Saw something like this in Alaska in the late 90's driving south towards Glenallen on a youth hockey road trip. It was a localized spot of purple/blue Aurora. Came out of nowhere, the shapes looked like a cauldron of boiling water but in bright colors. Everyone in the van saw it.
Always figured it was an experiment from this remote HAARP research facility that fires radio waves at the ionosphere.
Thanks for sharing your comment. Whenever I read this kind of thing I'm reminded of the 1561 celestial event over Nuremburg[0] and I hope we can a) see more of these kinds of events and b) really start digging into their nature.
> At the dawn of August 7, we saw large black spheres coming and going with great speed and precipitation before the sun and chattered as if they led a fight. Many of them were fiery red and, soon crumbled and then extinguished.
I have also experienced a strange Aurora phenomenon. My first year living up north I was lucky enough to catch the northern lights. They were gray (not green) but really fun. A kind of camo-patterened pulsing, flickering in and out, with ripples that would move through it.
Eventually they moved from the northern horizon to entirely overhead, and even into the southern horizon. The overall pattern continued: pulses of circles fading in and out like blinking neon light, with waves crashing through and across the entire thing, slowly. Still gray, never green.
Then I noticed that the waves would all "sink" into a single spot in the sky. Directly overhead was a "dark spot" in the borealis, and it moved around slightly and had this wicked looking "interference" pattern around it, like what you'd expect to see with two magnets interfering.
Over and over the waves would ripple from the north and "sink" into this dark spot. The hole itself seemed to pulse as the waves moved around and ultimately into it. Kind of felt like it was a kind of magnetic pole. Not sure. The aurora itself (patterns of blinking, pulsing, shimmering) continued into the southern sky, but the dark hole was right overhead.
I haven't been able to really find anyone else who has experienced this. Just wanted to share.
I have seen something similar. A spectacular display in the mid-90's in February at Big Trout Lake Ontario; I watched it from the lake on the winter road. The entire sky would react to waves of energy, and there was a dark hole - as you described - in the middle of the sky. I have never seen such a dramatic display of aurora, with such strange patterns (vs the typical whisps of light) before or after.
Edit to add that the aurora happens in the upper atmosphere, so its interaction with the magnetic pole would be visible over long distances of the Earth's surface.
I remember seeing one of those on a night flight from the US to Europe. The pilot pointed it out on the PA and was puzzled as to what it was. It looked like a thin line of clouds illuminated by a super bright moon… except there was no moon that night and it was way higher than where clouds are supposed to be. Color was a silvery white.
Contrary to the findings from the Steve study published earlier this year, the satellite did not detect any charged particles raining down toward Earth's magnetic-field lines, indicating that whatever created Steve did not follow the same rules as the solar particles that create the aurora.
The article says we've "solved" it, but later on it says:
> Steve is an important discovery because of its location in the sub auroral zone, an area of lower latitude than where most auroras appear that is not well researched. For one, with this discovery, scientists now know there are unknown chemical processes taking place in the sub auroral zone that can lead to this light emission.
> Second, Steve consistently appears in the presence of auroras, which usually occur at a higher latitude area called the auroral zone. That means there is something happening in near-Earth space that leads to both an aurora and Steve. Steve might be the only visual clue that exists to show a chemical or physical connection between the higher latitude auroral zone and lower latitude sub auroral zone, said MacDonald.
Essentially, we still don't know what exactly is happening.
This is an essential read for folks who are wondering what it is. That said, my favorite crackpot theory that I read was that it was aliens burning down the ozone layer in preparation for an invasion. The most interesting speculative idea was that it was tied to the impending pole shift (as the poles weaken it extends the aurora south).
I don't see an optical spectrum anywhere, the linked paper (http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/3/eaaq0030) contains a host of other cool data that was collected. Fig. 3 in particular has indications that this phenomenon happens at some kind of domain boundary, given how many of the shown quantities change in this relatively narrow band.
