☕️ Coffee & Covid 2025 🦠

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On top of all the weirdness here on our own Blue Rock, our generation is witnessing unprecedented Signs in the Heavens. Last month, Science Alert ran a record-breaking story headlined, “A Giant Hole Just Opened in The Sun – And It’s Blasting Earth With Solar Wind.” A massive, historic gate has opened on the Sun. And that’s just the beginning.

A coronal hole isn’t a hole in the way you’d punch one through paper— it’s more like a tear in the Sun’s magnetic fabric, a place where the Sun’s outer atmosphere thins and its inner plasma slips free into space. In ultraviolet light, it looks like a gaping shadow, a bruise on the solar surface. These holes form when magnetic field lines open up like vents, unleashing a torrent of charged particles —what scientists call high-speed solar wind— that gushes toward the planets at over a million miles per hour.

“Think of it as a firehose of solar wind escaping into space,” said NASA solar physicist C. Alex Young. “And when it’s aimed at Earth, it can slam into our magnetic field and rattle it hard.” That means auroras dancing across the skies and risks to satellites, power grids, and GPS. This hole is tied for the biggest Earth people have ever seen; and the previous records were all set within the last seven years.

In other words, it’s all been building to this. And maybe even more after this.

🔥 For centuries, the aurora was a northern myth— the Northern Lights, a rare evening bonus for well-heeled Alaskan cruise whale watchers and polar explorers. But over the last several years, the skies have changed. Across weeks and months, rather than the typical hours, the aurora has returned, again and again, dancing over Australia, lighting up South America, reaching into Europe, the lower United States, and even the South Pacific. Not once. Repeatedly.

It’s no longer a rare northern phenomenon. It’s just The Lights. And it’s getting pretty common.

Earth people are watching, with their own bulbous eyeballs, the sustained effect of space weather that used to only be a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. It’s not a freak, one-off event; it’s a pattern, driven by a vast, long-lived coronal hole in the Sun’s surface that keeps rotating back toward Earth like a cosmic lighthouse—blasting solar wind directly at our planet.

And Earth is more vulnerable than ever: our magnetic field is weakening, part of a long decline that could be centuries in the making. Together, this solar fury and terrestrial softening are producing auroral displays that aren’t just spectacular; they’re historically unprecedented on a human time scale. The heavens aren’t subtle anymore. They’re glowing. Signs.

🔥 The source of all this wonder —and the quiet threat— is a coronal hole so vast, persistent, and geoeffective that it’s redefining everything we thought we knew about the Sun. Stretching over a million kilometers —longer than 60 Earths laid end-to-end— this coronal hole ranks among the largest ever seen (and all were recent records), and this one is the longest-lived, most consistently Earth-facing coronal hole ever recorded.

Unlike one-off solar flares, this persistent massive hole is a steady engine of solar wind, rotating back around and hitting Earth roughly every month. Its equatorial position makes it especially potent, blade-sharp in precision, and it shows no signs of fading. As one spaceweather expert put it back in December, 2023, when the last record-sized hole appeared (now surpassed by the current phenomenon): “The size and orientation… is unprecedented at this stage of the solar cycle.”

The current, even more unprecedented, record‑breaking coronal hole first became visible —and began its slow growth into historic scale— back in late September, 2024. But it gained real notoriety last month, when it completed nine months of continuous rotation and solidified its place in Solar Cycle 25 history. By mid‑July, it’s still facing Earth and not showing signs of abating — instead, it is on track to strike again over the next few days.

For context, most coronal holes are short-lived and modest in scale— blinking into existence for a few days or weeks before fading out without much fanfare. The average hole spans about 300,000 kilometers, and rarely persists for more than a month or two. The current equatorial (in the middle) behemoth, by contrast, has lasted over nine months, spans nearly a million kilometers, and has returned every 27 days to hammer Earth with high-speed solar wind. It’s not just an outlier—it’s a statistical freak of nature, and it’s still going strong.

But that astonishing news is not the only celestial anomaly confounding astronomers. Now let’s discuss the trio of interstellar visitors.

