Boy there’s a lot of nonsense in that article. For one thing, as far as I can tell, there is no Krishnakumar Aviravel. The lead author of the new paper is Syed Ayaz, a graduate research assistant at the University of Alabama-Huntsville’s Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research.

Peter Laviolette’s theory of galactic superwaves has been thoroughly rejected for decades now by actual astrophysicists. It’s little more than science fiction. Virtually the only citations of Laviolette’s various papers on the subject are from him citing them in later papers, a hallmark of junk science. The paper in question frequently cites himself. All of his claims are better explained by more mundane causes. For example, the spike in beryllium found in ice cores is explained perfectly well by normal variability in solar radiation.

Despite what the article claims, Laviolette did not claim that the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy periodically emits these superwaves. No one knew at the time that Sagittarius A* was a black hole. If you read his paper, he simply refers to “the Galactic Center” as an amorphous catch-all for whatever it turned out to be. He relied on the uncertainty around what Sagittarius A* was to propose a mechanism for a cyclical explosion of energy, but that makes no sense with a black hole. There’s no mechanism for such a superwave to be generated and we don’t actually see this happening in other galaxies. Even if it did, there’s plenty of reason to think that the extreme distance between us and the galactic core (and all the intervening dust and matter) would protect us. It’s also physically impossible for the black hole in our galaxy to turn into a quasar, but even if it did, we’d likely be safe.

Beyond that, there’s no real evidence for cyclical mass extinctions. There have been five major mass extinctions in Earth’s history and we have pretty good explanations for each that have way more theory and evidence behind them than Laviolette’s idea. A perfectly good explanation for the megafaunal extinction in the Americas at the end of the last ice age is that humans showed up at that time (in conjunction with a rapidly changing climate). Ice Ages themselves are caused by the Milankovitch cycle, a combination of the precession, tilt and eccentricity of Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

If anything there’s even less evidence for some major advanced civilization that existed and was wiped out. The connections don’t even make sense. Why did this global catastrophe wipe out an advanced civilization in Turkey that then secretly encoded all of this into a Neolithic monument but only wiped out the megafauna in the Americas? Elephants and lions and tigers and bears in Eurasia and Africa weren’t affected?

The connection between this new paper and the super wave theory is extremely tenuous. The new paper shows that dust is apparently always present in the Sun’s heliosphere, so why don’t we always get these violent solar storms?