Coronal Mass Ejection - Ending life?

[Sykesy]

Due to the terrible weather down here in Devon yesterday, i was stuck indoors and bored. A few months back i had recorded the film 'KNOWING' with Nicholas Cage. Thought why not and gave it a go. Not a bad movie(apart from Aliens at the end), but when it came to a large CME that wiped off life on planet earth it got me thinking - could that happen for real in the future or has it happened in the past? Modern thinking has it that large meteorite's probably did in for dinosaurs, but could it have been a CME on a scale not yet witnessed by man. Does the sun have it in it to produce something like that or has it settled down now that it is half way through it's life expectancy?

[DaveGarland]

I had a chuckle at the start when Nicholas Cage was stood be his telescope. With all the garden lights on and the BBQ crackling away right next to it

[SionR25]

I think that at the moment the sun is too stable to produce the a CME that could potentially kill us, or anything else, off. I also don't think it would have caused the extinction of dinosaurs, the sun still would have been in a stable state, and would have to have been for life to develop. Later on in its life cycle it may have enough energy to create something strong enough to cause damage but I don't think that realistically they could actually cause too much damage to the planet anyway. Between the Earth orbiting the sun and the spinning of the sun we wouldn't have enough exposure for it to do enough damage. I may be wrong here but its what I have been led to believe.

[acey]

I'm not aware that it has ever been seriously suggested - other than in Hollywood - that a CME could directly endanger life on Earth. CMEs affect Earth's magnetic field and are therefore a danger to communications, electronic infrastructure etc. Who knows, perhaps there could be some effect on any biological systems strongly dependent on Earth's magnetic field, but there have been complete reversals of the field many times over geological history (not due to CMEs) and they are not associated with mass extinctions.

The biggest magnetic storm ever recorded was in 1859, but they didn't have communication satellites back then so the only effect that most people noticed was the increase in aurorae (visible even in the Caribbean, and in some places brighter than the full moon). Events of that scale are believed to occur roughly once every 500 years.

Solar storm of 1859 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I haven't seen the film, but I'm guessing that it imagines some great big planet-size blob of glowing gooey matter flying towards the Earth, rather than a shower of charged particles that get deflected around the upper atmosphere by Earth's magnetic field.

[garethmob]

In this months astro mag (either AN,S@N or S&T) it actually says the exact oppersite. As the sun quietness down there's more chance of cmes and the like which I thought was quite interesting

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[Macavity]

I think the radiation levels would have to be HUGELY intense. As a one-time "designated radiation worker" <G> I was never in fear of external radiation - The "inverse square law" is helpful. Ingesting radioactive fallout is a different matter - Inside you, at cellular / DNA level etc., it's at ZERO range.

A rise in cancers? Genetic anomalies? But no mass extinction?

We seem, as a species, to be fairly "radiation (well!) hard"?