Ep. 198: When the Sun Flares Up

it feels like everyone's searching for the secret to living longer these days better health sharper minds stronger bodies this is the chonty and the dog podcast i'm dr marcus rani and i'm joined by someone who understands performance and resilience better than most international cricketer chonty rose in this show we explore the science of longevity from how our bodies age to the everyday habits that help us stay strong sharp and resilient as the years go by catch full episodes on the ibm podcast youtube channel and on all audio streaming platforms good morning folks and welcome to yet another episode of simplified and uh because we all know what simplified is it's the smartest podcast to come out of my list and it is a podcast which will make you look smarter than you actually are without making you smarter so very unique sort of promise and one that we live up so i'm naren and i'm totally hi naren you are are you from lower malad yeah i'm actually from upper malad because uh i don't know what a lower malad thing so i i could give a background to two folks i saw signboard recently on a metro station near our house and it was named lower malad so i found it amusing it reminded me of a buddhous thing called upper silesia so in the second world war buddhous was arrested in france and everything was happening in europe and there is a region of poland called upper silesia so buddhous was there and he was not impressed it's like a poor place i think but it's not very posh so he said if this is upper silesia yeah is that when he created the character called andolan jeeves oh man i never thought about that but you could totally have you know a novela except that andolan jeeves would be such a terrible guy yeah so the cheapest possible topic i could think of and that is the ways in which the world could end yeah and theory topic of course and one that is best discussed with a diet of bad puns and silly jokes and ridiculously optimistic so in short and the first thing in the mind actually how it started was i was reading an article about you know different ways in which the world could end it was sort of a listicle you know like yeah one of us has further regressed from looking at wikipedia to going to buzzfeed so the end of the world is totally nice it's totally nice yeah so basically uh it wasn't too disappointing to tell you the truth because there was nothing new i mean you know the usual candidates one was uh pandemic right so one of the ways the world can end is a pandemic i mean you've been there and done that come on you meant the list was a disappointment i thought like you know that the world could end was a disappointment yeah that itself yeah that was yeah there was a spoiler that came from a headline but yeah i get what you mean yeah pandemic is still vanilla now yeah there was other suspect was a nuclear war you know there was such lovely hopes of that but we've been let down by the likes of pakistan and iran and north korea i mean they've been at it for decades now how close is that what is it minutes to midnight thing right now i remember it moved like to two minutes or so when trump and all these days were going and it's basically you know like a estimate put out to say yeah if it's at midnight yeah but these guys are really slacking on the job another candidate was climate change and i laughed myself silly over that climate change surely not so the best uh candidates they could come up with was asteroid impact and super volcanic explosions these two things could easily wipe us out and then i guess they can i mean if you have a large enough asteroid from a good well-known brand like one of those cheap tiny limitations like a really good asteroid and it hits properly like then yes and everything will end and of course a good large volcanic eruption could also do the job though it had to be really really really large because it'll erupt in one point and if you really want to kill everyone on the other side of that point then it's going to have to be you know it'll have to be someone that's had a little comp plan and please take an energy boost and say but the one which i really found uh intriguing and heard before which is why i thought you know it could form a simplified topic is solar flaps i didn't know solar flaps were that badass and that i only knew that solar flaps is what when i think when we were kids you'd be listening to some bbc program on some shortwave radio and all of a sudden it would go on on the blink and people would say so i looked it up and uh i read about it and i found that it's pretty interesting so first of all what is you know what what exactly is a solar flare how did that so apparently the surface of the sun is a pretty busy place it's not like the interior of the sun is any meditation workshop that's also i guess equally busy but solar surfaces apparently that is because the sun works on converting hydrogen to tv and so basically what it does is it sort of rips all the electrons from the hydrogen atoms and so you have a bunch of positively charged hydrogen atoms going around in a bunch of negatively charged electrons buzzing around the place and uh you know sort of really like it's like church station on monday morning it's like or twitter on one of the rare occasions when uh somebody says something uh uh you know which they with the it said it doesn't really happen but it has been known to happen and then it becomes like the surface of the sun on a lovely day like the olympic village after the games are done right so or the jnu championships does been certainly believed according to people that was some high grade shooting there yeah sherlock holkin's grave thing someone has to pay attention to the dead rubbers so yeah i'm glad you know constant vigilance is being practiced by the evident leaders of a nation anyway yeah so fusion on okay so we are talking about so this thing is called plasma and you can see plasma when you're if you're doing a you see someone welding right so that arc that very bright arc which hurts your eyes that is actually a little bit of plasma because that electric arc is flying from the electrode to the metal and it's ripping all