12-23-2016, 01:19 AM
Let's just hope and pray that we never experience what they did in 1859, known as the Carrington Event.
If people panic when their smartphone does not work for a day, can you imagine the chaos of a power grid or 2 being taken down during a solar flare?
Sheesh almighty, that is one scenario I would not want to see.
Especially if it affected hospitals, banks, emergency agencies etc etc.
Obama did pass in Oct. an Executive Order for such scenario.
Hopefully nothing like that will ever occur, but if it does, at least maybe our govt will be prepared to act on it and calm the public before panic ensues.
Quote:The flares were so powerful that "people in the northeastern U.S. could read newspaper print just from the light of the aurora," Daniel Baker, of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said at a geophysics meeting last December.
In addition, the geomagnetic disturbances were strong enough that U.S. telegraph operators reported sparks leaping from their equipment—some bad enough to set fires, said Ed Cliver, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts.
In 1859, such reports were mostly curiosities. But if something similar happened today, the world's high-tech infrastructure could grind to a halt.
"What's at stake," the Space Weather Prediction Center's Bogdan said, "are the advanced technologies that underlie virtually every aspect of our lives."
If people panic when their smartphone does not work for a day, can you imagine the chaos of a power grid or 2 being taken down during a solar flare?
Sheesh almighty, that is one scenario I would not want to see.
Especially if it affected hospitals, banks, emergency agencies etc etc.
Obama did pass in Oct. an Executive Order for such scenario.
Hopefully nothing like that will ever occur, but if it does, at least maybe our govt will be prepared to act on it and calm the public before panic ensues.