In 2012, Whitley Strieber released an ebook titled Solar Flares: What You Need to Know, that explained the potentially disastrous effects on our civilization that a large-scale coronal mass ejection, or solar flare, could have. In 1859 a large flare resulted in the Earth being hit by a massive geomagnetic storm, dubbed the Carrington Event. The storm was strong enough to knock out telegraph systems in Europe and North America, and would have had far more dire repercussions if it were to occur today, in our more electronically-dependent civilization.
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Both NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and the U.K. Met’s Space Weather Operations Centre have issued a G2-Moderate geomagnetic storm watch for April 2, due to the presence of a negative polarity coronal hole high speed stream (or CH HSS) facing the Earth. While this isn’t a full coronal mass ejection, coronal holes cause an increase in the speed and volume of the charged particles coming from the sun, and can affect Earth in similar, albeit more moderate, ways.
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Earlier this month, Russia’s Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau announced it’s intention to upgrade intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), to be used against asteroids that could potentially impact the Earth. The proposal comes two years after the high-altitude, 500-kiloton explosion of a 20-meter (65-foot) meteorite over Russia’s Chelyabinsk region, an event that caused extensive injuries and property damage.
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One of the major roadblocks our culture has in regards to space travel is that in order to travel at speeds that could make a trip to a distant planet or star in a reasonable time frame is the application of energy: currently, we’re stuck burning chemical fuel to propel our vehicles, of which means also lugging that fuel along with the vehicle, meaning the vehicle weighs more because of the extra fuel, meaning the vehicle has to carry more fuel to offset that weight — it unfortunately becomes a cycle of inefficiency, making for a very slow vehicle.
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