Thursday, October 23, 2014

"Blessed are the eyes which see the things" - The Sun and The End of the World




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The Sun and The End of the World


We may sometimes wonder how the human world will end, since eschatology is an important theme of the Bible.
End of The World: Top 5 Popular Scenarios

1: Extraterrestrial Impact
 
This scenario is where there is an impact of a large extraterrestrial object with the Earth.

2: Pandemic
 
A pandemic taken from the Greek words pan all and demos people, it is a spreading of infectious disease that propagates through populations across a large region. 
3: Climate Change 
Throughout the Earths history there has always been climate change, in this end of the world scenario we take the meaning of climate change as when the environment becomes too hostile to support current human life populations.

4: Nuclear War
 
Since the creation of the atom bomb in the 1940's, there has been a new threat to mankind, nuclear war.  
5: Gray goo (nanobots) 
Nanorobots (nanobots, nanoids, nanites or nanonites) are typically conceived to be devices ranging in size from 0.1-10 micrometers and constructed out of nanoscale or molecular components. As no artificial non-biological nanorobots have yet been created, they remain a hypothetical end of the world concept. 
Gray goo phrase is given to the concept of out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all matter on Earth while building more of themselves.

http://drwibble.hubpages.com/hub/End-of-The-World-Top-5-Scenarios
However, we have to think about our origin first when handling our survival, the matter about ourselves so grave and significant.  It is because there must be a kind of relationship between the beginning and the end of our existence.  Moreover, if we were an extraterrestrial being, we would surely check from how human beings came to exist to how it has ceased to exist all through history of human beings when we examine the fate of them.

Pu simply as we, mankind, came to exist receiving energy from the sun like any other living things, we might face the end of our history due to some special condition of the future sun.  Then, how can the sun destroy human beings?
Ice age on the way as scientists fear the Sun is 'falling asleep' 
A NEW ice age could be on its way to Europe after scientists warned of an alarming fall in the performance power of the Sun. 
By: Owen BennettPublished: Sat, January 18, 2014

The number of gas explosions on the Sun's surface should be at the peak of its 11-year cycle of activity, but there has been an unexpected drop off. 
One space physicist said he had not seen anything like it in his 30 year career, and there are fears the temperatures could drop so low the Thames might freeze over.
"If you want to go back to see when the Sun was this inactive... you've got to go back about 100 years," Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire told the BBC. 
One of the Sun's biggest lulls came in the 17th century, known as the Maunder Minimum, at the same time as freezing winters swept across Europe. 
That caused not only the River Thames to freeze solid,  allowing Londoners to enjoy frost fairs, but even the Baltic Sea iced over in some of the harshest conditions ever recorded in Europe. 
Dr Lucie Green, from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory told the BBC: "It's completely taken me and many other solar scientists by surprise."
After this sudden calming of the Sun, scientists wonder whether its activity will continue to fall. 
"It would feel like the Sun is asleep... a very dormant ball of gas at the centre of our Solar System," said Dr Green. 
"There is a very strong hint that the Sun is acting in the same way now as it did in the run-up to the Maunder Minimum."

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/454657/Ice-age-on-the-way-as-scientists-fear-the-Sun-is-falling-asleep

Specifically we can refer to data and a graph showing centuries-long fluctuation of influences of the sun on the earth.


Finally, the Sun may influence the Earth's climate also in other, more convoluted ways, e.g. by modulating the flux of cosmic rays, which have been proposed to increase the coverage by low-lying clouds.

But how strong the Sun's influence is and which mechanism is playing the main role is a matter of current research. The Sun's influence on the Earth's climate can not be measured directly. However, good correlations have been found between different proxies of solar activity and climate records, for example, between the concentration of 14C in tree rings and glacier fluctuations (Fig.1).
Fig. 1. Sunspot number (green line) and the concentration of 14C in tree rings (red) as proxies of solar activity versus glacier fluctuations (white circles; after Eddy 1976, Nature 192, 1189).

Another example is the the coincidence of the so called Maunder minimum (a period in the second half of the 17th centuty when hardly any sunspots were seen during more than 50 years, see Fig. 1) with the Little Ice Age in Europe, a time of severe cold and great hardship, when the Thames froze regularly and alpine glaciers grew deep into the valleys. The latter is greatly illustrated by painters of Dutch school, showing winter scenes, ice-covered canals, figures skating and sledging (Fig. 2).
http://www2.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate/se_body.html

In a longer time span through the history of the earth, it has experienced an ice age in several times.
What is an ice age? An ice age is a long interval of time (millions to tens of millions of years) when global temperatures are relatively cold and large areas of the Earth are covered by continental ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Within an ice age are multiple shorter-term periods of warmer temperatures when glaciers retreat (called interglacials or interglacial cycles) and colder temperatures when glaciers advance (called glacials or glacial cycles).

At least five major ice ages have occurred throughout Earth’s history: the earliest was over 2 billion years ago, and the most recent one began approximately 3 million years ago and continues today (yes, we live in an ice age!).

Currently, we are in a warm interglacial that began about 11,000 years ago. The last period of glaciation, which is often informally called the “Ice Age,” peaked about 20,000 years ago. At that time, the world was on average probably about 10°F (5°C) colder than today, and locally as much as 40°F (22°C) colder.


Simplified chart showing when the five major ice ages occurred in the past 2.4 billion years of Earth’s history. Modified from several sources including Dynamical Paleoclimatology: Generalized Theory of Global Climate Change, 2002, by Barry Saltzman.

http://geology.utah.gov/surveynotes/gladasked/gladice_ages.htm

If severer condition of the current ice age should come to be manifested and engulf the whole earth to continue for 100 years or more, if not one million years, the human civilization would be frozen and disintegrated.  The end of the world for human beings must surely come if the condition should continue for 1,000 years.






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Luk 10:23 And he turned him unto his disciples, and said privately, Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see: