A Chilling Report From NASA

Who can believe or trust what the historians have to say? What is the truth of history? Then we have all of these doomsayers who are writing about the possibilities of the end of the world- or at least as we know it. However, we now have a report from NASA, a SCIENTIFIC report if you will, that speaks of the real possibility that we may be facing a major catastrophe, mainly due to what we think is the solution- technology!

The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January released a very chilling and sobering report.
In essence, the report contends that plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences beyond repair. For those of us in Houston who went without electricity for two days to two weeks have a clue about what life without POWER might mean; however, for a year or more? Is that life sustainable with the population that we have today?
More specifically, Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report, said, "We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster." That is sort of to the point! :-(
It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection. If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.
So, what're the odds? There is none. It just could happen, and it has happened before.
The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. However, things could get much, much worse than that.
We're living by grace far more than we can imagine, but the sooner we look at HOW we're living, the better we might be able to anticipate and prepare for real-life possibilities be they on December 21, 2012, or tomorrow.