Rory Cox@DrRoryCox

Sep 10

BBC Newsnight

@BBCNewsnight

Sep 9

“You just said that 10% doesn’t seem an unreasonable estimate that AI could kill all humans”

“Yes”

“Wow… oh my God.”

@vicderbyshire speaks to Nobel Prize Winner and so-called ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton about predictions by an Anthropic researcher that there’s a more d kill all humans within a decade.

#Newsnight

Rory Cox@DrRoryCox

Sep 3

Black Hole

@konstructivizm

Sep 2

The Night the Sun Almost Fried the Victorian World

On 1–2 September 1859 the Sun threw a tantrum so violent that Earth has not seen its equal in the written record. We call it the Carrington Event, after the English astronomer Richard Carrington, who watched a patch of the Sun de in a matter of minutes.

Seventeen hours later the shock arrived.

Compasses spun. Telegraph networks—the internet of the 1850s—went feral. Operators yanked wires from batteries and still watched sparks leap across the keys. Some stations kept sending messages on the residual current alone. Paper caught fire. Operators got shocks. In the dark, auroras painted the sky blood-red and green as far south as the Caribbean and Hawaii. Gold miners in the Rockies stood up at midnight thinking dawn had come.

What hit Earth was a fast, dense coronal mass ejection—a billion-ton cloud of magnetized plasma—slammed into the planet’s magnetic field and crumpled it. The resulting geomagnetic storm induced currents in long conductors: telegraph lines then, power grids and satellites now.

Carrington’s flare was not unique in kind. It was unique in how hard it hit a world that had just wired itself together and had no idea the Sun could answer back.

A repeat today would not stop at flickering lights. It would threaten transformers, GPS, radio, and the thin electronic nervous system of modern life. NASA and others simulate that scenario because September 1859 is the benchmark: the strongest geomagnetic storm we can point to and say, this actually happened.

Simulation credit: NASA. The Sun’s still out there. It has not promised to wait another 167 years.

Phillips P. OBrien

@PhillipsPOBrien

May 8

James Holland@James1940

May 7

Publication day here in the UK. History is here to help! @WeHaveWaysPod @ww2headquarters @PenguinUKBooks @TransworldBooks