[Server-sky] Dawn Chorus

[Keith Lofstrom]

With the dawn, birds awake and sing together in chorus.  A
nice feature of remote suburban living, and camping trips,
in places quiet and forested enough to hear.  For lazy
late-waking people like me, an overnight stay in one of the
guest trailers at the Malheur Field Station is a good way
to hear the bird's dawn chorus without getting out of bed.

But there is another dawn chorus, made by high energy
particles (mostly protons, ionized hydrogen) trapped in
the Earth's magnetic field, comprising the van Allen
radiation belts.  These particles are stimulated by solar
coronal mass ejections, the solar wind, lightning, and
the very low frequency transmitters used to communicate
with submarines.  At the dawn position of their drift
around the earth, they emit a small part of their energy
as audio frequency electric fields, which can be picked
up by special "baseband" receivers far from power lines,
motors, and other electric systems.  The audio signals
coming out of those receivers is beautiful, and
coincidentally quite similar to birdsong.

A sample here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD3CBY2CnXg

(though the UK town is probably toDmorden, not toRmorden)

What you are hearing is electric fields processed into
sounds, not something picked up with a microphone or an
ordinary radio.  I doubt the birds themselves can detect this
signal, but who knows?  Nature does the darnedest things ...

Why does this matter to server sky?   When there are enough
megatons of thinsats up there, they will scatter those 
particles into the top of the atmosphere, and the van Allen
belts will disappear.   If we are impatient, We may use
server-sky and orbiting electric tether technology to make
the radiation belts go away sooner ("VLF remediation"). 

That would be good for satellite longevity, good for
studies of how the van Allen belts work (because we can
turn them off and on and watch what happens), good for
reducing radiation reaching most parts of the earth, but
not so good for listening to the "music of the spheres".

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com