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Moogs
Hates the Infotainment
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: NSA Archives
 
2014-07-26, 11:31

You want startling? I too am no electrical engineer, but I've read it takes the power companies / manufacturing companies roughly 12 months to build commercial grade transformer rigs. A bad solar EMP would trash most of them as I understand it, and we have almost none in reserve (too expensive for today's short-term financial wizards). And you can't build more without electricity. Nice situation we've saddled ourselves with, eh?

The strange thing is, I was watching the solar flare "news" either last summer or summer before (during the solar maximum period) and there were a few blips mentioned on social media about flares that were spotted, etc, but not this storm you're talking about. I honestly believe with stuff like this, when it's imminent, we're kept in the dark (no pun intended). Only thing worse than getting hit and having people panic, would be people panicking 24 hours before it hits.

You know how the human race works (or fails to work), Drewmeister... we never do what we need to do until something terrible happens first. But we won't have a second chance if our electrical grid and parts of our industrial infastructure are simultaneously trashed over a very short period. We'll all be transported back to the 1800s for a long while. (For more fun, check out the 2014 Speeder Bike / Ebola thread. )

...into the light of a dark black night.
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