the gas atoms it can find all the atmospheric molecules you're just shattering them into protons and electrons and it makes it a charge so basically the tldr is that plasma is electrically charged and when it moves around it also causes magnetism and the magnetism of the sun also makes it go around so because electricity and magnetism are basically two sides of one coin so it's one heavy hot mess of electricity and magnetism and they keep forming loops and sometimes there's so much energy concentrated into one loop and there are like literally millions of them all over the sun you know it sort of spirals into each other there's almost like a short circuit and all of a sudden the loop collapses and it just erupts into a you know sort of splash which is thousands of miles high that's a solar flare and from earth it doesn't look that you know most of the time you can't observe it but they have these uh you know you can just filter it it's one some one particular frequency so if you sort of put a passband filter on that frequency you can actually see the flares jumping up and down okay and this is happening all the time every minute and continuously yeah so every now and then for some reason you have extra gigantic ones and so huge that they end up sort of reaching the earth or even the earth and uh they're usually accompanied by something called coronal mass ejections which is uh i don't sound like something the department of telecommunication can ban on the grounds of uh or what is that morality public morality but yeah it's a completely respectable so coronal mass ejection is when this solar flare happens a bunch of these aforementioned electrons and protons you know which have been stripped of each other they they sort of like billions of tons of it they get ejected into the atmosphere and usually this becomes something called solar wind so you know space is full of these particles because once they leave the sun the temperature presumably drops so they saw but they still they have the momentum so they're drifting and uh it's akin to wind so that's why they call solar wind but sometimes they are so huge that they come and they hit earth yeah even then the earth has its own magnetosphere so this whole bunch of charged particles come and they sort of go across the earth because the earth's magnetic field is actually protecting it yeah it's negatious from it's just wind yeah it's everything is it's just hot okay so it's when you were much younger you must i don't know if you're old enough remember but back in the day there was something called uh nasel surakshar kawaj there was some popular item sold on national television like we are the telemarketer selling it and so it was something you wear and it protects you from the evil eye so if you're wearing it i'm giving the evil eye if you didn't have it that thing will happen but if you have the nasel surakshar kawaj it just go around you and unfortunately that excellent product is yeah yeah and i never thought to find an explanation for why my life turned out this way yes now you know had you bought it maybe you could if you could go back in time the first thing you would go back in 1992 and get another so this magnetic field is something like another so it and what happens is all this matter goes and ends up on the poles okay because of the magnetic field and when it rains down and it enters the atmosphere they're all charged particles so they play tricks with the light and you get the auroras which people play pay a lot of money and go and hang around in cold places you see it's a fairly normal thing this keeps happening and people keep going and seeing the auroras and every once in a while the coronal mass detection is so huge that it not only envelops earth it's too huge even for the for the magnetic poles to attract so it passes you know it's like the wind enveloping a cricket ball somebody of the likes of boomerang you can imagine the wind going across it and then sort of a tail that's that's what happens and when that happens corona mass detection is full of charge particles so it drags the magnetic field into a tail and when it you know when it goes away when it passes the earth's magnetic sphere that whole tail thing just snaps back like a gigantic rubber band hits the earth again and because the magnetic field uh you know sort of changes very very rapidly it so you know electricity is generated if uh the magnetic field associated with the conductor changes very quickly it's directly proportional to the rate so this entire this enormous magnetic field is changing very rapidly and what it does is it tries everything that remotely resembles a conductor not the phd guys but you know like like the electrical the first time this happened was in 1859 and it's called the carrington event because uh it was studied and uh reported by a very remarkable character named uh richard carrington completely amateur astronomer who did very pioneering work on like solar rotation and things like i just read up about him and i thought wow i mean it's uh amateur scientists uh i mean they're there now on watch out but uh back in the day they didn't even have watch out so and he was really a scientist so and of course he himself i read up about him so he is named after his father who was also richard carrington so it's very possible that the carrington was named by the carrington's father but yeah i mean there's a side then we should let it pass he figured that out and it is the largest sonar flare in recorded history it's the largest coronal mass station in recorded in 1859 and at that time the cutting edge of technology like the 5g of that time was electric telegraphs right across and like people got shocks when all these operators doing dicks and dashes yeah they did really long dashes and auroras were seen as far south as cuba okay and in the middle of the night and people actually woke up thinking that you know it's morning and it was that bright and after that it hasn't happened it happened once in uh quebec in 1989 and it ended up blowing all the transports wow okay yeah but quebec having roughly the population of a middle-sized housing society in mumbai they were able to get back on