There are no known neutron stars within range to do this to us, much less binary systems that could actually generate a GRB. Don’t lose any sleep over it.
Aww man… I wanted to be vaporized by an indifferent cosmic phenomenon beyond my ken. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to wait until heart disease finishes me off.
A GRB would make every mass extinction event the planet has endured, including the one it is going through now, look like nothing. The asteroid that took out the dinosaurs is a firecracker to an atomic bomb that is a GRB level of destruction.
It is one of the few events that can completely destroy all life on the planet.
I am sorry that things are not going well for you but a GRB is not the answer.
Nope. MOND is not the answer. It is never going to be the answer. There are too many things that MOND cannot explain. One of the reasons why planet 9 was hypothesized to exist is because the orbits of objects far from the sun are out of plane in weird highly elliptical orbits not explainable through modification of gravity’s effects at small force scales. Dark matter is another phenomenon MOND was meant to explain away but cant. i.e the bullet cluster is an object with less than 1% of its mass accountable by visible matter. MOND cannot make up the difference. Structures like this are only explainable if dark matter actually exists. The best MOND can hope for is to account for some but not all, of the discrepancy.
I hit up the Wikipedia article. Much like a typical episode of PBS Spacetime, it was just enough over my head to feel within reach while simultaneously hammering home that I was never meant to be an astrophysicist.
The best MOND can hope for is to account for some but not all, of the discrepancy.
Your last sentence kind of shut down the whole preceding "MOND isn't be a thing!" Part of the comment.
Sure, it doesn't seem particularly likely that MOND is a thing. But given that science always allows for old theories to be disproven, and our theories of how gravity works are already known to be incomplete or otherwise shaky, I wouldn't shut down any researchers who want to give it a go.
The issue is that MOND is being marketed as being able to fix things that we already know it isnt capable of fixing. This is the astronomy equivalent of an experimental drug tauted to cure cancer rather than a specific form of it (if it works at all.) The biggest issue I have with MOND is that the mechanism for modified gravity isn’t derived like relativity was (i.e relativity has a mechanism that naturally leads to its equations) but designed post facto to fit observations. i.e a0 was not derived from scratch, it was curve fit. A curve that does not appear to explain ultra diffuse galaxies which are apparently essentially free of dark matter. If MOND had some theoretical basis behind it beyond “stars in galaxies go brrr” and could explain the apparent lack of deviation from newtonian gravity of ultra diffuse galaxies, it might have deserved more attention.
I mentioned galactic rotation curves because thats more or less where it began. If MOND fails to fit the data at those scales, it will necessarily fail within our own solar system at the outer edges where a0 would potentially be relevant.
There are many variants of MOND. RelMOND, for example, includes features that resemble dark matter more closely.
I'm not saying "it's gotta be MOND", of course. I'm just reacting to what I perceive as an unnecessarily hostile reaction to it. We have yet to actually figure out dark matter either, after all, and there are many variants of dark matter that have been proposed. So the "it's designed post facto to fit observations" is a complaint that can be directed against it right now too. I see nothing wrong with exploring all the options, especially when it's by people who have chosen to spend their efforts doing that for themselves.
None of them are based on anything though. Theyre curve fitting models which is why I am hostile to them. Show me a mechanism that derives what a0 is from scratch.
Basing a model on how well it fits a curve rather than on a mechanism that naturally derives the curve from scratch is essentially worthless.
Without a mechanism that explains why there needs to be a MOND dominated regime in the first place, its just too susceptible to being pathological science.
Alternative option: when a kid eats a magnet, use a really huge magnet to get that magnet out of the kid. Guaranteed to make sure there are no repeat offenders.
Same talking points the CPSC used to run ZenMagnets out of business. Guns aren’t too dangerous to keep around kids, but magnets with the boxes absolutely *plastered * with warnings are. No joke, my zen magnets had over ten warnings on each box. All in bright red letters.
And if you go look at the actual evidence you’re gonna see that household chemicals cause way more damage and death than these magnets ever will. I have no clue who has it out for these magnets but they’re absolutely destroying a great stress reliever for what amounts to nothing.
