Game Over, Man!

by Coffinshaker on December 19, 2011 at 12:00 am

It’s the end of the world!  Well… for just a few hours anyways.

So with 2012 around the corner, I figured I’d make a nice little comic to help put your minds to ease.  One of the things the doomsayers are spouting is that the sun will send out flares that’ll wipe us all out from existence.  Ok, “yes” this year will be the start of some heavy solar activity, but the sun goes in cycles of low and heavy activity.  It’s been doing it for years…  And we’re all still here, mostly.  The issue is this; if the sun gets good and wound up, it could toss out a really big flare that could be bad times for us.  This happened once before in world history, here in the US if I’m not mistaken, when we were hit by a big flare of supercharged particles causing a major magnetic pulse resulting in some of the communications infrastructure getting fried… granted, that was telegraphs and what not, but there were still reports of people getting shocks from working too close to them when it happened.

Problem is, we’ve got lots more fancy tech since then and the fear is that if we get one good well placed flare, it could send us back to the middle ages.  While this is true, we’re also not complete idiots.  (emphasis on the “complete” part)  A lot of the delicate stuff in space, like satellites and whatnot have some protection from solar activity and when you look at the big picture, it’d be a pretty hard to hit a tiny blue ball in the vastness of the solar system.

Regardless of any of that, the big part of solar flares is the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that can fry stuff.  But even if you, like me, don’t think we’d be lucky enough to have one hit us directly, there are some precautions you can take to keep all your xboxes and walkmans safe from damage!!  It’s really quite simple actually!

To protect your valuable tech gears from an EMP, just set up a Faraday Cage!!
What is that you might ask?  Well, it’s just some awesome science at work, that’s what!  What you do is take some conductive metal like a steel mesh or even aluminum foil and wrap whatever you want to keep safe in it.  Or just fill up an aluminum or steel cooking pot and secure the lid.  Yeah… it’s just that simple!  See, the electrons from the EMP get redistributed evenly across the outer surface and do NOT transfer to the inside.  So, if you’re worried about your stuff, toss them in a cooking pot, set it and forget it!  (generally speaking, fireproof safes aren’t good for this… but you can wrap the stuff inside with foil.

So there you go!  You’re now 2012 proof!  Though I guess there’s other things out there like solar plasma ejections that could just instantly vaporize us, but I wouldn’t worry about that since there’s pretty much nothing you can do and about no warning.  Or I guess if the sun under-preforms it could lead to a mini ice age like the one a few hundred (?) years back.  But there’s no use worrying about very slight probabilities.

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