Photo courtesy NASA
“Unless we come up with a way to move the Earth out of the way, we are basically marking time until one of these things hits us.”
alized parts of the world, it was a little different. Telegraph lines were seen to spark, telegraph operators suffered shocks and more than one telegraph station actually caught fire. So, let’s extrapolate that Victorian-era damage into today’s world. While most satellites are hardened against flares, such a strong event would undoubtedly take out at least a few, leaving global communications a mess. Much less powerful flares regularly take out a transformer or two every now and then. A Carrington-level event would take out hundreds, possibly thousands of transformers all over the world. (Think about how long it takes to get a couple dozen transformers fixed during a snow storm…Vast stretches of the world would be without power for a very long time. Possibly years.) And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Each of those problems would lead
to a cascade of other problems. (Goodbye, GPS and turn-by-turn directions! Adios, microwave! So long, Siri!) It would literally take us years, maybe decades, to rebuild our civilization as we know it today. Of course, at this point you might be thinking, “That sounds like the Earth being destroyed to me!” Nope. The Earth would continue merrily on its way. It’s only our civilization that would be destroyed. So. There’s that. What can we do? Sadly, not much. Unless we come up with a way to move the Earth out of the way, we are basically marking time until one of these things hits us. All we can really do is be aware of the potential threat, improve our technology to be resistant to these events and develop contingency plans for the inevitable. Go and tell your electronics how much you love them—while you still can.
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