Solar eruptions

The elephant in the room of all governments is currently, sorry, not terrorism or banking crisis etc but the differences in the CMEs, Coronal Mass Ejections, that we have been fortunate to observe recently. One travelled at quarter c. The others seem to vary but only by a small factor around a day or two. 30 minutes to close the distance between earth and Sun got everyone to sit up and take notice, particularly the military. Light takes 8 minutes to span the same distance. The very powerful eruption missed earth. But it is axiomatic in statistics that what is possible will eventually happen. The rush to observation we currently see in space probes being set up to look at the local star is the result. If we were to be hit by a similar or conceivably larger CME then life might not be the same again for decades. Reassurance to the slaving classes is embodied in the ages given for the universe: 15,000,000,000 years, despite the actual lack of real evidence. If the universe is far younger, then catastrophic events may indeed be again a relatively normal part of human existence.

Don Scott, author of The Electric Sky, wrote about the way plasma acts in the Universe:

“Plasma phenomena are scalable. Their electrical and physical properties remain the same, independent of the size of the plasma. In a laboratory plasma, of course, things happen much more quickly than on, say, galaxy scales, but the phenomena are identical—they obey the same laws of physics. In other words we can make accurate models of cosmic scale plasma behavior in the lab, and generate effects that mimic those observed in space. It has been demonstrated that plasma phenomena can be scaled to fourteen orders of magnitude. (Alfvén hypothesized that they can be scaled to 28 orders or more!) Electric currents flowing in plasmas produce most of the observed astronomical phenomena that remain inexplicable if we assume gravity and magnetism to be the only forces at work.”

The perturbations of our local star may be experimentally determinable by scaling up a suitable experiment in the plasma lab.

Let us know if it is going on now?