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News Briefs 16-06-2010

Lost on the outer fringes of knowledge. STOP. Send bus money home. STOP.

Quote of the Day:

When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.

William S. Burroughs

Editor
  1. What’s wrong with the sun . . .
    How old is the sun?

    How old is the earth?

    How old is the human race?

    How long has the human race been recording sunspot activity?

    What are the odds we’re moving into another stage of a larger sunspot cycle with a duration of, say, millions of years?

    1. true, but..
      This is all true, we have no long term data to speak of.

      We don’t even have any long term data of the total energy output of the sun.

      There have been ice-age periods like the one we are having now with alternating cold and warm cycles, and then there have been continuously warm periods. The ice age stuff seems to be fairly short, the warm periods about 250 million years long. Maybe that is a separate cycle of the sun. It also is about the time it takes for 1 revolution around the galaxy.

      On the other hand, these missing spots are a nice opportunity for another end-of-the-world scenario:

      The sun is going out.

      1. Observation
        One of the basic tools of Science is observation. However, there can only be so much of it.

        It’s like saying that, since the Universe is 12 and a half billion years old, we concluded that in order to understand it fully, we would need to observe it uninterruptedly for an equal amount of time.

        Science tries to look for reasonable short-cuts 😉

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