TIL that in 2012 a large solar storm nearly missed Earth by a margin of nine days. If it hit, it could have caused damages to a cost of around $2.6 trillion.
TIL that in 2012 a large solar storm nearly missed Earth by a margin of nine days. If it hit, it could have caused damages to a cost of around $2.6 trillion.
Nearly missed means it hit?
54That’s a fun little language nuance. Narrowly or barely would be better, physically describing the distance of the miss is uncommon.
It was a near miss though, as in “close call”.
32The nuance is that "near miss" and "nearly miss" mean exact opposites.
"Near miss" means it almost hits, but actually misses.
"Nearly miss" means it almost misses, but it actually hits.
They just messed up the phrase.
36
It missed in a near fashion
3
Dude so the Mayans and all the Nostradamus hooplah could've coincidentally occurred with that solar storm?! Ya'll remember that right?
31One of these hit Earth in the late 1800's, and it was wild. Telegraph lines were setting on fire and people would get shocked just from touching the telegraphs. And that was when we had just barely started to wrap the world in conductive wire, if this happened now we would be majorly screwed.
26Would we? I remember reading Ted Koppel’s book Lights Out a few years ago, but I’d assume that utilities, grid operators, and governments have been making efforts to improve grid resilience
7My power goes out every hurricane which is at least once a year.
4Yeah but the power going out is what is supposed to happen. Its a good thing. It means the fault was cleared and the area made safe. The issue with one of these events is were not currently protecting against it in a lot of places. So real bad things have the potential of happening WITHOUT the power going out. No breakers tripping (or not tripping fast enough) means more equipment damage. It currently takes over a year to build a HV transformer, and that's with power. What happens when 500 all explode at the same time (cause the power didn't go out fast enough) and we need to replace them all at once? Without power?
5
Plot twist: it did hit in 2012. Any survivors had their consciousnesses uploaded to simulation.
21That would explain a lot.. things seemed normal until about 2013...
13uploaded by who
4
Dammit. We need a good solar flare to remind us what's real and what isn't
8