I was just reading a
NASA story about how we all dodged a bullet from a solar storm that went widely unreported in 2012 and found myself reading about
radiation hardening afterward.
It's certainly a technical discussion that's well over my level of education, but I can't help but wonder about the possibility (and cost) of manufacturing items built to withstand these natural EMPs.
The best anecdotal story about the havoc these storms can wreak is from the "Carrington" storm of the mid-1800s, when telegraph stations were burned down due to sparks created by electrical surges traveling down the telegraph lines.
I've never thought about it in detail until now, but EMPs actually change the crystalline structure of electronics components, so there's no easy repair to these items - you need to remanufacture components from scratch, and you might be forced all the way back down the line to pre-electronics components if all of your electronics equipment has been damaged.
A pretty startling concept.
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