From the British journal, New Scientist: "It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.
"A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event—a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun." [Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe]It can and will happen here, perhaps sometime between now and March of 2013—for that is the high danger window that the American space agency NASA, Europe's ESA, and the Russian Federation's Roscosmos have been warning about for years.
The sun is a fickle friend that has a love-hate relationship with the Earth. And we're in the midst of a cycle where the sun really doesn't care for us very much. In fact, good old Sol is getting a real "hate on" for our planet right now.Experts fear the Kill Shot
Whispered at meetings behind the curtains and in the darker corners of the worlds' solar observatories are the words kill shot. It's spoken in hushed tones by scientists with tight faces through lips that sometimes tremble.What does it mean? What is a kill shot?
It's a solar X-flare greater than any human being alive has ever seen or endured. It's a shot literally felt 'round the world that probably won't kill off humanity, but would kill 21st Century technology, slamming much of modern civilization back to the 1800s in a matter of hours
A solar kill shot means no electricity, no water processing plants, no food distribution networks, no office buildings, no working cities, no working plumbing, no banking, no financial markets, no mail, no computers, no telephones…in fact little of anything that everyone in a first world country takes for granted. All of it will be whisked away in the twinkling of a magnetic superstorm.Most of government would grind to a halt—including the IRS (so even the greatest crisis might have a silver lining, however small).
Massive solar flare strike similar to electromagnetic pulse attack What is an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack?
The Independent Working Group on Missile Defense, the Space Relationship, and the Twenty-First Century, 2007 report, created by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis states:
"An EMP that results from a nuclear weapon…destroys any 'unhardened' electronic equipment and electric power system—which means virtually any civilian infrastructure in the United States. The pulse occurs when a nuclear weapon explodes…at an altitude between 40 and 400 kilometers.
"The detonation of the nuclear warhead releases…energetic particles [that] scatter in every direction away from the blast. Many of the particles descend and interact with the magnetic field lines of the Earth, where they become trapped. The trapped electrons then create an oscillating electric current within the field, which rapidly produces a large electromagnetic field in the form of a pulse.
"Once the pulse reaches electronic equipment, it negatively interacts with them and either disables, damages, or destroys them. An EMP generated by a nuclear weapon could affect all critical infrastructures that depend on electricity and electronics within the vicinity of the nuclear warhead blast radius. A nuclear weapon with a burst height of approximately 100 kilometers could expose objects located within an area 725 miles in diameter to the effects of EMP."
An EMP strike puts US computer network at high risk — but a superflare would be much worse
Since so many consumer products today rely on computer chips—such as automobiles—they would immediately become inoperative. The entire banking system would collapse, as well as the entire infrastructure of the financial services markets. Manufacturers would be affected, all forms of transportation, many government facilities—especially at the state and local levels—and hospitals, agribusinesses, water processing plants, electrical generating plants…for all practical purposes everything would grind to a halt. TO READ MORE GO TO
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