The endoscopists at our childrens hospital also echoed that magnets are a super common foreign body ingestion, any two magnets swallowed is a huge hazard with a high potential for lifelong consequences. And the little balls are supposedly the worst as they have a small surface area in addition to being fairly strong, so they cause perforations quickly.
Also warnings on a magnet box or other toys will be ignored far more commonly that on household chemicals. I don’t know any people who keep bleach on their office desk, and even then it is in a childproof bottle. But many will have these little magnet balls on full display or somewhere a child can reasonably reach, some parents give these to inapropriately aged kids to play with even. Nobody gives a bottle of bleach for their kids to play with.
You don’t have to give a bottle of bleach. The point is that most household chemicals have hardly any warnings on them at all and the ones they do have are written in tiny text on the back. And no, most household chemicals do not have locking bottles. Sure things like bleach do, but you purposefully chose one to try and fit your narrative. Turns out, bleach was the number one household chemical to injure children in 2006! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20679298/
Let’s look at another report which states that ~50% of the magnet injuries come from products marketed to children, not these magnets made for adults. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6125079/
It’s incredibly clear that the CPSC doesn’t actually care about the facts and someone in the magnet industry pissed them of else they’d be spending their time trying to fix the actual things that are killing children, like firearms.
Just to end this post; the zen magnet warnings covered every inch of the packaging, you opened the box and there were more warning, you opened the bag in the box and there were even more warnings. There were permanent warnings in bright red text that couldn’t be removed from the box. This was more warning than any other product on the market and yet zen magnets have been completely banned, while bleach is still sold at your local grocery store with no ID necessary. Here’s a picture of one of the warnings, sorry I couldn’t find a video showing all the warnings, it’s been lost to time.
Anyway, the CPSC clearly doesn’t care about actual child deaths and injuries, as it didn’t do anything to even slow the rate of injuries or deaths and yet completely banned an entire industry just for pissing them off. I’ve posted all the proof straight from the CPSC above if you don’t believe that statement.
I checked through the links, and what I did find, besides the childrens magnets is that 1/4 of the magnets were small magnet balls, so it is not like it is an uncommon thing. If magnets are ingested they can cause serious surgical emergencies, which will lead to having to cut out part of the intestines as well as potentially cause peritonitis, the surgery will have lifelong consequences, it is of course also possible to die from complications. And small powerful magnets cause the most damage.
Generally the only other foreign body that is as bad to ingest as small magnets are batteries.
Regarding the warnings - Ill say it again, noone really reads those , everyone I have known with the balls has had them on full display without safety. People for solid things like this just look at the warnings and go, well duh its a choking hazard. And then of course theres the classic reasoning of but my kid is smarter.
Is the CPSC right? I mean, their reason stands solid, their response maybe disproportionate. That said I think the idea that the magnet industry somehow wronged the CPSC is a bit conspiratorial.
Also I would not classify drugs as household chemicals, hence why I chose bleach as my example. The other really bad offender for household chemicals used to be 70% vinegar, but that one was banned in the EU, so now we can only buy 9% which will not cause more than an upset stomach generally, most other common household chemicals will not be as bad and many of them still have childproof locks.
Kids keep eating lots of things. The “one way” to stop it: parenting. But even that doesn’t always work because kids are like… that. I’m sure that if you went 4000 years in the past, ancient toddlers would be putting stones and styli and tabula rasae in their mouths, and 4000 years from now they’ll be putting futuristic whatevers in their mouths. They’re toddlers. It’s what they do. Sometimes they’re magnets. In the future articles will read: Kids Keep Eating Dermal Regnerators— 5 Ways to Make Them A For-Profit Clinic or whatever
The point is that magnets pose a greater threat than most things that are commonly swallowed. This article identifies that risk and tries to spread the word to treat magnets as more dangerous than coins or other random small objects which may be choking hazards.
I remember I did that the first day I got a switch, just to see what the hype was all about. Tasted pretty damn awful but I think if you were really committed to it and drank a lot of water you could probably swallow one.
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