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Short Stuff: Magnetic Pole Switcheroo · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. The whole gang's here,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: even in spirit. So let's go stuff you should know.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Uh yeah, you put this one together. This is a
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: good one.
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  Speaker 3: We're talking about the magnetic field, and specifically the switching
• 0:18
  Speaker 3: of Earth's magnetic pole, and I guess we should just
• 0:22
  Speaker 3: start talking about what the magnetic field of the Earth is, right, Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: You kind of can't really get past that one, because
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  Speaker 1: apparently it seems to be fairly peculiar to Earth to
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  Speaker 1: have a really solid inner core made if I think
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  Speaker 1: iron and nickel, and that that is basically bathed in
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  Speaker 1: a bath of molten outer core. And because that molten
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  Speaker 1: outer core is constantly roiling and convecting and doing all
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  Speaker 1: sorts of crazy motions, it actually produces a dynamo effect
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  Speaker 1: where a magnetic field is generated. That inner core essentially
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  Speaker 1: becomes a giant bar magnet with a north pole and
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  Speaker 1: south pole. Yeah, and that magnetic field radiates from the
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  Speaker 1: center of the Earth outward into outer space, and it
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  Speaker 1: does some pretty cool stuff. One, it prevents high energy
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  Speaker 1: particles that are bombarding Earth at all time from reaching
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  Speaker 1: Earth generally and killing us, just shooting right through your throat.
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  Speaker 1: And out the other side, so life can exist on
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  Speaker 1: Earth and then less importantly but more beautifully also creates
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  Speaker 1: the auroras.
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  Speaker 3: And also why I wear a kevlar turtleneck actually not
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  Speaker 3: a dicky really because.
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  Speaker 2: It gets warm in the summer.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's smart.
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  Speaker 2: So you've got that bipolar core.
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  Speaker 3: You know, we have the North pole in the South
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  Speaker 3: pole geographically, like, we know where those are.
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  Speaker 2: We've mapped those out.
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  Speaker 3: They're great, everyone loves them, but they really have nothing
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  Speaker 3: to do with the actual magnetic poles of the Earth.
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  Speaker 3: Two different things. The Earth's poles, as we will see,
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  Speaker 3: they move around a lot because of that molten core
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  Speaker 3: is unstable and it moves. That that roiling sort of
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  Speaker 3: molten gunky we're talking about is weaker in some places,
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  Speaker 3: it's stronger in some places. And you know, you kind
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  Speaker 3: of likened it to a pot of water like bubbling
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  Speaker 3: and the bubbles like pop and fade away. The same
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  Speaker 3: thing is going on there that creates instability and sort
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  Speaker 3: of just movement.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. So that's suffice to say that the Earth's magnetic
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  Speaker 1: field is not constantly stable. It's constantly changing. And since
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  Speaker 1: some spots are weaker than other spots, that means the
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  Speaker 1: poles can actually move around, and they do. They wander about.
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  Speaker 1: It's called excursions, and they can move all over the place.
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  Speaker 1: And as a matter of fact, when they what seems
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  Speaker 1: to pass what seems to be a threshold, they flip
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  Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, the South Pole is that
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  Speaker 1: the geographical nor Pole area and the North Pole is
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: down in Antarctica somewhere. And it happens. And we've just
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  Speaker 1: recently learned about this kind of thing.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's called polarity reversal.
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  Speaker 3: There's some disagreement among the scientific community about how often
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  Speaker 3: this happens, how quickly it happens. There was a study
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  Speaker 3: in twenty twenty from the Scripts Oceanographic Institute in San Diego,
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  Speaker 3: San Diego, Right, Yeah, he said, sd I didn't think
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  Speaker 3: it was South Dakota.
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  Speaker 2: Definitely, or southern Durham, North Carolina.
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  Speaker 1: It could have been that one. It's definitely not South
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  Speaker 1: Dakota though, I'll tell you that.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: So they had a new model based on one hundred
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  Speaker 3: thousand years worth of data and they said, actually, these
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  Speaker 3: poles are wandering like a lot. It's a real walk about.
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  Speaker 3: They're wandering about ten degrees a year. That is equal
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  Speaker 3: to the distance between Atlanta and Toronto. For Aussie friends,
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: brisbe in Melbourne or if you're in London. Those are
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: the three places that listen to us basically, sure Canada,
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  Speaker 3: Australia in the UK, or London and Prague. And that
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  Speaker 3: is about ten times what scientists thought before the study
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  Speaker 3: came out.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, the pole can wander that far in a year.
