Surviving a pulsar

@Beholder: Aren't you thinking of a gamma ray burst from a relatively nearby supernova or maybe a feeding quasar jet? Being close enough to a stable neutron star / magnetar generating a pulsar signal would irradiate the planet for who knows how many thousands of years before the orbits shifted/drifted/tilted away enough to get the planet out of the beam.

I was watching one of the Science Channel programs that was talking about high radiation star remnants in one of their segments. The scifi story writing area of my brain postulated that putting a military base deep inside one of the planets for radiation protection might work well to prevent surprise attacks given the high radiation in that solar system would make it hard for cloaked ships to remain cloaked. Any incoming ship would also need considerable shielding. Of course, if the opponents had a working wormhole drive, it wouldn't matter. Being close enough to a magnetar to disrupt a wormhole drive would probably kill everyone taking shelter inside the planet.

Getting back to the GRB assumption, the beam time would probably be measured in hours, so consider a large part of the planet getting "cooked". Most consumer grade underground bunkers probably wouldn't be deep enough to provide any real protection from something like that. For a distant GRB with comparatively lesser radiation, I would guess that the bunker would need to be some tens of feet deep. For a GRB beam that sets the world on fire, it would need to be hundreds of feet deep, if not thousands.

While a lot of the radiation could be blocked some tens of feet deep, the problem is the small amount that gets through over how many hours and causes accumulated radiation damage during that time.
 
I think everyone on this thread is looking in the wrong direction. You should be looking at humans and not cosmic events.

Hydrogen bombs can only be set-off by an atomic bomb. Little history: United States is the only country at set-off a hydrogen bomb decades ago, they weren’t smart enough not to set-off second bomb, but they did it anyway. For the most part other countries as well as the US pretty much abandoned hydrogen bombs. The atmosphere around the planet is made up of oxygen and hydrogen, in this scenario, if the atmosphere caught fire the whole planet would be a fireball similar to the sun but probably not as hot.

Professor Opmmur
 
Opmmur said:
I think everyone on this thread is looking in the wrong direction. You should be looking at humans and not cosmic events.

Hydrogen bombs can only be set-off by an atomic bomb. Little history: United States is the only country at set-off a hydrogen bomb decades ago, they weren’t smart enough not to set-off second bomb, but they did it anyway. For the most part other countries as well as the US pretty much abandoned hydrogen bombs. The atmosphere around the planet is made up of oxygen and hydrogen, in this scenario, if the atmosphere caught fire the whole planet would be a fireball similar to the sun but probably not as hot.

Professor Opmmur
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The atmosphere does not contain enough oxygen for a self sustaining fire because it gives less energy than consumed, but I would worry about damaging or clouding at the stratosphere.

If normal air could ignite itself at any temperature, igniting pure oxygen would have set off that chain reaction already.
 
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Beholder said:
The atmosphere does not contain enough oxygen for a self sustaining fire because it gives less energy than consumed, but I would worry about damaging or clouding at the stratosphere.

If normal air could ignite itself at any temperature, igniting pure oxygen would have set off that chain reaction already.
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You are correct.
A rare occurrence at Paranormalis.

Oxygen isn't flammable.
There's hardly any hydrogen in the atmosphere. It's mostly nitrogen.

Harte
 

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