Rather than being an individual launch, I'm wondering if the exhaust from transfers (from LEO to other orbits) leave gases in their own orbit, and if a particular transfer is happening a lot, the gasses would accumulate in their own distinct orbit.
Context: I worked on a satellite that observed interesting phenomenon that appeared in low-visible-light around the Earth, and one of the things we picked up as noise was the gas from a spy satellite doing a transfer near the Earth-Sun line of sight.
I don't get really why this is so surprising. The planet Venus has had cometary plasma tails, as has Mars (and it is entirely possible that the age old religious tales of Mars being some sort of warrior, and Venus being an angry snake-headed goddess was just our ancestors witnessing a very rare interplanetary electrical discharge via Birkeland currents), so this is probably just a form of our own tail.
Aurora themselves are just the interaction of our magnetic field with that of the Sun's, so it seems unlikely that large scale magnetic fields are not also the cause of this one.
This reminded me of the beam of light in "The City and the Stars" by Arthur C. Clarke - what turned out to be a weapon that fired giant mass heated to plasma state at high velocity.
One of my favorite memories is driving far north of Jackson, WY with my partner and her father. We pulled over off the road near a farm and started stargazing when I noticed this colorful ribbon flowing in the sky.
I thought it was the Aurora, but when I googled around I realized it wasn't. I found some talk of Steve and it was exactly what I saw.
It's definitely a weird thing to witness just out of nowhere.
Alright, so for decades Steve was called aurora as well, possibly for ages by natives observing it; yet now scientists decided to slap another sticker on it as the original scientific aurora explanation doesn't fit this class of what was traditionally called aurora as well; and we ended up with 'Steve'...
"Quark" and all of its generations[0] have unusual names as well. If STEVE actually is a new phenomenon, then eventually the name will stop sounding weird. The acronymization of the name also helps.
"Steve does not contain the telltale traces of charged particles blasting through Earth's atmosphere that auroras do. Steve, therefore, is not an aurora at all"
Yes, that's correct. At 300km, Steve would be situated within the thermosphere [1]
> The highly diluted gas in this layer can reach 2,500 °C (4,530 °F) during the day. Even though the temperature is so high, one would not feel warm in the thermosphere, because it is so near vacuum that there is not enough contact with the few atoms of gas to transfer much heat.
Yes but from the sun, not from the heat in the air molecules. And if you were not shielded from the near vacuum, you’d cool down from the evaporation of sweat on your skin.
At the equator, on the surface of Earth, solar radiation is about 1kW per square meter. According to this¹ wikipedia article 55-60% of solar energy is lost on its way through the atmosphere.
So would ~2kW / square meter at thermosphere height be enough to make you feel warm-hot despite the heat lost to evaporative cooling from sweating?
One might sweat a couple of liters/hr, and thus might manage 2 kW. But that's not needed. Between bright hot Sun, too hot, and dark cold deep-space sky, too cold, Earth spins, mixing too hot, and too cold, into not too bad. And so can you - the "barbeque roll" thermal management strategy for satellites. And if you're head-on to the Sun, or in shadow (holding an umbrella)... I don't recall whether radiative loss is sufficient to shed basal metabolic rate without sweating or not. If not, you might build yourself some elephant ears, and sleep with them edge-on to the Sun (and Earth). But EVA suits use water sublimation cooling - because people do EVA to strenuously exercise, even in the bright sun.
Science education content, down to kindergarten, mentions Sun heating Earth. But pervasively fails to mention deep-space sky cooling Earth. So a lot of explanatory leverage is left on the table - "Why are nights cold? Especially with clear sky? Especially in the desert? Why are mountains snow-capped? Why is winter colder?" etc. I wish I knew of a forum/community in which to discuss and create such improved content, but I've been failing to find one. :(
The air in this case is what's at high temperature so it wouldn't be drawing anything away at all. You'd still lose heat through infrared radiation. I'm not sure which effect would be greater.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
> "To photographers and stargazers in northern climes, Steve has been a familiar night phenomenon for decades. But the mysterious ribbons of light only entered the scientific literature for the first time earlier this year"
It's so exciting to realize how little we really know. Think about how many fantastic unexplained things there must be in the universe if we haven't even finished understanding the ones right under our noses. There's so much complexity that we can easily create things that are too complicated for one person, or even many, to fully understand.
