Would life be any different if the Earth's poles weren't magnetic?

[chrisk]

@Machine_Elf

Yes, it’s true that some lodestone was naturally magnetized, and was at first the only source for magnets that could be used for making compasses. But they weren’t nearly strong enough for useful electric motors, so we make our own permanent magnets these days by exposing magnetizable materials to very strong electromagnets.

If we lived on an earth with no magnetic field, it’s possible it might have taken us a bit longer to discover magnetism, but we would have figured it out eventually.

From the wiki article:

“One theory suggests that lodestones are magnetized by the strong magnetic fields surrounding lightning bolts.[7] This is supported by the observation that they are mostly found at the surface of the Earth; not buried at great depth.”

I assume that we’d still have lightning bolts without a magnetic Earth.

[Chronos]

Quoth AaronX:

I wonder what else we’re missing out on because they don’t occur naturally? Magnetic monopoles, hmm?

The way my old advisor put it, “We know that magnetic monopoles exist. There might just be a very small number of them, though, such as zero.”. That is to say, the laws of physics as we understand them are such that, under the right conditions, magnetic monopoles would be produced, but those right conditions might be very hard to attain.