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Sun is cooling down and what that means for us (guardian.co.uk)
10 points by nickb on April 27, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments


I thought it meant because of the Oracle takeover. My bad.


The good thing is that this might mean that the civilization destroying solar magnetic storm to hit us in 2012 may not be quite that bad, giving us a few more decades to fix our high voltage power nets to be more resilient.

But then, predictions are difficult, especially if they are about the future.


Is there anyway we can affect the sun's cooling down process? Maybe it can help offset the effect of global warming somewhat.

I know it's a crazy idea. But many great inventions are borne out of crazy ideas.

Someone to take on this?


Oh, come on. There's the good kind of can-do attitude, which is useful, and then this kind, where if you think you want something enough, anything can happen.

Consider how much effort had to go into just putting a man on the moon, and compare that to the effort required to affect the fundamental energy processes of a body in which one million Earths can fit. The two problems are many, many orders of magnitude apart. Affecting the Sun in a noticeable way is well out of our reach now, and with high probability will be for the next millennium.

EDIT: I'm full of shit, it's 1 million


Another fun fact: the power output of the sun is 4 * 10^26 Watts.




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