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  Speaker 1: A year. You just like, when you hear about this,
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  Speaker 1: you're like, Okay, that's that's where I didn't know they
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  Speaker 1: could move. Maybe it just kind of gyrates a little bit. No,
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  Speaker 1: it can travel from Toronto to Atlanta in the year
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  Speaker 1: and back, and it wanders all over the place. It's
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  Speaker 1: not like it follows like a set line. Because again,
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  Speaker 1: right the molten inner or outer courts roiling, it looks
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  Speaker 1: probably a lot like the surface of the sun, and
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  Speaker 1: so all the little spots in weird like areas and everything.
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  Speaker 1: That's where the kind of like the magnetic poles actually
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  Speaker 1: traveled like down a plinko set essentially, but is severear
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  Speaker 1: plinko set. If you can wrap your mind around that
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  Speaker 1: kind of.
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  Speaker 3: Thing, all right, Well I'm gonna wrap my mind around it,
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  Speaker 3: and we're gonna take a break, and then I'm gonna
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  Speaker 3: unwrap my mind right after this. All right, so we
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: were talking about this thing is it's really holland these
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  Speaker 3: poles are moving around and they can actually flip.
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  Speaker 2: And the last time that happened.
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  Speaker 3: Was about forty two thousand years ago in what's called
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  Speaker 3: the La Champ I guess the La Champ excursion, great
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  Speaker 3: man name, and this was the lava flow in France,
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  Speaker 3: of which it was named after because of the fossil
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  Speaker 3: record I guess that we discovered in the nineteen sixties.
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  Speaker 3: And during this excursion, the North Pole went across North America.
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  Speaker 3: Then said, all right, now I'm gonna drop down into
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  Speaker 3: the Pacific or through the Pacific to Antarctica, and then
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  Speaker 3: I'm the North Pole, by the way, and I'm going
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  Speaker 3: to stay there in Antarctica for about four hundred years,
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  Speaker 3: and then I'm going to go back up to the
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  Speaker 3: Indian Ocean to the actual geographical North Pole.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, roughly that area, back to generally where the north
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  Speaker 1: magnetic north Pole typically is. Right. Yeah, that's really fast.
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  Speaker 1: Four hundred years on a geological timescale is like a
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  Speaker 1: blink is too slow as a description or analogy, And
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  Speaker 1: so the Lashapis excursion seems to have had some pretty
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  Speaker 1: significant effects on the planet at forty two thousand years ago,
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  Speaker 1: coincides with a bunch of weird stuff that happened on Earth.
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  Speaker 1: There was a lot of glaciers that expanded and all
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  Speaker 1: sorts of surprising places. The wind patterns changed globally, the megafauna,
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  Speaker 1: a lot of megafauna species disappeared from the fossil records,
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  Speaker 1: and so too did the Neanderthals. It was a really
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  Speaker 1: really sick, magnificant period of like surprising and kind of
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  Speaker 1: dismal activity in Earth's history. And they have traced this
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  Speaker 1: to basically a weaken in the magnetic field. That is
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  Speaker 1: probable the magnetic field became very weak and that allowed
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  Speaker 1: the poles to flip very quickly, and that it wasn't
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: necessarily the poles flipping that caused all of this weird
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  Speaker 1: stuff to happen, but that the magnetic field being weakened
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  Speaker 1: probably also let this weird stuff happening. So the reversal
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  Speaker 1: of polarity was a symptom, just like say the disappearance
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  Speaker 1: of the Neanderthals was, or the change in wind patterns,
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  Speaker 1: where they were all symptoms of this weakened magnetic field
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  Speaker 1: around Earth.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, you talked about it, you know, sort of acting
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  Speaker 3: like a force field against that particle bombardment that probably
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: weakened it enough that they were bombarded. The ozone layer
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  Speaker 3: was damaged, a lot of UV light is just baking
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  Speaker 3: the Earth, and it was just bad, bad enough where
• 7:57
  Speaker 3: scientists obviously are like, well, when is this going to
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: happen again? Because we're in store for something pretty rough,
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  Speaker 3: And what they've kind of come out with was a
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  Speaker 3: we're not sure exactly when it's going to happen again
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  Speaker 3: because you can't look back. I think you mentioned earlier.
