Events of terrible beauty

One of these days, there will be another Carrington Event.

There will be a huge coronal mass ejection from your planet’s yellow star that strikes your planet square on.  The result will be a vast electromagnetic pulse which fries almost all your electronic stuff.  You will be plunged in an instant back to something like the 19th century.

Will you have what it takes to survive?

On the other hand, perhaps there will be nuclear attacks that cause EMPs, or perhaps there will be a pandemic or other natural events which brings down the world’s economy, resulting in much the same.

On that cheery note, I read at Spaceweather:

ERUPTING FILAMENT AND EARTH-DIRECTED CME: During the early hours of Oct. 22nd, a long filament of magnetism erupted on the sun: movie. The explosion hurled a lopsided CME into space, and a new analysis suggests it could be Earth-directed. Click to watch the movie, then scroll down for more information:

The eruption occured squarely on the Earthside of the sun, but the CME is not squarely Earth-directed. The bulk of the ejecta will fly north of the sun-Earth line. Nevertheless, the CME is expected to deliver a glancing blow to Earth’s magnetic field on Oct. 24-25. It might even merge with a pair of minor CMEs traveling ahead of it. If so, the combined impact would be more likely to spark a geomagnetic storm. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras in the nights ahead.

Watch for auroras!

They are events of terrible beauty, presaging we know not what.

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