Beware the Solar Flare
We humans certainly seem to be preoccupied with the various ways “life as we know it” might one day cease to exist. It’s definitely a good sign that at least many people believe “life as we know it” is a good thing, because you certainly wouldn’t necessarily think that judging by the way some people act. Several disaster films have waxed eloquently on the many possible ways the world could be destroyed. We have wayward meteors heading for earth, aliens set on destroying the earth, earthquakes and other natural disasters of such enormous power that the entire planet will be either reshuffled, frozen, sunk or burnt.
Then we have the “real” destructive forces at work, such as global warming, a return to the ice age, unprecedented extinction rates, and so forth. Now we have a new one to add to the list, the danger of solar storms to human life on earth. According to NASA scientist Richard Fisher, “The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity.”
Fisher continues, “Our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms.” The problem seems to be that solar storms can disable or destroy satellites, and if the storm is strong enough, even transformers on power lines could blow up from the effect of an accumulation of charged particles on those lines. The effect of this would be GPS devices left useless, cell phones non-functional, credit card transactions rendered ineffective, and no electricity for millions of people at the northern latitudes.
Scientists are predicting now that the worst of these storms will befall us in May 2013. Short of solutions, the best we can do at the moment is keep predicting the storms, putting our satellites in safe mode, and hope for the best. It is certainly tempting to send Bruce Willis to the sun to drop a nuclear bomb-not a bad idea even if there was no solar storm to contend with. So in case you were worried that there was nothing much to worry about, now that shouldn’t be a problem, thanks to NASA and their happy band of scientists.