This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Begoggled Fox: Copying this to the discussion for a bit.
- You Fail Astronomy Forever: The ending takes a bit of license with how solar flares work. Mostly, in terms of sheer magnitude. Also, a kid says the temperature of the sun is 10,000 degrees at the surface, and Cage's character says he's right. That's sort of close... in Farenheit. Since this is a physics class, they would've been using Celsius, or even Kelvins (it's around 5700 K, there).
- I don't know... That thing was called a solar flare, but it looked more like a hard coronal mass ejection. And those carry a whole lot more energy. If they last long enough, or if they are strong enough, they most certainly can whipe out life on Earth. And usually, you only notice them 8 minutes after they've started.
Since I'm the one who fleshed this part out, I'll say this. The Earth already got hit with one of these, back in 1859. It's called the Carrington Event
, and demonstrates nicely what a CME would do to Earth nowadays. It caused arcing on telegraph stations, some amount of temporary climate change, and the destruction of around 5% of the ozone layer at the time (more than CFCs et al have done in the modern age). However, even though we got directly hit with it, it still didn't kill even a fraction of life on the planet with raw plasma. That's what the Van Allen belts are for.
The flare in Knowing is still at least an order of magnitude too strong to be believable. I could see it causing a civilization-destroying event, taking out communications satellites and power stations, and causing some nasty climate changes, but definitely not a Class X end-of-the-world scenario.
Goggle Fox: (Again — yes, I'm the same person as above. Password loss wooooo! I've stuck with this one for a while.)
I just noticed that this section got deleted without further discussion. I'm somewhat disappointed by this. I've recovered the original section I entered and removed the rest of the natter. Any further discussion, or reasoning for removing it entirely?
Does Big Applesauce really apply? The guy worked at MIT, his family lives in Boston, and he has to travel from his home to New York City to (try to) prevent one of the prophecies.