"Think about how many fantastic unexplained things there must be in the universe if we haven't even finished understanding the ones right under our noses."
Well said. I think because so much is already in our books we forget how much miraculous things actually surround us and we forget to look at them and seek them.
Some biologist anecdotally said that the best place to hunt new species unknown to science is your own back yard.
On the other hand, without all this working for others we wouldn't have a system which lets us spend that other half of our lives seeing the things we do get to see.
That's just speculation, what system are you imagining in place of 'wage labour'? chattel? I imagine UBI and an explosion in the sciences; When anyone with interest can afford to follow that interest.
How are you measuring leisure time? My impression is that great gains were made in the union heyday of the 40s-60s, but that leisure time for most workers has been declining since then. The move to almost universal dual income households means outside-work time is spent doing the stuff that used to be done during the day. Also many more people have a second job. I’d be greatly heartened by data showing leisure time had increased in, say, the last 50 years.
If the context here is the development of human history leading up to notions of private employment then our timeline is in the tens of thousands of years and variations within past decades become almost irrelevant. Comparing hunter-gatherers or roaming tribes with modern city dwellers? Enough said.
I'm not sure I disagree with you about the last 50 years. I think it's a bit of a hard topic to dissect because the notion of a "workday" is relative and changes over time. I think a day of work is a lot easier now than in the 1950s and I think the ancillary work we perform to care for ourselves and our homes is reduced. By how much, I'm not sure how to quantify.
I recall Hans Rosling did a great talk along these lines, "The Magic Washing Machine." It's mostly talking about the mechanization of household labor in the mid century which we agree took place. I think since then we no longer spend as much time cooking, or cleaning, maintaining our appliances or cars. I think improvements in communication systems save a surprising amount of time -- consider how many hours a month you might waste if cell phones didn't exist? If you had to drive to a place to sign paperwork instead of fill out an online form?
There's nothing so large as the washing machine in the last 50 years but I think we have a significant amount of small improvements. Coupled with work becoming more palatable (part of why work/life becomes blurred is that some large percentage of us enjoy working) I think there's a possibility that labor has shrank in the last 50 years even if people work longer hours. Which they may not, factoring in household labor.
I know many people who do not need to work as hard as they do -- some who do not need to work at all. Yet they still do, even when the requirement is removed.
My opinion about the last 50 years is fairly weakly held, I'm basically just thinking freely. My strong comments above are in reference to the development of much more basic notions like "private employment."
Having a system to enriches the few who don't need more wealth reinforced by impoverishing the many is better than chattel slavery and worse than a system which offers real choice and ownership of ones labor.
maybe. History shows me that, unregulated, our system makes kings and queens that own not only own land and wealth but people as well.
If i wanted to make a system that insured the absolute minimum advancement and progress, the absolute maximum misery and poverty, while giving a random few almost god like powers..
UBI doesn't work because it depends on people working to fund it. The amount of money required for poverty level UBI in the US (one of the richest countries) is more than all of the federal current tax revenue, which comes from working people.
We can't all decide we are going to live for free and magically still get to drive cars, live in houses, eat food, have running water, etc.
The entire point of the economic system is to motivate people to help each other. If the money motivation goes away, people either stop helping each other or you have to motivate with violence.
The funding for UBI would require more funding than the current federal tax revenue. One of the things that would be necessary to make it work is redistribution of wealth. Taking taxes large corporates who are increasingly making more money through automation and the removal of jobs, so that it can be used to fund a better lifestyle for the majority of people.
