Ridiculous question, but...

Manuk

Could a solar flare like the one in the film 'Knowing' really happen?

Just wondering

Linguo

I was wondering that myself...only thing to distract me from Cage's woeful acting!

Manuk

Personally I think his terrible acting in unlikely scenarios is quite entertaining. The idea of the sun killing everything like that was quite exciting, though, which is why I find myself here wondering aloud about it...

Linguo

Lol me and my bf did too, he's so bad he's brilliant! And my telescope was in a scene of the movie too which was good!:D

Capt'n Midnight

Supernova kills off mammoths 13,000 years ago ?
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/NSD-mammoth-extinction.html

They also found evidence of the supernova explosion’s initial shockwave: 34,000-year-old mammoth tusks that are peppered with tiny impact craters apparently produced by iron-rich grains traveling at an estimated 10,000 kilometers per second. These grains may have been emitted from a supernova that exploded roughly 7,000 years earlier and about 250 light years from Earth.

“Our research indicates that a 10-kilometer-wide comet, which may have been composed from the remnants of a supernova explosion, could have hit North America 13,000 years ago,” says Firestone. “This event was preceded by an intense blast of iron-rich grains that impacted the planet roughly 34,000 years ago.”

supernovas are also blamed for other larger extinction events
so even if the sun don't flare like crazy we have reasons to worry

Manuk

We'd be quite lucky to be present for a mass extinction event... how many organisms will be able to claim to be there for what religious folk would term 'the apocalypse'?

Obviously we'd all be dead and not able to claim anything to anyone, but it'd still be pretty cool to see.

jkforde

if a large CME doesn't directly kill us it's effects on the strained electrical network and the collapse of our technology is what might.... take a look at this James Burke vid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pvm4nF1Yb0).... it's dated but the core vulnerability he's talking about is worse now... and http://www.articlesbase.com/technology-articles/a-global-disaster-from-the-perfect-solar-storm-853356.html... time to crawl into that cave! ;]

Capt'n Midnight

Manuk wrote: »

We'd be quite lucky to be present for a mass extinction event...

:eek:

Stuff living at the bottom of the sea and in cracks in rocks going down even further should survive most things that don't boil away all of the oceans.

It would have been spectacular if Gallieo had been in orbit when Shoemaker Levy 9 hit Jupiter. Then we could have gotten real pictures of an ELE. Putting a map of earth / globe beside then for scale might have sobered some people up.



http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewArticle.do?id=2497

In 2000, researchers from West Chester (Penn.) University claimed to have discovered the oldest known living microorganism in an ancient salt deposit in New Mexico, buried 610 meters (2,000 feet) below ground. It was trapped in a tiny brine-filled pocket that formed in a salt crystal 250 million years ago.

http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewArticle.do?id=2497

Another very deep borehole was drilled in Gravenberg, Sweden in the search for deep earth gases. It reached 6800 m and here thermophilic bacteria were successfully enriched and isolated from a depth of 5278 m where the temperature was 65 - 75 °C.

http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/08_03/hottest.shtml

But the new microbe, for now called “Strain 121,” thrives at 121 °C and can even survive for two hours at 130 °C.