Afraid of catching cancer in these last dog day rays of summer?
Don’t be! ‘cause there’s plenty of other ways the sun can kill you!
Like the solar flare headed for earth!
(Jesus. Sometimes I forget just how small we are.)
Actually, we don’t have to worry about leaping tongues of fire raining on us like lightning streaks from Olympus just yet (hopefully). The recent X class magnetic explosion that happened on the sun will probably just mean that we’ll end up getting hit with an inconvenient cloud comprising energized magnetized plasma. While that sounds like a lot of meaningless words, it carries with it less of a death sentence and more of a misfortune – like disrupting our planet’s magnetic sphere, fckking with our satellites and phones, and spreading circumstantial butthurt virally.
(Although, for some that might be considered a fate worse than unprecedented incineration.)
Even if this recent storm is a non-event, it still doesn’t mean we’re outta the heaven-sent murder woods forever. We need only reflect on the flares back in 1921 and 1859. Back then – at the later of the dates at least – the biggest concern was about the telegraph service going to shit. We’re slightly more reliant on technology today. For some perspective within the economy set up on this pale blue dot you live on – if a flare of that magnitude were to hit us today, it’d also hit us in the bank balls. Because that’d be a grand total of..
“Plus twelve… divide by five…
…subtract one…
… carry the two…”
Yep, that’ll be about an estimated two trillion dollars in damage.
Hey! That’s almost as much as our national debt!
(Hah. Just kidding. Pretty sure we created new numbers just to keep a record of that.)
Still, you’ve gotta wonder how bad Apple’s gonna have it if all our communication systems get effed? Especially with the annual unveiling of their updated phone? Which is like one of those Pandora bracelets that you add a shitty trinket to each year and pretend to be enamored with? But secretly hope a solar flare would hit just so that you don’t have to wear it anymore to make your little brats happy?
(Oh good! Finally being honest about its actual size. Even put a man nearby for scale.)
#colormeimpressed
On the real, though – while “glitch in the matrix” bullshiz like this one we might face is currently our worse “end of the world as we know it” threat right now, a solar flare like the retro ones could seriously eff up our communications. And yes, an even worse one could be like all your favorite doom-porn outta Hollywood. And… yes, Virginia, there is a satan sun capable of raining fire on you. Or – at least catching telegraphs on fire.
But the good news is that if it happens, it likely won’t be for a while, science says.
Plus I’m pretty sure we’ll all annihilate each other long before it does.
That’s if the Higgs Boson vacuum doesn’t eat everything up like Langoliers first.
Stephen King, anyone?
Mmmnope?
Mmmkay.