from Hacker News

The Worsening Cosmic Ray Situation

by scarhill on 3/7/18, 11:59 PM with 79 comments

  • by tyingq on 3/8/18, 3:22 AM

    To bring it a little closer to home for HN, there was, at one time, a big controversy with Sun Microsystems and cosmic rays creating memory errors on their servers. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10...

  • by maccam94 on 3/8/18, 9:03 AM

    I wonder if it'll get bad enough to spur consumer hardware to switch to ECC. I can't believe the price difference is very significant, especially if it starts being produced in even higher volumes.

  • by acidburnNSA on 3/8/18, 3:51 PM

    Tangentially related, taking a Geiger counter on a trans-Atlantic flight is a pretty good time [1]. Some good low-dose radiation data we have comes from flight crews.

    [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2014-05-17-radiation-on-fligh...

  • by geuis on 3/8/18, 2:57 AM

    > The problem is, as the authors note in their new paper, the shield is weakening: “Over the last decade, the solar wind has exhibited low densities and magnetic field strengths, representing anomalous states that have never been observed during the Space Age. As a result of this remarkably weak solar activity, we have also observed the highest fluxes of cosmic rays.”

  • by eximius on 3/8/18, 1:11 AM

    Is the increase fully accounted for by weakening solar protection, magnetosphere, and atmosphere?

    What are the causes for reduced protection in the latter two?

  • by sq_ on 3/8/18, 3:33 AM

    Tangential question, but does anyone have any idea why, based on the first graph in the article [1], NASA's allowable radiation limits for women are so much lower than for men?

    [1] http://spaceweather.com/images2014/06dec14/missionduration.j...

  • by siavosh on 3/8/18, 4:32 AM

    I just had the horrific thought of what if some nearby interstellar event zaps all of earth with a deadly blast of fatal radiation killing all life in a matter of days. Is this possible and is there anything in the archaeological record hinting this may have happened?

  • by ggm on 3/8/18, 3:46 AM

    Buy shares in ECC memory suppliers.

  • by doinkdoink on 3/8/18, 5:16 AM

    Plugging one of my favorite podcasts that recently covered spaceweather!

    http://weatherbrains.com/weatherbrains/?p=6720

  • by tzs on 3/8/18, 6:30 AM

    Do cosmic rays that reach the surface leave any traces or make any changes that persist over geological timescales and can be dated, so that we can see how they have changed over very long times?

  • by gigatexal on 3/8/18, 3:19 PM

    Wait so what does this mean for cancer rates? Are they related?

  • by EGreg on 3/8/18, 12:01 PM

    Cue the Republican jokes about this being manmade :)