How would you protect your animals from nuclear fallout?

[Summer_]

I somehow lost this thread

 

[JacinLarkwell]

I think what that meant was, if somebody a few thousand miles away has a finger ready to press a missile launch button...there is not much I can personally do about that idiot, thousands of miles away.

Oh, I took it to mean that there was no choice on having to keep living if that happened, which isn't true

 

[Liz Birdlover]

it's not caused by cars and cow farts

I don't understand why they would blame cow farts. I milked many cows many times, when I was 14 & again in college...never heard a single cow fart! Or is it just beef cattle that fart?


Hey, might be a huge opportunity for GasX if that many cows are farting...maybe we should buy some stock

 

[Liz Birdlover]

Does anyone know:
Where to find info on what locations have the most likelihood of being a target? Cities? Silos? Power plants? Any maps? Also, what happens after a blast? Fallout radius, etc…?

They want to take out large populations, hit the so called important people (the politicians that get us into the mess in the 1st place), poison the food & water supplies for any survivors.

 

[Summer_]

They want to take out large populations, hit the so called important people (the politicians that get us into the mess in the 1st place), poison the food & water supplies for any survivors.

Is there anything useful in Indiana?

 

[Liz Birdlover]

Is there anything useful in Indiana?

I believe there's something useful in every state. Indiana farms produce a lot of food

 

[SandyRiverChick]

Ya'll are pretty entertaining. George Carlin summed up how I feel pretty well...

In this interview called "I just don't care"

 

[azurbanclucker]

Ya'll are pretty entertaining. George Carlin summed up how I feel pretty well...

In this interview called "I just don't care"

I miss Carlin.

 

[MarGyver7]

Does anyone know:
Where to find info on what locations have the most likelihood of being a target? Cities? Silos? Power plants? Any maps? Also, what happens after a blast? Fallout radius, etc…?

Hi guys....Yes I will post some maps shortly....just let me get caught up on all of the posts I missed reading today (Senor Juan Valdez was late with my coffee this morning...always trying to catch up on everything...) and then I have something pretty crazy to share too!

 

[MarGyver7]

Let's set come context here. (grab a drink, this is going to be many words.)

Mars' atmosphere was most likely stripped away by the solar wind and intense cosmic radiation from the early sun, which was more violent and had a much greater impact on the early solar system than it does today. It has settled down over time, and WE are not under the same kind of threat from it regardless. Earth is lager and has a more robust magnetic field than mars that helps absorb and deflect the solar wind. (thanks semisolid nickel iron core!).

To date, there is no conclusive evidence that life ever existed on Mars. Many tantalizing indicators, but nothing definitive yet. It would be headline news worldwide and you'd KNOW without a doubt the second it was announced.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-maven-reveals-most-of-mars-atmosphere-was-lost-to-space

Venus Is another creature entirely. It HAS an atmosphere, composed mainly of CO2. It COULD have sustained life a couple billion years ago, but approximately 700 million years ago something happened (we don't know what) that reshaped the surface and released massive amounts of CO2, which would have eliminated life as we know it if it existed there. We don't have enough evidence to say it was related to solar activity, we simply do not know due to limited missions to Venus and a lack of data.

https://www.space.com/planet-venus-could-have-supported-life.html


Unlike the solar wind, which is a constant stream of particles and radiation steaming from the sun, solar flares are caused by localized surface activity on the sun ejecting intense x-ray and UV radiation into space. they travel at the speed of light and hit the earth in about 8 minutes (if they're emitting from the side of the sun we can see). They are classified based on their intensity and the potential disruption to satellites and other equipment increases as you increase the intensity. M and X class flares generally are capable of causing disruptions, while A, B, and C class flares don't. We see on average 10 x class flares a year averaged out over the solar activity cycle (11 years).

The Carrington even was a different but closely related creature, a geomagnetic storm. GMS' can be cause by solar flares, and also by Coronal Mass Ejections (CME's). These bursts of highly charged particles move much slower and typically take 1-3 days to hit the earth after they erupt on the sun's surface. They're what causes the auroras to fire up and high powered GMS' can overwhelm the magnetospahere and flood the earth with particles over a period that can last several hours depending on the strength of the storm. Very rarely do we get storms that strong. Kinda recently, in 1989, a geomagnetic storm caused a 9 hour power outage in Quebec. Since then, federal governments have developed regulations that utilities have to follow specifically to mitigate another Carrington event from crippling the power grids.

The internet buzz about a mega flare in 2025 is speculative fiction based on the fact that we will be at solar maximum late 2024 to early 2026. That's when the sun's at it's 11 year peak for sunspot activity and the potential for large CME and geomagnetic storms is the highest for this cycle. There is absolutely no evidence or data to say that "yes, we're going to have a massive Carrington event equivalent Geomagnetic storm in 2025".

You can reliably predict when we're going to have particularly strong geomagnetic storms because the news media will report on the northern or southern lights being active far outside their normal boundaries. There's a direct correlation between them. NOAA/NASA's Space weather prediction center also tracks this activity more precisely and provides updates for inclement space weather. You can find that info here:

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

Generally speaking Solar flare/GMS activity is a bigger problem for orbital and high altitude equipment and not for humans. We get pretty auroras on the ground, spacex loses starlink clusters, and occasionally some older power grid equipment gets smoked from solar radiation. It's a problem, sure, but not for humanity at large. A large event like the Carrington event would be very problematic, and cause much more wide-ranging issues, but it would not be life-ending . It would likely really annoy the power grid but as I mentioned, FERC/NERC/NRC regulations are in place to mitigate that today. We could see localized disruptive activity related to that from utilities not in compliance, but again, not catastrophic.

Cosmic radiation from Gamma Ray bursts is another monster entirely. There is absolutely nothing we as a species can do to protect ourselves from a large GRB today. Sorry. Fortunately, they're incredibly rare to begin with and we'd have to be in the direct path of a sufficient intensity for it to have any impact on the planet. The likelihood of that is extremely low.

https://phys.org/news/2015-01-gamma-ray-dangerous.html

There's a lot of speculative and frankly insane conspiracy vlogs on the internet. I strongly recommend taking them with a grain of salt and finding peer reviewed academic research with actual facts in it to get the real answers. Science doesn't have an opinion, it's just a presentation of the data you can draw your own conclusions from. If someone's steering you toward their opinion, pump the brakes, go learn for yourself and THEN decide if they're legit or full of it.

This concludes my Ted talk. Thanks, you've been a great audience. Please tip your servers.

Nice outro statement