of the particles fields)

You cant have it on a single particle.
But if temperature is defined as an average over an volume, I'm not quite sure what the upper limit would be.
Probably the maximum number of particles they could possibly fit into that area all moving at the speed of light. (relative to some fixed point outside)
But then you lead to some questions that I dont think physics can yet answer.
How many particles can you fit into an volume?
Sure, too much mass and it collapses into a black hole....but if these particles are traveling at near-C speeds I'm not sure that collapse can happen as the energy levels are probably going to be stronger then gravity can pull them together.

So, not infinite, but not a clear upper bound either.

If particles are zero-dimensional, then the number of particles that can be fit into any space is infinite.

And particles (the smallest, most fundamental) has to be zero-dimensional, unless space itself is made out of pixels!

Nah, because theres another possibility; that things have a dimension, but can move freely below that resolution.
If it was pixals, movement itself would be in discrete steps rather then continuously....in fact, movement itself would be an illusion :P

Not if they have repealing fields which there isnt sufficient energy to overcome.
Like trying to push similar poles of a very strong magnetic together; the closer you get, the more energy it takes.

The nuclear forces can be overcome by gravity - the sheer volume of particles clumped together.

So your question would have to be, what is the maximum amount of atoms you can fit in a predefined space, without their mass combined causing a chain reaction, or resulting in a black hole.

And all you need to do to see that it's A LOT, is look at the ground under your feet, or some neutron star a spoonfull of which would weigh tons!

If so, that would mean the smallest possible space is smaller than the smallest possible body of matter.
--

Is there even space without matter? Maybe matter is everything, and vacuum is just an agreement between the particles that there is a certain distance between them. Maybe "vacuum" is a value stored within the particles themselves. Maybe every particle in the universe is a unit with certain variables, and all those units interact with one another using an engineered system called "space".

And all those units... that make our universe... their purpose is just to operate one small part of a bigger system.

It is a lot, but I think it would be even more if the particles were going at or near lightspeed.
As they have to overcome the nuclear forces and the energy in their own velocities.

I think science can state how much mass is needed to overcome nuclear forces only when the mater involved is at rest, or, well "cold".

If space is merely a value in the particles defining the space till the next particle, then would that not mean that by destroying particles you'd expect the space around the contract?
(ie, all nearby particles would go in just slightly).
Or if you had the particles arranged like a long cylinder, then the end of that cylinder would look like it had a repealing force? (as the combined "space variable" from the particles along the cylinder would be much more then the space-variables across the diameter).
Of course, both effects might be far too small to notice.
But it would be unintuative given that currently it seems that particals attract other particals. (ie, gravity), rather then making space between them.

That said, Its good to have unintuitive and outlandish sounded theory's, mind you.
Because normally when looked close up the universe doesn't act at all like what we expect based on experiences in our "macro-world".

Of course, the universe dosnt always act like expected on large scales either....we have concepts such as "dark mater" and "dark energy" needed to explain how mass arranges and moves on galactic scales.
But it might be we have just got our understanding of gravity wrong.
So, it could be a wrong formula, rather then a question of missing variables.

Particles can't be destroyed... can they? For all we know, there is only one particle in the whole universe, and that particle just has multiple instances. Even if one instance of that particle is removed from space, its value can still remain and redistribute to other appropriate instances.

I didn't understand that part about a cylinder.

Well, particles can be broken down into other particles.....assuming the word particle is correct, we arnt really sure.
So it depends on what level your thinking this information is stored at.

As for the cylinder, just imagine a 2D bar instead;

......................
......................

This is a bar composed of atoms.
The atoms are bonded together..and held apart...by the fundamental forces.
However, theres a greater volume of empty space around the bar, then there is within it.
(for the sake of simplicity, lets imagine a vacuum)

(Vacuum)
...................... (Vacuum)
......................
(Vacuum)

etc.
If your saying the "gap" in the vacuum to the next particle is somehow a property of the atoms, rather then a fundamental property of space itself, then surely it means the space around this bar is defined by the bar?
The atoms are each contributing in their small way to the surrounding "gap"
correct?

Then does that not mean, their contribution to the gap would change as the alignment of the bar is changed?
As horizontally there is a lot more "gap contributions" then there is vertically.*
(*on this diagram, I'm also assuming space is 2d ;p)

Therefor as you rotate the bar (say 90 degrees), you'd expect a (apparent) lengthening of space along its axis.

Dont be daft.
If we changed on of them, they would all change. :P
Texturing would be a nightmare too.