🔥 Three times within the last eight years, around the same timeframe as all the record-setting solar activity, something else never before seen has happened. Two days ago, National Geographic ran a story headlined, “Our solar system has a new mysterious visitor—what is it?” They’re calling it 3i/ATLAS; the numbering system reflects it is only the third of its kind ever seen. All recently.

You may have already heard of the first one, with the nearly unpronounceable name Oumuamua (“ooh-moo-ah-MOO-AH”). That one shot past Earth back in 2017, but it was so remarkable that fresh YouTubes about the odd artifact are still filling feeds today, with no sign of letting up.

Oumuamua shattered conventional astrophysics by becoming the first object ever observed entering our solar system from deep interstellar space— not orbiting the Sun, not part of the Galactic plane, but flying straight through on a hyperbolic intergalatic trajectory.

It didn’t act like a comet, or an asteroid, or anything else we’ve seen before. It spun, it tumbled, and most famously— it sped up as it left the solar system, without any visible propulsion or outgassing. In other words, it defied conventional physics. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb went there, suggesting (however artfully) that it could be artificial— a relic of alien technology, perhaps, or maybe a controllable solar sail. He went on to write a 2023 New York Times bestseller about it: “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.”

🔥 But then, as the Oumuamua controversy continued to rage, two more equally bizarre interstellar wanderers have shot through. The most recent one, ATLAS, is shooting through this week. It is the largest of the three.

What makes these objects most remarkable isn’t that they came from outside the solar system. It’s that they don’t follow any of the rules. First, all three —Oumuamua, 2i/Borisov, and 3i/ATLAS— are all on hyperbolic trajectories, meaning they don’t orbit the Sun at all; they’re just passing through, unbound and unaffected by the gravitational leash that holds everything else in the solar system in its place.

Even stranger, none of them arrived neatly along the Milky Way’s galactic plane, where most stars and debris orbit in an orderly disk. Instead, they came in at steep, unpredictable angles, like stones thrown from deep space, possibly from very old or dynamically disturbed regions of the outer Milky Way— or much further away. They are, in every sense, cosmic outsiders— and the fact that three of them have appeared in such rapid succession, all within a decade of each other, raises questions that standard models can’t comfortably answer.

In 2019, 2i/Borisov flew past. It wasn’t quite as weird as Oumuamua. It looked more like what astronomers expected: an icy, outgassing comet. But Borisov wasn’t exactly “normal.” Its chemical signature —especially its high carbon monoxide content— was unlike any comet ever observed in our own system. It may have looked the part, but its composition suggested a completely different story.

Now, in 2025, we have the monstrous 3i/ATLAS— and it’s already breaking new records. Scientists guessed its age at over seven billion years, predating our entire solar system by more than 2.5 billion years. It’s swinging in on a steep, retrograde trajectory, from a completely different direction than the others. It’s not just old. It’s incomparably out of context.

The bottom line is, nobody knows what they are, why they are so weird, how Oumuamua could have suddenly sped up as it left the solar system, or why we’ve never seen any of these types of interstellar visitors prior to the last seven years.

Those are all the facts. Now let’s have a little fun and speculate. Just a little.

🔥 What if, as Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb delicately hinted, these are not random coincidences, but something artificial? Loeb opined that, “These interstellar objects from our cosmic neighborhood could also be artificial in origin, just like tennis balls on the backdrop of familiar rocks in our backyard.”

I find the three interstellar visitors’ timing —alongside the Sun’s weirdness— extremely intriguing.

If they are artificial (or artificially sent by someone or something), what if they didn’t come to see Earth at all? What if, instead, they came to check on the Sun? The only common denominator in their trajectories wasn’t planet Earth. It was the star at the center of our solar system. Oumuamua dipped so close to the Sun that it actually passed inside Mercury’s orbit.

Maybe … they are interested in our star’s strange behavior.

If these objects were sent, flung, or tossed from somewhere else, then perhaps their purpose isn’t to explore life-bearing planets at all, but to monitor stars like ours when they reach some critical threshold. After all, we only recently discovered the Sun’s capacity for long-lived coronal holes, escalating solar wind, and what could be the start of a multi-decade surge in output. Combine that with the ongoing weakening of Earth’s magnetic shield —something that could affect the whole heliosphere— and you start to see the outlines of a system worth watching.