Sadly I don't see a political environment where that's actually viable any time soon, but at some point we're going to have to see a move in that direction because there will be an ever decreasing pool of jobs that require actual people.
The cost of UBI depends entirely on the magnitude of the benefit; your position is indefensible given we haven't established the magnitude.
Obviously increasing welfare implies increased taxes. I don't see anything controversial there? I do agree the USA currently lacks the political will to move much in this direction.
..in your opinion. But in reality the current system doesn't work and needs constant massive bailouts and public funding R&D to just barely operate for the minority..
The entire point of the current economic system is to motivate the masses to enrich the few. If the motivation goes away then maybe people will work to enrich their own lives.
>But in reality the current system doesn't work and needs constant massive bailouts and public funding R&D to just barely operate for the minority..
Says an HN comment..
Maybe try to rework this sentence, because it doesn't appear to be true. While things may not be excellent for everyone, clearly the "system" works to some extent.
>The entire point of the current economic system is to motivate the masses to enrich the few.
Do you have a source on this? What do you consider to be the current system? The Federal Reserve System?
>If the motivation goes away then maybe people will work to enrich their own lives.
Do you seriously not think that people work to enrich their own lives right now? I can tell you that I'm posting this to enrich mine.
The current state of our market system requires massive bailouts and massive funding into research and development, massive subsidies (e.g. arms), and an overworked and underpaid workforce to limp along and pay out a healthy dividend to the richest(few) investors.
>source on this?
Just look at any multi billion dollar company; whats the difference between shareholder payout and worker payout? How else would you define this system where a company can declare hundred million dollar profits while paying minimum wage?
>Do you seriously not think that people work to enrich their own lives right now?
We try. for the last 8 hours i worked to make money that would enrich my life, but my work made someone else a hundred times this amount so 1% of my last 8 hours was for me.
If somebody else is making 100x off of just your work you need to quit yesterday and find somebody to pay you 2x what you are currently making. They will be more than happy to do so as they will still be making a 50x profit on you.
Either that or you have absolutely no clue as to how much value you actually create for your company. Nobody generates 100x profit, not even slaves.
I thought your point was that somebody else is actually making 99-100 dollars for every dollar that you make. I would like to know how you came to that number.
i worked out those numbers roughly for myself. My point though, was; most of, or at least the majority of my working life is to enrich someone who is richer that could can ever be. This is the nature of the relationship between the shareholder and the common worker.
ubi isn't doing away with markets or the profit motive. it's just: here is enough money you don't die. so more people can pursue their passions. OP is probably excessively optimistic that will be science. in reality it will probably not be. but it's a lot better than useless bureaucracies, inefficiencies and the willingness to do whatever so you don't die
Even things we do understand and that we have documented are underused.
Let's take a few examples.
I had Malaria 10 years ago. Well, did you know Atovaquone-Proguanil (e.g: Malarone) can not only prevent Malaria, but also __cure__ it, killing the plasmodium in the liver?
Still, most people, including a lot of doctors, think you can't cure Malaria and you have to live with it for life.
WHO declared in 2015 that processed meat was now classified as carcinogenic to humans. The information is publically available on their website (http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/), but who knows about it ?
So not only our understanding of the universe is very limited, but also, our ability to propagate (https://xkcd.com/1053/ :)) and use said understanding is even more limited.
> The first documented death related to asbestos was in 1906, yet it was only banned a century later
Incredibly it's still not generally banned in the USA; only a small list of products are banned by the EPA federally.[0] It was increasingly banned in Europe from the mid 1980s, and totally banned throughout the EU in 2005.[1]
>Incredibly it's still not generally banned in the USA; only a small list of products are banned by the EPA federally.[0] It was increasingly banned in Europe from the mid 1980s, and totally banned throughout the EU in 2005.[1]
Like everything else, everything is deadly at large doses. Even water. Alcohol clearly causes stomach cancer too at large doses, yet alcohol is not banned, right? If we were to ban everything that leads to a certain point of toxicity, we would not be able to live with anything around us. Toxicity is factored by exposure, which is why "carcinogenic risk" is not a binary variable.
