The 2,000,000th post game

Otto Farrant was in NATIONAL THEATER LIVE: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE with Corey Johnson, who was in X-MEN: FIRST CLASS with Kevin Bacon.

61 bottles of beer on the wall,
61 bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around,
60 bottles of beer on the wall.

TODAY IS

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

It’s like everyone was peeling onions.

It was better than we’d hoped for!

Such a great speech.

Such a receptive audience.

Truly a special evening!

And

The Solar Storm of 1859 (a.k.a. the Carrington Event), which pushed both sets of polar aurorae down to tropical latitudes and caused telegraphs to fail all over the world (while some worked via induced current even after being disconnected from their batteries). If such a storm happened today, it could be devastating to the modern world.

The main reason Mars is lifeless (as far as we know) is because its magnetic field was too weak to keep the solar wind from stripping away most of its atmosphere over time.

Red dwarfs are smaller and dimmer than our Sun, meaning their habitable zones are closer, and so any planets in them are likely to be tidally locked (i.e. the planet would rotate once every time it orbited its star). Tidally locked planets are unlikely to have strong magnetic fields to protect them from solar flares. On top of that, red dwarfs (especially young ones) are very prone to flaring, and can produce BIG flares that put our Sun's flares to shame.

Young Sun-like stars are known as T Tauri stars, that are known to have much more activity than our own comparatively calm Daystar, with strong stellar winds, extensive coverage of starspots, and of course flare activity. Planets in orbit around such stars are thus likely to be lifeless.

That 1859 Solar Storm? It almost happened again in 2012. Luckily, it missed us by a week. Fun Fact: there is a 10-12% chance it could happen again in our lifetimes...