Well, I found something I didn’t know could even happen.
Last June, that’s June 2015 for those that read this post past 2016, Earth was smashed by a pretty damned big geomagnetic storm. Massive, really. Big enough to temporarily force a crack in our magnetosphere.
That’s scary impressive. And scary.
It’s no secret that the Sun interacts with our little backwater mudball in more ways than heat and light and orbit. Solar storms, coronal mass ejections and sunspots are just a few of the trade offs we contend with due to our little Goldilocks spot in the system.
A year later, after all the GRAPES-3 data has been examined from the June storm, it has never been more clear that some of those solar maladies might not end well for us here on Earth.
Just how big can these storms get? What kind of irreparable damage could the Sun do to our highly electronic technology? Could one of these storms destroy our magnetosphere in a solar equivalent to a hard sneeze?
Humanity used to live hard, brutish lives before the rise of technology. Granted, in some places, humans still do live like that. It would be interesting to see who would survive once our comforts and ease are stripped away. More, what kind of hellish landscape would this planet turn into with the magnetosphere damaged so much? In what ways would we revert back to our agricultural time and in what ways would we change or progress?
A light in the world building dark for those looking for it.
-T.A. Creech
Author of LGBT romance and speculative fiction.