02-08-2017, 01:25 PM
(02-08-2017, 01:06 PM)Cirocco Wrote: My apologies for being unclear. If the loss of planetary magnetism is due to a loss of cohesion in the Earth's core and the atmospheric shields are weakening any solar activity striking the surface here would be potentially poisonous to all life forms due to radiation.
Those are all some pretty big IFs, though. And on top of that, there's IF the magnetic shield effect is substantial, which is something that's still being debated. After all, we have evidence of polar reversals happening every few hundred thousand years, but no evidence of Earth ever having been left completely defenseless or of massive die-offs due to solar activity. So you're talking about IF something happened that, as far as we can tell, has never before happened in the history of life on Earth.
I'm just saying, it's not necessarily something worth worrying too much about. Even if the polar reversal happens in our lifetime, it's likely to be more of a large-scale inconvenience than a true disaster.