> Everyone is exposed to asbestos at some time during their life. Low levels of asbestos are present in the air, water, and soil. However, most people do not become ill from their exposure. People who become ill from asbestos are usually those who are exposed to it on a regular basis, most often in a job where they work directly with the material or through substantial environmental contact.
The ones who are at the most risk in regard to asbestos are workers in construction or demolition. And in most countries how they should work with asbestos is now clearly regulated (safety gear and procedures).
everything is deadly at large doses
...
if we were to ban everything that leads to
a certain point of toxicity, we would not
be able to live with anything around us
No, that's not how this works.
The salient point here, is that we know about specific things which are predominantly non-essential, and atrociously bad for everyone.
Lead. Asbestos. Cigarette smoke. DDT. Plutonium. This list is not exhaustive.
Believe it or not, humanity is well acquainted with some natural, persistent, toxic villains, that no one needs to share a room with. No one's life is actually better with any of these things.
Yeah, coffee has low concentrations of acrylamide in it. Then, use that to argue that there's the same sort of calculated risk in the stimulant side-effects sought by those who self administer a cigarette's dose of smoke.
People try to form the same sort of argument, when contrasting natural substances and materials, versus synthetic counterparts. Gee, everything's natural! Yes, and the sun will swallow the better part of the solar system during its red giant phase. Except, that's not the point.
Muddying the waters, by digging up grey zone edge cases doesn't make asbestos a desirable choice for consumer goods, or even professional products. It doesn't make cigarettes good for anyone. It doesn't make lead a practical additive for gasoline. It doesn't mean we should render random birds extinct as by-catch, so we can barbecue all summer. It doesn't mean plutonium, in any amount, should be handled beyond the watchful eyes of armed guards by pretty much anyone.
The thing is though that most of the materials in that list can still be used in ways that don't incur risk. Just because making your water system out of a toxic metal is a bad idea doesn't mean you should outlaw the use of fishing weights and lead-acid batteries, in the same way the banning the shoving of asbestos into every corner of a house doesn't mean you have to also stop using it in firefighting equipment.
Actually, it kind of does. We really should stop selling lead fishing weights, and avoid using lead-acid batteries as much as possible. Mostly, because the world really is a better place for everyone, when consumer retail channels aren't fire-hosing these things into the waste stream. Lead acid batteries probably have unique applications to brag about, but fishing weights don't.
Yes, on shelves, it's all controlled behind appealing packaging, and a yeah quantity of people derive pleasure from using things properly, and disposing of their waste responsibly, but another portion of people take it home will simply spew it out into the open, dumping it into landfills, where maybe it leaches into a water table, and maybe it doesn't. But if you look at the inputs, it all started with making and selling such products at all.
Fire departments probably benefit from the use of asbestos, as a niche class of use cases. Simply knowing that there are exceptions to general utility, should not guide choices about broad marketplace availability.
The problem with DDT was that while it didn't cause significant problems for people (at the concentrations used), it caused huge problems for birds (thinned shells). At the same time it wiped out the mosquito carrying malaria along the gulf coast. The ecologic side effects were terrible, but in many cases human risk may well have been reduced.
Some asbestos is extremely dangerous, some is not (it depends on their chemical composition and microstructure)... using the same name for all of them is not helpful to safety, nor is declaring all of them dangerous.
There is Plutonium in the Pacific ocean. Should we guard the ocean, ban swimming in the ocean, ban fish caught in the ocean? Why, when sun exposure is much more likely to kill you with carcinoma than ocean plutonium?
I definitely am still going to go outside during the day even though the dangeous sun is irradiating me. I'm going to eat toast with dangerous acrylamide.