their feet without much effort but uh you know something like that in a big city would be a problem yeah but how long does this one thing last just passes by yeah it passes by so it's not it's not really long lasting maybe an hour maybe half an hour if it's a really big one but it's uh the momentary thing is enough to talk system and what is i know i mean i want to call this the way the world will end and it is really how the world will end because in a sense we won't really die i mean it's you know it's not gonna fry you and but you won't have twitter you won't have facebook and you won't have google so i mean i don't know you know people will say that china is the guy but this is something more serious and i i don't know i think that's that's what uh the end of life is no podcast so this is the low and dirty on the solar flares and actually in 2012 there was one which was really huge it was the big daddy of them all you know because they're all called cannington events after richard cannington's dad and uh the last one would have wiped out all electrical systems and luckily for us it just missed by like you know like very very little i mean i can imagine the sun appealing for uh sort of uh so this is what the mayans predicted that the world would end in 2012 but luckily we bought the nasa so they didn't expect something like that to be made to that point so so this is the uh low and dirty yeah very very interesting when you're saying coronal mass ejection i was actually thinking of so australia has this weird dance with lockdowns and not lockdowns right so australia is currently going on so at midnight on one of the tournament days lockdown was supposed to be in effect so till that time the city was full of spectators at 11 30 everyone had to be like driven out on mass so that's what i was thinking of when you said coronal mass ejection which is absolutely yeah that is a coronal mass yeah so but you mean like this is predictable at any rate yeah it's absolutely not predictable not only is it not predictable it's very poorly understood and uh you know actually we could i i just uh realized that had we studied this a little deeper the two of us would have presented this in our podcast and become the first podcast to win the mobile physics right but i guess we'll do it some other in some other episode just explain physical phenomenon so well that they just instantly decided to give us but yeah so they don't know they don't know how to predict it and they don't know how but the one the one good news is that the flare comes at the speed of light and the the dangerous split that is the coronal mass ejection it takes it's like thunder it's like so coronal mass ejection takes a day or so to come so theoretically you haven't done it but really a lot of guys observing the sun everyone's got they've got satellites they've got telescopes they've got everything looking at the sun and monitoring sunspot activity and so this actually starts from sunspot activity sunspots are places which look dark on the sun because of all these magnetic activities there'll be a point or there'll be a spot in the middle of all this magnetic activity where the oil you know boiling and boiling and going around suddenly becomes very quiet like a sort of first glass compartment in a train and that because it stays still it cools down and starts radiating so they look dark they look black and they're called sunspots and those sunspots you know they're like the center of all the magnetic and electrical business so when the collapse happens usually the flare will come from the sunspot area a bunch of sunspots it's impossible to predict but you can see it coming God has to bless the scientists to raise their love because half the world will be saying it's fake news the other half will want you to send them to jail for that it's absolutely no hope what do you do if you know it's coming the best thing apparently is to just plug out pull out all so all these you'll have to go and discover all your transformers you'll transform on the windings so you know when the electrical magnetic field passes through the windings they're going to generate EMF and burst you unhook everything from transformers and a fine chance of that happening this is a real like transformers movie that is to be made from the end of the world scenario and if you tell this to Talib he'll be that this is a black swan event and he'll put all his money in transformers they're all earning a price in time and that happens in 2072 Talib will become a silly so yeah I hope everyone enjoyed that little sojourn into the possibility that the world will end and I'm very sorry to disappoint everyone by saying that it's probably not going to end not in this way but other people are working hard Pakistan, Iran and Morocco are still at it but hot and electricity and magnetically charged is basically the sun's tender so it swipes right on the earth who knows we'll probably go out of the balance I think this reminds me there was this beauty pageant some time ago and our friend Donald Trump who was not present at that time he had some problem with one of those Miss Puerto Rico and he apparently said she was fat and she was Miss Universe and he said no no she can't be Miss Universe she's too fat and something about it oh yeah she has become Miss Universe and subsequently she put on weight and this guy was fat shaming and something like that and I got the bright idea that actually you can call such people instead of calling them fat shaming you can actually call them Miss Universe because they are hot and they're rapidly expanding and Donald and no one really hot it's unfunny on two towns one it's about fat shaming two it's too niche so only woke people will understand yeah that's what Simplified is about finding niche things and making them unfunny so yes I'm sure everyone is very excited and will run off and tell their friends one of the better ways in which the world can end which is solar flares the only way we can run off dinosaurs is probably solar flares yeah so stay safe stay unflared and stay simplified until next week when you bring something better than this one bye stay tuned bye bye bye bye bye bye bye