Reclusland

Sometimes, one of these unfinished posts is nearly finished, lacking only a kind of a punchline. Other times, I find a lot of cool shit all on one subject, and I kind of mash it together, hoping something good might spontaneously combust into existence.

This is one of the other times, when the combustion never really spontaneated.

And ironically enough (given the lack of combustion) this one is all about the sun. I’m somewhat fascinated by the sun, being that, all religious notions aside, it is scientifically the source of all life in the solar system. It’s closest metaphor for god in the nearby physical universe, and yet there’s so little that we actually know about it.

We know what it looks like:

(awesome gallery of sun pictures)

We also know (through the educated guesswork that is science) a little bit about its insides as well. The interior of the sun in known as the convection zone, and it is a constantly boiling mass of radioactive materials. Occasionally the boiling causes bubbles which rise to the surface and pop.  That’s a solar flare.

All that activity is blasting massive amounts of solar radiation outwards into space.  This radiation is known as the solar wind, and it produces something called the heliosphere, a magnetic bubble that protects the earth (and the entire solar system) from about 90% of interstellar cosmic radiations.

Unfortunately, it seems like that magnetic bubble might be shrinking.

And that’s only one example of what looks to be a general trend of sun-related-things not working “properly”.  Check this article (and it’s sources) from mid-December ’08:
- the interplanetary magnetic field has been low since October 2005.
- the ionosphere has dropped in altitude to unexpected and unexplained low levels.
- our solar cycle is a year late getting started.
- Earth’s magnetic field is ripped open on a regular basis.

Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

But don’t despair, the sun’s not necessarily dying just yet!  Perhaps it’s just resting quietly…

That idea is supported by articles from both space.com and physorg, showing that, in early November, the sunspot cycle was actually increasing.  The physorg article even quotes a David Hathaway (of NASA), who is also quoted here saying that this period of minimal solar activity is to right on target with historical data, and that we are simply in sort of a trough between two waves of increased solar activity.

So what happens when the activity increases?

“During Solar Max, huge sunspots and intense solar flares are a daily occurrence. Auroras appear in Florida. Radiation storms knock out satellites.”

And when’s the next one of these due?  2012, of course, when “a perfect space storm” could occur.  Yet another thing to worry about for 2012, as if we needed any more…

What else is tied in with sunspots? According to some studies of the Paraná river in South America, “the flow of (the) river – and thus the rainfall that feeds it – appears to rise and fall with the number of sunspots.” And wikipedia shows that several other effects (such as the growth of wheat and the ozone layer) have been tentatively linked to sunspot activity as well…

To have even more to worry about, extreme weather has been linked to the rise and fall of Empires as far back as the 500′s, with effects reaching around the globe.  And recent studies of cave stalactites in both China and Jerusalem, show that a decrease in rainfall occurred around the collapse of major Chinese dynastic empires as well as the Roman empire…

If nothing else, people don’t like governments that can’t find ways to make the crops grow!  And whether or not these changes were caused by solar activity, if solar activity does effect the weather, and we’re in for some a-typical solar activity, we better watch out!

Either we’re having an increase in solar activity that will knock satellites out of the sky and cause power outages, or we will have a sudden drought with possible food riots and a general slow collapse of civilizations around the world.  Caused by the sun.  Great…

So what’s the good news?  Well, at the end of that list of the “general trend of sun-related-things not working “properly”" was a brief mention of the earth’s magnetosphere being “ripped open” by the sun.  The article I linked to above describes this process, rather negatively, as being “like an octopus wrapping its tentacles around a big clam, (the) solar magnetic fields draped themselves around the magnetosphere and cracked it open”

Well, according to an earlier article on physorg, these things are called “flux transfer events”, and they were not even known of 10 years ago.  The physorg article describes them like this: “On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth’s magnetic field presses against the sun’s magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or “reconnect,” forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth.”

To me, this shows a close, intimate connection between the earth and sun, where the earth naturally opens it’s defenses in order to take in nourishment from the sun. 

And this happens approximately every 8 minutes.

Far from appearing like an octopus opening a clam, the relationship between the sun and magnetosphere is a rather beautiful one, it turns out:

This brings to mind Gurdjieff’s explanation of the cosmos as consisting of different emanations from the “SUN ABSOLUTE” (perhaps a more mythological stand-in for the black holes at the heart of the galaxies..?).  According to Gurdjieff, each sun is sustained by “emanations” from this SUN ABSOLUTE, and in turn, each sun sustains it’s various planets through these same kinds of “emanations”…

And so we finally reach the point where I was hoping something would coalesce and combust from this (larger than expected) grouping of facts.  I sensed ideas about energy passing through these magnetic portals from galactic centers to suns, and from suns to planets. Which perhaps might also shine some light on how exactly gravity works, since the original explanation of gravity’s was that it was “action at a distance”, that there was nothing else connecting the sun, the planets, and the stars…

Perhaps even, when these portals open, things like “evolution” might occur at a faster rate…  We all know our culture’s myths about radiation, right?

Perhaps there is some link between these “flux transfer events” and the way things change on earth, in both a biological, physical, electrical, space-like, yin-like manner, and a psychological, magnetic, time-like, yang-like manner…?

It also makes me wonder how the solar activity cycles would synch up to McKenna’s Time Wave Zero graph…

After all, as people have commented elsewhere on this site “It’s like the Universe is stitched together with electromagnetism…”