Or at least checking in on.

Avi Loeb’s hypothetical solar sail wouldn’t need to decelerate on approach if its objective wasn’t Earth. It would glide past, take a solar reading, maybe perform a course-correcting maneuver near perihelion —just like Oumuamua— and then sail off again, its job complete. And if that’s the case, then what we’ve witnessed over the past eight years isn’t just a trio of oddballs on galactic joyrides.

It might have been more like a diagnostic routine.

🔥 Humans have always studied the sky for signs. In ancient Egypt, a dimming Sun foretold the death of a pharaoh. In Babylon, unexpected lights in the heavens were warnings to kings. Chinese astronomers kept millennia-long records of “guest stars,” comets, and auroras, interpreting each anomaly as a message. Usually a dire one.

Einstein once said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

Though it sounds like folklore, the link between solar activity and human behavior is supported by centuries of observation and a growing body of scientific research. Periods of heightened solar output —marked by sunspots, aurorae, solar flares, and geomagnetic storms— have been statistically associated with increased unrest, technological disruptions, and even shifts in human psychology.

Sound familiar?

Hospital admissions for mood disorders rise during solar storms. Some studies suggest spikes in heart attacks and strokes during geomagnetic disturbances. Markets grow more volatile. Wars and revolutions have clustered, historically, around peaks in solar cycles like this one. The mechanisms aren’t fully understood, but the correlations are too consistent to ignore. The Sun doesn’t just light our days; it stirs the invisible systems within us, the electrical, biological, even the emotional. When our star grows chaotic, so do we.

As researcher Sacha P. Dobler noted in his historical survey of solar cycles and human behavior, “Periods of solar change do not merely alter the weather—they reshape the world.” History proves it. When the Sun flares, humans seem to flare with it: revolutions, revivals, migrations, madness, and miracles.

If the past is any guide, what we’re seeing now isn’t just climate or coincidence— it’s epochal.

🔥 What do we see in the headlines about the oceans right now? Exactly the kind of instability you’d expect if something big were stirring the global circulatory system. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is weakening— potentially nearing a collapse timeline measured in decades, not centuries. BNE Intellinews, last week:

In the Pacific, El Niño and La Niña patterns are arriving earlier, lasting longer, or vanishing altogether, defying historical models. Record-breaking marine heatwaves are blooming in the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. Salinity patterns are shifting in ways that suggest deepwater disruption— as if the pumps of the ocean are starting to sputter. LiveScience, yesterday:

And let us recall the expert-baffling “South Atlantic Anomaly,” that vast “dent” in the Earth’s magnetic field, right above the region where sea ice is collapsing, ocean salinity is spiking, and auroras are flaring where they shouldn’t. EcoNews, about three weeks ago:

It’s not just the South Atlantic Anomaly anymore. It’s become the Global Magnetic Anomaly. And it’s still growing. And it’s so powerful that most low-Earth satellites must power down to cross through it. The danger zone keeps getting bigger, confounding satellite operators.

None of this proves a solar cause, but taken with the sky’s increasing violence, it’s impossible to ignore the timing. The oceans are lurching. The skies are glowing. The machinery is moving. And the experts are, as ever, baffled by all the “mysterious” goings on. They just can’t put the pieces together.

All the evidence indicates we live in truly historic times. Vast, unknowable changes are coming. The Sun is awakening. The Earth is shifting beneath our feet. Forces once thought stable magnetism, ocean currents, even the length of the day— are now in motion. We’re watching the sky crackle with fire, the seas churn with salinity, and new visitors from deep intergalactic space glide silently past our star.

And yet, amid all the mystery and upheaval, there is clarity: we were made for this moment. The ancients called these things signs; we call them data. But the meaning remains. These aren’t just omens of collapse— they’re also signals of profound transformation. Of endings, yes, but also of new beginnings. So look up. Look inward. The age of passive spectatorship is over. Long dormant machinery is lurching into gear, and our generation is not here by accident.

Oh, and again: the experts are useless.

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https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/sky-signs-saturday-july-12-2025-c?utm