I was watching a programme on Discovery Science that detailed how a massive solar flare of epic emanates from our sun every 100/150 years.
It analyzed how a forthcoming solar flare could wipe out telecommunications around the globe and send our earth's electromagnetism in tilt. Sattelites would fry and so would phones, pagers (if any?) wireless connections and the internets.
Which begs the question. Will other stiff such as fridges, TVs, DVD players etc be affected?
Now this brings me onto part II.
In Chuck Palahniuk's fight club, there are many referances to the people being enslaved into this modern world of comfort. Where we are brought up thinking that surrounding ourself with lots of stuff will make us happy, but it turns out that the things we own end up owning us.
We feel the urge to buy stuff that we dont really need. Even I am taking a look around me and I am seeing stuff I hardly use.
Then we have the people who live beyond their standards. Those that need to loan and borrow money to be 'happy'. To 'look good'. The amounts on the world's credit cards must be gargantuan. Stuff on credit all worthy of adding another crippled character to South Park. We had Jimmy, then Timmy and now Economy.
Without forcing this perspective on anyone, would it be possible that this Solar flare wipe out ALL technology, and as Tyler put's it, 'erasing all the debt, bringing us all back down to zero' ?
What life would ensue?
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Deferrals get you nowhere - Just Do It.........Or Ineptitude will consume your life like a Cancer
I'm not refering to those babies but to a massive one that could wipe out TV's, internet and the mostly reliebale power grids. No power for days, weeks, months or maybe years.
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Deferrals get you nowhere - Just Do It.........Or Ineptitude will consume your life like a Cancer
I believe everything would be chaotic. People will start stealing and looting, others will run away to somewhere, what they feel is a safe place. If nothing is working, then there will be riots in the streets. Good human nature. lol
__________________ Deja Moo: The feeling that you've heard this bull before.
Probably nothing will happen. People will initially be weirded out, news "experts" will discuss the event for a couple years over whatever form of long range communication we still have, and then we'll go about our lives.
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
if the cycle is 100/150 years, we should have a general idea about what might happen. widespread use of telegraphs existed in the 1830s, and afaik, nobody since then has noticed all our electricity just fail.
There's also this problem of the flare having to be "directed" at Earth. Earth is a spec compared the sun. It would take well over 1,000,000 earths to equal the mass of the sun. The sun is massive (and large). It's possible that we have missed a super solar flare since 1859 (as in, one occurred, but we failed to observe it), but it's also possible that none actually occurred (I think that this option is more likely than the former). On top of this, super solar flares the size of the one that occurred in 1859 are also not common. In other words, it is very likely we could miss most of the next super flare.
Could it happen? Yup. They predict the damage to be between $30-$70 billion and, currently, our only recourse is back up satellites ready to replace the damaged ones. Power should be out for quite a few people from anywhere from just a few seconds to a couple of days.
I don't recall losing power "for years" being a symptom of a super solar flare.
[SPOILER - highlight to read]: In fact, it would be impossible short of a flare continually erupting for years from an area on the sun that strangely leads* the Earth's orbit around the sun just perfectly to continually bombard the earth with a solar storm.
*Similar to how a gunner has to lead shots for a distant target while both are in motion.
so, it isn't actually doing physical harm to electronic equipment or communications infrastructure, just causing them to be non-functional during their exposure to the flare?
like, its not that it is rendering a telephone wire innert and unable to send a signal, but that it is disrupting any signals caught in the flares EM?
Yes AND it's destroying electronic equipment. Transformers will blow (keep your movie jokes to yourselves...Bay haters) due to too much energy passing through...but that won't be everything.
We will see things ranging from the Quebec incident to static in cell phone calls. The difference is it will be on a much more massive scale and many of our satellites would be damaged and need to be replaced.
I think the problem is: some people think that the Van Allen Belt is completely wiped out and it takes years to "repair." Not true. Guess where those energetic particles come from? That's right: solar wind. The nature of the "wind" would also be the repair of the radiation belts. The earth's magnetism just simply wouldn't cease to exist because that's caused by rotations in the core. Take that, "Knowing" movie believers.
In fact, there are people and proposals out there to get RID of some of the energy in the radiation belts. Odd, isn't it?