Are Earth ice ages created by stars?:
It might sound preposterous, like astrology, to suggest that galactic events help determine when North America is or isn’t buried under immense sheets of ice taller than skyscrapers.
But new research suggests that the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly from our solar system’s passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
Resembling the curved contrails of a whirling Fourth of July pinwheel, the Milky Way’s spiral arms are clouds of stars rich in supernovas, or exploding stars. Supernovas emit showers of charged particles called cosmic rays.
Theorists have proposed that when our solar system passes through a spiral arm, the cosmic rays fall to Earth and knock electrons off atoms in the atmosphere, making them electrically charged, or ionized. Since opposite electrical charges attract each other, the positively charged ionized particles attract the negatively charged portion of water vapor, thus forming large droplets in the form of low-lying clouds.
In turn, the clouds cool the climate and trigger an ice age — or so theorists suggest.
Burning fossil fuels might be our only hope! We should run our cars overnight. We should also exterminate and bury entire species to ensure our future generations have fossil fuel to burn.
Or we could admit that our understanding of the universe and its component parts have great glaring omissions, and realize that humanity acts in its best interest given its best knowledge at the time it acts….
Nah. BIG OIL! BIG PHARMA! (Anything but BIG LAWYERS! BIG IDIOTS-DEMANDING-PUBLIC-POLICY AND BIG GOVERNMENT!)
