EMP Pulse a Real Threat to Life

Picture source: NASA website

Many doomsday theorists in the twentieth century believed that if we destroy ourselves as a species, the cause would most likely be by nuclear war. By the time the twenty-first century rolled around, Global Warming/Climate Change became one of the more leading possibilities. Another possibility, although maybe not as pressing as Earth's changing weather, a possibility that doesn't often get discussed is an electromagnetic pulse.

The two most likely ways that Earth can be hit on a large scale is by a massive solar flare from the sun and by nuclear detonation twenty-five to five hundred miles in altitude over the central United States according to the Commission to Assess the Threat to the U.S. from EMP Attack, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in July 2008.

A nuclear attack even on this scale would affect a continent and would leave America with the ability to still retaliate against their attacker via nuclear submarines located in the seas.

The sun poses the greater risk of the two. Experts generally believe that electromagnetic surges from the sun on this large of a scale tend to happen on an average of once every one hundred years. An event on this scale hit Earth in 1859, but electronics were just on the verge of being used for wide-scale communications and did not inflict the damage it could do today. Known as the Carrington Event, it caused severe disruption to telegraph communications, shocking some telegraph operators and even starting fires when the sparks jumped and burned the paper used by these operators.

A less strong, but still damaging event occurred in March of 1989 when Canada took the brunt of a solar flare. Six million Canadians went without power for nine hours when power transmission from the Hydro Quebec station had been disrupted. Even power transformers in the United States had felt some of the effects of the flare. Despite all this damage, this event was nowhere near the scale of the Carrington Event.

In July of 2012, a similar event to Carrington occurred and had just missed Earth's trajectory by one week. If it had hit Earth directly, the results could have sent us a few hundred years in the past from a technological standpoint. Computers, televisions, transportation, communications...everything would have been knocked out.

So what happens if Earth is hit directly by a solar flare on the scale of the Carrington Event? The real possibility of millions of deaths all over the world would be almost definite. For all those who are in life and death situations in hospitals or depend on electronics of some form to keep them alive, their lives would be at jeopardy. Those in extremely warm regions, the lack of air conditioning could pose a real problem, especially when clean and safe water might not be able to be properly distributed to them, let alone to people in less intense climates around the world.

For those who do survive, the world would most likely go back to a city-state type of government system to get by until things could be rebuilt. Until then, even though we have the luxury of doing so much by computer, it would be best for the world to make sure that everything has a hard copy. Medical texts/records, historical records, and even things as simple as photographs.