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  Speaker 3: It doesn't necessarily happen in a pattern that you can
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  Speaker 3: count on.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, it doesn't seem to.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, so they can't say like, all right, well here's
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  Speaker 3: when it's going to happen again, But they do think
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  Speaker 3: this was a really the La Shamp excursion was sort
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  Speaker 3: of a rare, fast thing, and if it does happen again,
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  Speaker 3: it'll probably be over the order of thousands of years,
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  Speaker 3: and it's not going to be the kind of thing
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  Speaker 3: like most of the other times it happened. It was
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  Speaker 3: over a much slower time period. The La Champ was
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  Speaker 3: just so fast it wrecked everything. And it probably wouldn't
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  Speaker 3: be that bad if it happened again, because it would
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  Speaker 3: be on a much slower, you know, thousands and thousands
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  Speaker 3: of years timeline.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean tens of thousands of years versus hundreds
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  Speaker 1: of years. That's pretty significant as far as differences go, right,
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  Speaker 1: And if if it sounds kind of like if it
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  Speaker 1: rings a bell. We talked a little bit about this
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  Speaker 1: in the plate tectonics episode, where like the magnetic striping
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  Speaker 1: at the bottom of the sea is basically lava flows
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  Speaker 1: recording reversals in polarity of Earth's poles. This is very
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  Speaker 1: much what we're talking about. So because they think it
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  Speaker 1: happens over you know, tens of thousands of years, and
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  Speaker 1: if you look back in the fossil record at other
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  Speaker 1: times that coincide with polarity reversals, there doesn't seem to
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  Speaker 1: have been anywhere near the kind of catastrophic events that
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  Speaker 1: came from the La Shop excursion. They're not particularly worried
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  Speaker 1: about it, but we do know that if it did
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  Speaker 1: happen on like a normal slow timescale, we still have
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  Speaker 1: to adapt because a lot of our technology relies on
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  Speaker 1: a stable magnetic field.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean they have to take that stuff into account.
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  Speaker 3: Like when they look at the fossil record, maybe not
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: much of anything happened because they weren't using satellites and
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  Speaker 3: they you know, didn't have things floating around in space.
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  Speaker 3: But there's an area called the South Atlantic Anomaly between
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: South America and South Africa where there is a weaker
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  Speaker 3: magnetic field than elsewhere on Earth, and when satellites and
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  Speaker 3: stuff go through there in spacecraft there are issues.
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  Speaker 1: They're like can you hear me? Are you still there?
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  Speaker 3: And they say, in space, no one can hear you scream.
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  Speaker 2: Name that movie.
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  Speaker 1: Space Balls exactly.
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  Speaker 3: So that's an example of what can happen with a
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  Speaker 3: just a somewhat weaker magnetic field. So they would have
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  Speaker 3: to account for that stuff ahead of time, know it's
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  Speaker 3: coming and account for it. I think there would be
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  Speaker 3: some economic impact, but I mean I think who is
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: at the Cambridge Center for Risk Studies said that it
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  Speaker 3: could be like a six to forty two billion dollar
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  Speaker 3: cost for the United States, which honestly, that's chump change
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  Speaker 3: when you look at you know, budgets of the United States.
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  Speaker 1: But that's a day, yeah, a day, So it's.
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  Speaker 2: Not like uh.
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  Speaker 3: I mean, that's a lot of money obviously, but it's
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  Speaker 3: not like that would wreck the American economy anything.
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  Speaker 1: It depends on how long it went on for you know, well, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: I guess so. I mean, if they didn't get up
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  Speaker 1: and running within a few hours, that could be you know.
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  Speaker 2: It could add up, It could add up.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: Speaking of knowing it's coming, I want to go ahead
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: and stem the tide of emails. I know that Chuck
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: was talking about alien By the way, everyone.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: Who could Jos baseballs.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: One other thing, Chuck, because the disappearance of the Neanderthals
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  Speaker 1: coincides with the weakening of the magnetosphere and probably bombardment
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  Speaker 1: of UV radiation and ions. Yeah, maybe right that the
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: Neanderthals really didn't help. You might be onto something. Man,
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: that's an old one. You got anything else?
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: I got nothing else? JM.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: Well, then short stuff is out. Stuff you should know
• 11:59
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• 12:01
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