Sorry to be so very late to the party- I've been in hospital more often than not the last three weeks. I'm going through all my unread mail and Alistair, your essays are always among my favorites so I'd be keen to know if you consider the 1859 Carrington Event a kind of solar super flare in miniature? Given the amount of damage that it caused, the primitive nature of the technology of the time, the ubiquity and fragility of possible victim systems now and that a real superflare would be quite stronger, one shudders to think how our civilization would be hammered if we don't take preemptive measures to harden our technology.
Sorry to hear you have been in hospital, I hope everything is fine and you are recovering.
The Carrington Event is interesting. We're not completely sure how strong it was, given that it was the first solar flare recorded and we didn't have the proper equipment to monitor it. But from the tree rings we think the flare in 774, which would have counted as a superflare, was about 10 times bigger.
The other thing is superflares are still poorly understood, so we don't really know if they are just normal flares scaled up, or driven by some other process. Either way though, the damage to our technology would be immense! Especially now we are relying more and more on satellite hardware, which is even more vulnerable to big flares.
Sorry to be so very late to the party- I've been in hospital more often than not the last three weeks. I'm going through all my unread mail and Alistair, your essays are always among my favorites so I'd be keen to know if you consider the 1859 Carrington Event a kind of solar super flare in miniature? Given the amount of damage that it caused, the primitive nature of the technology of the time, the ubiquity and fragility of possible victim systems now and that a real superflare would be quite stronger, one shudders to think how our civilization would be hammered if we don't take preemptive measures to harden our technology.
Sorry to hear you have been in hospital, I hope everything is fine and you are recovering.
The Carrington Event is interesting. We're not completely sure how strong it was, given that it was the first solar flare recorded and we didn't have the proper equipment to monitor it. But from the tree rings we think the flare in 774, which would have counted as a superflare, was about 10 times bigger.
The other thing is superflares are still poorly understood, so we don't really know if they are just normal flares scaled up, or driven by some other process. Either way though, the damage to our technology would be immense! Especially now we are relying more and more on satellite hardware, which is even more vulnerable to big flares.