#1 Threat To Mankind
If the 1859 Carrington Solar Storm happened today we would be existing in a nuclear nightmare. It won't be an epidemic or a 5 mile wide asteroid or an attack of the evil reptilians from the bad side of the galaxy, it will be our extreme stupidity of only safeguarding nuclear facilities for half a day or so that will do us in. lf we lose the grid you are talking weeks at the least to fix. By then we would all probably glow in the dark. www.youtube.com/channel/UCt2yxX9jhtBEapmep_K468A Music Ambient Ambulance by Jingle Punks science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/06may_carringtonflare/ At 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, 33-year-old Richard Carrington—widely acknowledged to be one of England's foremost solar astronomers—was in his well-appointed private observatory. Just as usual on every sunny day, his telescope was projecting an 11-inch-wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw. On that morning, he was capturing the likeness of an enormous group of sunspots. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of blinding white light appeared over the sunspots, intensified rapidly, and became kidney-shaped. Realizing that he was witnessing something unprecedented and "being somewhat flurried by the surprise," Carrington later wrote, "I hastily ran to call someone to witness the exhibition with me. On returning within 60 seconds, I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled." He and his witness watched the white spots contract to mere pinpoints and disappear. It was 11:23 AM. Only five minutes had passed. Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Indeed, stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii. Even more disconcerting, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted. "What Carrington saw was a white-light solar flare—a magnetic explosion on the sun," explains David Hathaway, solar physics team lead at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
