Dodged a bullet.

[ernunnos]

Massive solar flare narrowly misses Earth, EMP disaster barely avoided

It's funny how the U.S. government can find the money to create a surveillance apparatus the Stasi would be envious of, but they can't find the money to harden our infrastructure against something that would end civilization as we know it, and is statistically guaranteed to

Comments

[smjayman]

The only way we're going to learn is to have it happen. How long do you think it would take to un-screw everything after such an event?

[ernunnos]

I don't think we would ever really recover. Humanity would survive, but life as we know it would be over, even after the power grid was restored. It takes *months* to build transformers. (A couple of them burned in Phoenix years ago, and it caused outages and brownouts for months while new ones were built and trucked in at 5MPH from California.) There's no spare stock. Commerce would totally grind to a halt. Diabetics would mostly die. HIV in Africa would take over again. Food disruption would result in many lean years, and starvation in many overpopulated countries. The death toll would be in the hundreds of millions, possibly a billion. Of course, governments would use the event to claim massive new powers. And people would let them because hey, they're starving. I imagine it would take a generation or more to fully recover, similar to what happened to Europe after WWII, but globally. But I don't think people our age would ever see a world that looked familiar to us - assuming we were among the survivors. Much of the old