One of my favorite movies is, Escape from L.A. I know it isn’t the greatest movie ever. It is a bit cheesy but I can ignore the cheese and look to what really mattered to me the whole movie. I loved the ending. I loved how Snake (Sorry, his name is Plissken) clicks a button on the whole world is sent right back in the dark ages. I was 16 at the time and any movie about the end of the world excited me. Movies like that still do. We have 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, The Knowing, The Walking Dead, etc…
But what if one of those movies becomes reality? What if all the end of the world movies I love so much weren’t Hollywood pictures but predictions of impending actual events that will happen. Cataclysmic events that when they do happen, will destroy the world we love and bring on the final days. Earth will no longer be the blue marble in the galaxy but left as a dark spot floating 92,960,000 miles from our Sun.
It appears that something is going to happen tomorrow, Saturday 13th. A massive solar flare is heading our way and smart people are expecting that it will cause satellites to fail and power grids to crap out but the extent of the damage is uncertain. Sounds like something out of a low-budget Syfy movie doesn’t it? This isn’t a movie. This is real life and it will happen. Hopefully those people in lab coats are wrong and nothing happens.
A government-sponsored panel in 2008 estimated that such a solar event today would likely destroy the U.S. electrical grid, inflict a staggering $1 to $2 trillion dollars worth of damage, and require over a year to repair. So it’s more than of mere academic interest to monitor and observe these violent events as they unfold. Plus, they’re amazing to watch.
Damn, Sun! You Scary.
This has happened before. Once during 1859, knocking out telegraphs and lighting up 
the sky from the Caribbean to the Rocky Mountains. It also took place in 1989. This knocked out power in Quebec for 12 hours. That was 1989. That was a much simpler time. I think people were still riding horses and buggies. Today is 2014 and we are a mass group of people who rely on technology to control just about every aspect of our daily lives. If this were to happen during some robot uprising, a solar flare of this size or greater would be a gift from the heavens. Without robots uprising or terminators and semi-trucks coming to life, we have little fear about becoming ants to the machines.
The sun is a huge ball of gas. The sun will eject what scientists call, coronal mass ejection. I would guess it is like us farting after eating extensive amount of Taco Bell. This giant Sun fart is on the radar for the NASA people because of how intense it is, listing it as a X1.6, which I have no idea what that means but they say it is pretty f**king bad. While all of us on Earth don’t have to worry about being vaporized like Nic Cage was in The Knowing, those people in space may need a big and healthy dose of sunblock.
Joking aside, this thing could cause some serious damage and create massive blackouts, sending us back to the days or yore. Bob Berman of Slooh explained it nicely,
“A government-sponsored panel in 2008 estimated that such a solar event today would likely destroy the U.S. electrical grid, inflict a staggering $1 to $2 trillion dollars worth of damage, and require over a year to repair. So it’s more than of mere academic interest to monitor and observe these violent events as they unfold. Plus, they’re amazing to watch.”
Not something that sounds exciting now. I really thought the end of days would be awesome. I am more of a zombie apocalypse man and not a guy who is ready to go though the power grid of the world crashing. I will be watching the sky and making sure my phone is charged before I go to bed. If I am going to deal with losing power, I’ll need my phone to communicate with friends and family. If by some strange chance this solar flare knocks out cell towers, at least I will have flappy birds to play while the world becomes a dark and sad world.
I should thank Inquisitr for the story. There site is actually worth the read. I have no knowledge in science or the actual facts behind solar flares.
pitweston
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