DNA recovers from cosmic ray doses 100 times normal
Once in about every thousand years a huge dose of cosmic rays hits earth and radiation dose rates for earth-dwellers rise to about 100x normal. A Japanese scientist called Fusa Miyake, and her co-workers, discovered the phenomenon in 2023, and other scientists, particularly those working on Antarctic ice cores, confirm these events, which have now been called Miyake events.
The doses are so high that they may even have historically caused something like a mild pandemic on earth – making people temporarily ill with radiation sickness, but not killing the majority.
Aurora displays would have been seen from the poles to the tropics and could have lasted a year or more. Such storms today would destroy our electrical infrastructure and possibly force earth-dwellers back to a mainly agricultural civilisation. (And what happens if the only cars we then drive are electric?)
The events do not correlate with known highs in the cosmic rays from the sun, and the best guess at present is that the source is unknown – the high doses come from elsewhere in our galaxy or even beyond, but it is very unclear what the events causing this might be. Even worse; we cannot predict such storms. I previously thought some cosmic events like nearby supernova explosions could produce high radiation doses on earth, but calculation showed the amounts of radiation were too small. This current discovery changes the picture completely, but still leaves us with the mystery of its origins.
The magnetic field of earth generally shields us from roughly 99% of cosmic ray attacks, but astronauts aboard the International Space Station, already routinely get a 100x greater dose than we earthlings, and normal radiation doses in space are worrying national space authorities, particularly if doses occur on longer trips such as those planned to Mars.
For the first time, scientists have begun to get an understanding of how earthlings have survived these big Miyake events. The DNA of humans has an astonishing capacity to repair itself when it is exposed to radiation – natural or man-made, i.e., humans have strong radiation defences built into their DNA. Part of the reason for this enormous repair reserve - that scientists over 100 years of research into the effects of natural and man-made radiation over the last century have slowly become aware existed in human DNA – seems to be exposure every 1000 years or so to natural high-radiation events like Miyake.
The dose from these is so high it is parallel to man-made radiaion sources, like atomic bombs. Such man-made doses make many sick, but because of the repair enzymes most recover. It made sense that humans would have had such a reserve repair system, because every so often it would have been activated by the Miyake events, which are natural, but rare. But people survived them - at least, on earth.
But what would happen to astronauts on the International Space Station? A Miyake event would probably kill them, even though there is already special radiation shielding built in. The same would happen to astronauts travelling within the solar system. Yes, it is possible to shield space craft, but the increased weight would make space travel impracticable because of the vastly increased fuel requirement.
That would be even truer for interstellar travel. At present we cannot see how travel from one star to another would be possible without voyage times of many hundred years for a one-way trip, and it seems very likely that during that time a Miyake event would happen and kill the astronauts/colonists. This may explain the Fermi paradox – why are we seeing no confirmed alien visitors on earth? The answer is probably that they simply cannot survive the radiation during the trip. Any visitors might have to be non-biological - perhaps radiation-hardened artificial-intelligence robots. Also perhaps an answer to the Fermi paradox is that industrial civilisation is difficult to maintain because of these disruptive events and it isn’t possible to sustain one to build and maintain space-ships long-term.
“The heavens are the Eternal’s heavens but the earth he has given to the sons of men”. We cannot expect to solve earth’s problems by expanding ever further into space – what about peace on the planet we have been given.