Thoughts:
Somewhere on UK TV (Yesterday?) last night was an interesting piece on the Suns behaviour and NASA probing Mercury. Apart from the discovery of ice on Mercury I was reminded of wild discharges of magnetic force. Followed rapidly by massive expulsions of particle matter. Beautiful Aurora at the poles usually but is a full on bombardment.
My experiences of similar was in the embodiment of near instantaneous system shut down of battle tanks (tracked/fixed weapons etc) on a Nuclear event - war usually. Commonly experienced in a lesser way with long range radio (ionosphere/troposphere) in days of old.
Termed Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) and its detection. We forget about all the handy satellites etc wafting about above our heads of the civil and military variety and their vulnerability. And there's the exposed power generators and cable systems on the Earths surface.
My reminder is of the Carrington Event that has again been detected quite recently and fortunately with Earth in a position that enabled a near miss.
Whats it to do with cars....their electrics/electronic control will effectively be fried due to large induced currents. Carry a foldable push bike in the boot?
"Extreme solar storms pose a threat to all forms of high-technology. They begin with an explosion--a "solar flare"—in the magnetic canopy of a sunspot. X-rays and extreme UV radiation reach Earth at light speed, ionizing the upper layers of our atmosphere; side-effects of this "solar EMP" include radio blackouts and GPS navigation errors. Minutes to hours later, the energetic particles arrive. Moving only slightly slower than light itself, electrons and protons accelerated by the blast can electrify satellites and damage their electronics."
"Then come the Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma that take a day or more to cross the Sun-Earth divide. Analysts believe that a direct hit by an extreme CME such as the one that missed Earth in July 2012 could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps".
OK...we have heard about it but NASA is looking closer and Mercury was a place to start. I know we have no protection in our life systems for this and as time moves on we take up/embrace more of the vulnerable systems. In my (dinosaur) view their are places you should not go with technology as appealing as it may appear. I wonder what the UN talking shop has on this subject...policy (yawn)
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/s ... superstorm
