Remember Y2K? Well, it’s back, but this time the looming disaster is cosmic, not a massive computer glitch. Let’s call it Y2K-12.
According to ancient Mayan calendars, Nostradamus and various other end timers, the world is going to end a little less than a year from now, in December 2012. Coincidentally, or not, in the video above from a Fox News broadcast in August, physicist Michio Kaku attempts to warn a panel of GOP know-nothings that sun will be erupting in solar flares over the next two years of an intensity unseen since the mid-19th century.
Compared with the solar flares we have experienced since then, the coming ones are tsunamis, Kaku says — massive bursts of energy that could take out power grids, cripple worldwide communications, disable satellites and send the world into chaos.
Not the end of the world in the biblical or Mayan calendar sense, just the end of the world as we know it. The Fox bubbleheads respond by cracking wise about looking for people to sue if Kaku’s predictions come true.
That was August. Here’s a headline from today’s Daily Mail in London:”Massive solar storm ‘could knock out radio signals’ over next three days, warn scientists“:
Skywatchers will be hoping for clear skies from today because particles from a recent solar storm will slam into Earth and produce amazing Northern Lights, or auroras.
On the downside, experts expect radio blackouts for a few days, caused by the radiation from the flare – or coronal mass ejection (CME) – causing magnetic storms.
The flare is part of a larger increase in activity in the Sun, which runs in 11-year cycles. It is expected to peak around 2013.
he National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center wrote: ‘Category G1 (Minor) geomagnetic storms are expected 28 and 29 December due to multiple coronal mass ejection arrivals. R1 (Minor) radio blackouts are expected until 31 December.’
Devices that depend on radio waves include GPS systems, radios and mobile phones.
A coronal mass ejection contains billions of tons of gases bursting with X-rays and ultraviolet radiation that are flung into space at around 5million mph.
They are mind-bogglingly hot – around 100,000,000C.
The Earth is occasionally hosed by these ejections, leading to amazing shimmering light shows.
Hosed, indeed.
