As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information
Disregard disease (Ebola), rising sea levels, simmering religious tensions, the potential for wars over resources. Disregard financial calamity, malfunctioning governments and lying sleazebag politicians leading us down the garden path. Is Europe going to be Balkanized? Is it to be inflation, disinflation, deflation or stagflation?
Nothing important, to me anyway, seems to matter much anymore. The herd's got other things on its mind.
Justin Bieber got thrown into jail, Oprah's fat, Jennifer and Angie had a catfight over Brad, there's a new iphone coming and America's supposedly Got Talent.
Maybe the following will wake the herd up. It's only the best reason any of us has ever heard for owning some gold and silver bullion in an easily accessible stash. It's something so devastating, so cataclysmic, so life changing, so unstoppable that the only way to survive the resulting wasteland would be to own precious metals and guns. Something so indefensible against, something so game changing that I'm talking about each and everyone one of us on this planet taking a forced trip back in time.
"Extreme solar storms pose a threat to all forms of high-technology. They begin with an explosion--a "solar flare"--in the magnetic canopy of a sunspot. X-rays and extreme UV radiation reach Earth at light speed, ionizing the upper layers of our atmosphere; side-effects of this "solar EMP" include radio blackouts and GPS navigation errors. Minutes to hours later, the energetic particles arrive. Moving only slightly slower than light itself, electrons and protons accelerated by the blast can electrify satellites and damage their electronics. Then come the CMEs, billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma that take a day or more to cross the Sun-Earth divide."
On July 23 2012, the sun unleashed a massive cloud of plasma. The plasma cloud, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), comprised a solar storm thought to be the most powerful in at least 150 years. This plasma cloud exploded from the sun and headed straight through Earth's orbit - and missed us by a week! Yep, if it had happened just a week before the plasma cloud would of had a catastrophic encounter with Earth's atmosphere.
"The consequences could be devastating for commerce, transportation, agriculture and food stocks, fuel and water supplies, human health and medical facilities, national security, and daily life in general."
- Steve Tracton, Capital Weather Gang
The event on July 23 2012 was a 'perfect storm.' A couple of much smaller previous solar storms had cleared the way, no interference would of weakened it's power, it was lined up exactly opposite the orientation of Earth's protector, our magnetic field. All that power would of had not only a cleared out path straight at us but would of slammed into us with our defenses out of alignment to the storm and not giving us anywhere near maximum protection.
Fortunately, the point of eruption on the sun wasn't Earth-facing.
"I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did. If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire."
- physicist Daniel Baker, University of Colorado
Sever Space Weather Events - Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts
According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the cloud could have knocked out electrical and communication grids causing more than $2 trillion in damage globally. NASA said anything that plugs into a wall socket or electrical outlet could of been disabled - and since everything we use is, somewhere along the line of its existence, eventually plugged in...well you get the idea.
Maybe we're without our electrical and communications grids for years - think about that, think about facing, think about living without electricity for an extended indefinite period of time. You've just been knocked back to a pre-electric age and your ticket 'back to the future' does not have a departure time/date stamp.
Is this science fiction? Perhaps some chicken-littleism on my part?
Sorry but no, solar physicists have compared the 2012 storm that missed us to the Carrington solar storm of September 1859, a storm that didn't miss us and was named after Richard Carrington who documented the event.
A space storm's impact is measured in nano-Teslas (nT) - the lower the figure, the more powerful the storm. A moderate storm is around -100 nT; extreme storms log in around -300 nT. The Carrington solar storm was three times more powerful than the strongest space storm in modern memory - the one that cut power to an entire Canadian province, Quebec, in 1989.
The 1989 coronal mass ejection that centered on Quebec measured -589 nT.
Carrington's 1859 solar storm was estimated to have been -1,760 nT.
In the 1859 event global telegraph lines sparked and shorted out, setting fire to telegraph offices in Europe and the U.S. knocking out the entire existing global communication network.
We're as completely unprepared, and our much more delicate electronics are even more exposed and unprotected today then the wiring of our early communication grid 155 years ago. It doesn't take much of an imagination to figure out what would happen to today's modern electronics if an event of such magnitude were to hit us again.
"An extreme space weather storm -- a solar superstorm -- is a low-probability, high-consequence event that poses severe threats to critical infrastructures of the modern society. The cost of an extreme space weather event, if it hits Earth, could reach trillions of dollars with a potential recovery time of 4-10 years. Therefore, it is paramount to the security and economic interest of the modern society to understand solar superstorms."
- research physicist Ying D. Liu, China's State Key Laboratory of Space
What's the chances of a Carrington magnitude event hitting us over the next decade or so? I'm going to leave you with the following...
"In February 2014, physicist Pete Riley of Predictive Science Inc. published a paper in Space Weatherentitled "On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events." In it, he analyzed records of solar storms going back 50+ years. By extrapolating the frequency of ordinary storms to the extreme, he calculated the odds that a Carrington-class storm would hit Earth in the next ten years. The answer: 12%."
- Pete Riley, Predictive Science, 'On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events'
Herd, I want a divorce, you go live your little doggie life - if you can't eat it, piss on it or screw it ignore it. I'm a boy scout, I believe in being prepared. Frightening odds, consequences, a little common sense preparation and precious metals are all on my radar screen. You need to put them on yours. Are they?
If not, they should be.