...And I'm not taking off the dangerous lead weights ballencing my tire rims on the drive to work, because I want to live.
> And I'm not taking off the dangerous lead weights ballencing my tire rims on the drive to work
Yes you will, because they are being banned in a growing number of states and countries. Lead weights are already illegal in the EU and in several of the most populous states in the U.S.
> because I want to live.
That's silly. Unbalanced wheels are annoying, but they aren't dangerous unless the shimmy is extreme, like when you have a lot of mud stuck in your wheels, in which case wheel weights won't help anyway.
> The ones who are at the most risk in regard to asbestos are workers in construction or demolition. And in most countries how they should work with asbestos is now clearly regulated (safety gear and procedures).
Yes but this is something that is commonly badly understood: the problem with asbestos is not that we can't manage it, it's that it WILL be badly managed at some point.
If you handle arsenic, you won't put it in schools and offices. You will manipulate it in very specifically environment that accommodate specific activities and is filled with specific people.
With asbestos, you have it in unmarked exposed building parts. Some accident may damage them. Somebody may drill a hole to fix something. Some contractor may rebuilt part of something without noticing. And then a small but continuous dose of asbestos will invisibly goes into the occupant lungs for years.
I think sametmax wrote a great reply already. I'll just address your logical fallacies.
Generalisation fallacy 1: "some harmful things are not banned; asbestos is a harmful thing; asbestos should not be banned".
Thankfully most governments are more nuanced with their regulations. In the case of asbestos, since comparable materials exist with less potential for harm, they are favoured and/or the more harmful stuff is banned. Where not possible there can be exemptions, e.g. see my European Commission link earlier, along with the "ban" it says:
> One remaining use of chrysotile has not been banned, however - in diaphragms which are used for electrolysis in certain chlorine plants. This exception is justified because no safe alternative has been developed and this process is carried out on closed sites under strictly controlled conditions.
Generalisation fallacy 2: "asbestos can be dangerous; if handled safely asbestos is not dangerous; asbestos is not a large risk".
Because it can be used safely does not make it generally safe.
The ones at the most risk are those who also smoke tobacco. The difference in cancer rates between smokers and non-smokers with equal exposure is huge.
We often get lost in the verbosity of textbooks and the amount of information bombarded at us that we fail to realize how primitive and simple the steps to discovering scientific knowledge were and how many centuries it took to compile this information into something we sort of understand today. Had we learned the science with this conscience in mind we would not only have taken the science with healthier doubt but also kept our own eyes open to find possibilities of deviations and reasons to make further discovery.
> At about 200 miles (300 km) above Earth, the air inside Steve blazed about 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit (3,000 degrees Celsius) hotter than the air on each side, and moved about 500 times faster. This band of hot, surging gas was about 16 miles (25 km) wide.
My bet is that it's a trace of a weapon. Propulsion trail? High energy laser hotspot?
I saw something very like this is a few years ago in the North of Scotland and after some moments of wonder I did assume it was a contrail from a missile launch - not at all a familiar event but there where some air bases in the region, and this shimmering plume extending through the frosty night sky into space begged an explanation.
I'm a bit surprised that no attempt was mentioned to determine which direction its coming from?
A beam, 16 miles wide.. of course its trite, but could be exhaust from starships decelerating into the solar system, or residue from a solar flare perhaps?
In the article, there is a link to a timelapse video on vimeo [0]. The "Steve" phenomenon seems to extend on an east-west axis, assuming that the "normal" aurora borealis in the video is to the north.
Two days before (May 06, 2016) there was a geostationary satellite launch by SpaceX from Cape Canaveral (JCSAT-14 / JCSAT-2B, positioned now on 154°East) [1].
Could it be possible that "Steve" is just residual exhaust gas from the recent satellite launch which may behave similar to an actual aurora phenomenon when ionized?
Always figured it was an experiment from this remote HAARP research facility that fires radio waves at the ionosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_...