Monday, Mar 30, 2009

Global Warning (Needed)

Today's Lunch Break:
Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe

While the disaster movies would have you believe that it's going to be an asteroid, nuclear war, or virus outbreak that kills most of us off, it may be nothing less than a case of bad weather.

Well, space weather, that is. A large enough ejection of coronal mass from the sun (a phenomenon often coinciding with solar flares) would disrupt the Earth's magnetic field, induce large currents in wires, melt transformers, knock out continental power grids, and render large sections of our interconnected and electricity-dependant infrastructure completely useless.

I think what this doomsday scenario should teach us as a civilization is a little humility. For all our greatness, it would just take a little puff of solar plasma to plunge our cities into darkness, starvation, and chaos.

Apparently, our best shot at achieving adequate global warning is to replace the aging Advanced Composition Explorer probe, which currently only might buy us fifteen minutes to prepare our power grids for the impact.

In the meantime, maybe it wouldn't hurt to plant a moon garden or two, far away from all the chaos and destruction.