One classic history parlor game is to imagine alternative scenarios to actual events, of which DK'ers can come up with all too many possible candidates where we wish history had worked out differently. In science, one interesting recent report is of a solar event that did occur, but where the consequences for planet Earth might have been very different had said event occurred a week earlier, at least according to one scientist. More below the flip.....
The solar event in question was a coronal mass ejection (CME) that occurred on July 23, 2012, about which you can learn at a NASA-posted video on YouTube here. The Guardian has an article by Maev Kennedy about a study of this CME at this link, which opens with this summary about the CME that day:
"The sun forced out one of the biggest plasma clouds ever detected at a speed of 3000 km per second, more than four times faster than a typical solar eruption."
Kennedy then drily says:
"Fortunately it missed."
In lay people's terms (more or less), she describes the nature of the storm:
"The storm would have begun with a solar flare, which itself can cause radio blackouts and GPS navigation failures. If the Earth had been in its path, this would have been followed minutes to hours later by the electrons and protons accelerated by the blast, followed by the CME, a billion-ton cloud of magnetized plasma.
Ignoring the mild gaffe that the accelerated protons and electrons, not to mention the CME, still did their thing even if planet Earth turned out not to be in their oncoming path, the consequences for us, had the planet indeed been in their oncoming path, would have been as follows:
"There would have been major disruption to all satellite communications and electrical fluctuations that could have blown out transformers in power grids. Most people wouldn't have been able to turn on a tap or flush a toilet because urban water supplies rely largely on electricity."
Even though the CME didn't hit us, it did "hit a spacecraft loaded with monitoring equipment", which gives people like University of Colorado researcher Daniel Baker loads of data to study.
BTW, the reason in the diary title for the term "Carrington" is because of the English astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed a comparable flare back in 1859. As Kennedy notes, at that time, after that flare:
"....in the following days a series of CMEs hit the Earth. Given it was the time of steam engines and horse-drawn traffic, this was less crippling than a similar strike would be now, but it did cause telegraph lines across the globe to spark enough to set fire to some telegraph offices. There were spectacular displays of the Northern Lights, seen as far south as Cuba and so bright in places that people could read newspapers outside in the middle of the night."
As lucky as we are that this CME missed us, part of 3CM's loser self can't help but wonder what would have happened if it had hit us. It's not hard to imagine mass panic and chaos particularly among first-worlders, with the entire electrical grid shut down (not to mention Repukes blaming President Obama for the problems in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential election, the way they blame him for everything). If nothing else, it would have been a staggering reminder of just how dependent on technology we all are (including this blog and teh entire internets, of course), for people with the bandwidth to think about the big scheme of things. Plus, such a cosmic event would have truly demonstrated how truly small we are, but also how unique we are.
With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week, which presumably will not involve cosmic star off-shoots.....