Sunday, August 29, 2010

Sunny Days Ahead

There is, apparently, a solar storm approaching which will hit with the force of 100 million hydrogen bombs.

While not exactly a paranormal event - it's actually nothing new although our current dependency on technology makes this a greater threat than ever before - this does have some interesting facets.

Firstly, the projected time for this is 2012. Ah, the Mayan's were right. They correctly predicted it. Well, no. Even if this did cause the end of civilization as we know it, the Mayans did not predict it.

The Mayan calendar runs on cycles and 2012 is just the end of one cycle - the cycle restarts in 2012. They in no way, shape or form, predicted anything anymore than December marks the end of our year.

And, of course, for them to have really predicted it, they would have to have predicted our current dependency on technology, satellites, the integrated circuit and the iGeneration. Nowhere in Mayan artifacts is anything remotely similar to an iPod.

Secondly, the experts involved are warning that communications could be very badly affected. There is no doubt that, given a large enough event, our communications could be knocked out. Completely knocked out.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

It may be that all technology will be affected, not just communications. Imagine for a minute a world without technology.

You will have no phones - mobile or otherwise.
You will have no electricity.
You will have no water.
You will have no sewerage.
You will have no transport.

Should this event be as big as some are predicting, the impact could be very threatening indeed. Rather than five to ten years to recover, there might never be recovery.

With the loss of the above, comes the loss of information - the more dependent we are on i-solutions rather than old-fashioned paper-based information, the harder it will be to recover. With an oil-based society (petrol, plastics etc) there will be a difficult recovery when the whole oil-processing business is put out of action.

Where will the food come from? Crops will still grow but how will they be harvested? How will the food be transported into the citys?

It's an 'end of the world' scenario and - hopefully - one that will not come to be. But until we have weathered these storms..... who knows?