Abstract
People’s interest in the influence of the Cosmos on the Earth, its immediate surroundings, the biosphere and human civilization has always existed. But only in the middle of the twentieth century, this vague area of cosmophysics was armed with a stock of necessary knowledge and received a conceptual basis for understanding and further study of the problem. The scale of this influence was well understood by many scholars of the past. So, in the early 1940s, one of the representatives of Russian cosmism, the creator of biogeochemistry, Academician V.I. Vernadsky wrote: “The connection of cosmic reality with us is much deeper and more commonplace than we think.” In this case, the biological significance is, first of all, the variability of cosmic factors. In general, the cosmobiological situation on Earth at any given moment in time can be considered as a result of their combined impact. Along with gravity, the rotation of the Earth and some other factors, the most important should be recognized as solar activity, geomagnetic field and the state of the atmosphere. The last three factors are highly variable. Their variations are precisely at the heart of the Sun-Earth problem.
The first guesses about the role of the Sun in the life of the Earth date back to ancient times, but scientific observations of the Sun began only about 400 years ago, after the invention of the telescope by G. Galileo. At the same time, the realization of the reality of solar-terrestrial relations (STR) came only about 105 years ago, after the brilliant pioneering research of A.L. Chizhevsky of 1915 (1938) (for details and references see Chizhevsky 1973). At the same time, it took several more decades of ground-based and direct space observations and experiments to understand the general picture of helio-geophysical disturbances, to study and classify their most significant characteristics. The main achievement of recent decades is that it has been possible to make significant progress in understanding the mechanisms of STR.
Any detailed presentation of the accumulated facts, hypotheses and concepts of STR is beyond the scope of this tutorial. In particular, we will not deal in detail with the well-known facts of the impact of geomagnetic storms on human health, we will not describe the numerous correlations between SA and statistics of technological failures and disasters, etc. The main focus below will be on the most important areas of research and the most reliable results.
Physicist, save me from metaphysics!
Isaak Newton
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Miroshnichenko, L. (2023). Influence of the Sun on the Biosphere. In: Solar-Terrestrial Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22548-2_12
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