The 2012 Solar Flare
The other day one of my neighbors in a very serious tone informed me that next year a solar flare will erupt from the Sun with such unusual intensity that it will end up wiping out the generation of electricity all over the world, with consequences that will be dire for everyone. Therefore he sees it as absolutely necessary that, this road being a close-knit community anyway, and with one foot already in the survival mode solely by dint of living in such a remote location, we all have to start thinking right now of pitching in together to have any chance of weathering this coming catastrophe.
He didn't tell me where he got this information, though he referred me to a NASA website, which surprised me, as I thought that he, having been a computer-phobe for a long time, got most of his news from his car radio instead.
I went online and did a google search on "NASA solar flare."
As soon as I saw the Fox News symbol come up in one corner of the screen, you would've thought that my monitor had suddenly spat red-hot hyena poop in my face, so fast did I switch to something else. Whenever you see Fox News' emblem on anything, you know that this leading Nasty of the World is again up to its main business of trying to mislead the ignoramuses of America and hopefully everyone else down the proverbial garden path.
Later on, though, I did dare to come back long enough to look at some of the video, which showed one of the Fox dodobirds almost breathlessly reporting this solar flare "disaster-to-come" as if he had just returned from a two-year time travel trip into the future. And under the video were a lot of comments mostly from people who had had the same reaction that I had had after spotting the Fox logo,
I saw that huge mess of a movie, "2012," whose makers strove to scoop out of the cinematic gutters every disaster movie convention they could find and use those to brew up their dreadful concoction. And I knew about the Mayan prediction of the end of the world coming in 2012. And I knew about solar flares and the fact that every 11 years they get extra active, and that 2012 will be 11 years since their last outbreak in 2001, which was indeed the worst year of my life because of two personal tragedies, as well as being the year of 9/11 and of GWBush's coming to power, towering twin disasters whose effects have still been barely ameliorated. But those things didn't quite result in the end of the world, and I don't see how any of it could be blamed on the Sun, the source of all life on the planet.
While I have paid no attention to religious pronouncements of the imminent end of the world, I have seen some scientific Discovery Channel programs that detail for us the various catastrophes that could result in our total obliteration. But, putting aside the supervolcano that is bubbling as we speak under Yellowstone Park and is long overdue to erupt again in what appear to be its 600,000 year cycles. it seems to me that if we haven't been wiped out by a supernova burst, an asteroid hit, or something like that at any point in the past million years -- and we seemingly weren't -- then the chances are highly acceptable that we won't in these next million either. And a million years is a L-O-N-G time.
I think this just shows once again the general arrogance of humans that they would think that such spectacular, drastic, once-in-an-eon events would occur during their very brief heyday. On the cosmological scale of things, we and our achievements are of no importance whatsoever, and we have so much bad company of our own kind on this spaceship that we are certain to be long gone anyway, before the Earth gets its next big nudge from without or from within that will turn it into a state that will indeed be very bad for business, most likely by becoming a gigantic iceball.
He didn't tell me where he got this information, though he referred me to a NASA website, which surprised me, as I thought that he, having been a computer-phobe for a long time, got most of his news from his car radio instead.
I went online and did a google search on "NASA solar flare."
As soon as I saw the Fox News symbol come up in one corner of the screen, you would've thought that my monitor had suddenly spat red-hot hyena poop in my face, so fast did I switch to something else. Whenever you see Fox News' emblem on anything, you know that this leading Nasty of the World is again up to its main business of trying to mislead the ignoramuses of America and hopefully everyone else down the proverbial garden path.
Later on, though, I did dare to come back long enough to look at some of the video, which showed one of the Fox dodobirds almost breathlessly reporting this solar flare "disaster-to-come" as if he had just returned from a two-year time travel trip into the future. And under the video were a lot of comments mostly from people who had had the same reaction that I had had after spotting the Fox logo,
I saw that huge mess of a movie, "2012," whose makers strove to scoop out of the cinematic gutters every disaster movie convention they could find and use those to brew up their dreadful concoction. And I knew about the Mayan prediction of the end of the world coming in 2012. And I knew about solar flares and the fact that every 11 years they get extra active, and that 2012 will be 11 years since their last outbreak in 2001, which was indeed the worst year of my life because of two personal tragedies, as well as being the year of 9/11 and of GWBush's coming to power, towering twin disasters whose effects have still been barely ameliorated. But those things didn't quite result in the end of the world, and I don't see how any of it could be blamed on the Sun, the source of all life on the planet.
While I have paid no attention to religious pronouncements of the imminent end of the world, I have seen some scientific Discovery Channel programs that detail for us the various catastrophes that could result in our total obliteration. But, putting aside the supervolcano that is bubbling as we speak under Yellowstone Park and is long overdue to erupt again in what appear to be its 600,000 year cycles. it seems to me that if we haven't been wiped out by a supernova burst, an asteroid hit, or something like that at any point in the past million years -- and we seemingly weren't -- then the chances are highly acceptable that we won't in these next million either. And a million years is a L-O-N-G time.
I think this just shows once again the general arrogance of humans that they would think that such spectacular, drastic, once-in-an-eon events would occur during their very brief heyday. On the cosmological scale of things, we and our achievements are of no importance whatsoever, and we have so much bad company of our own kind on this spaceship that we are certain to be long gone anyway, before the Earth gets its next big nudge from without or from within that will turn it into a state that will indeed be very bad for business, most likely by becoming a gigantic iceball.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 2:28 AM
1 Comments:
But the fish are dying and birds are falling out of the sky & the date of the Rapture is KNOWN to all!
I'm with you on the population issue, although pure dumb luck is all that kept me from that huge family, and on the issue of the general arrogance of man. (And woman!).
It is pretty sad, really how much stupid there is in the world, but I guess it takes all kinds and I guess the fact that I really did laugh out loud at the image of a monitor spitting red-hot hyena poop makes me one of those with a poorly defined sense of humor. (I wasn't laughing at all at the image of it spitting @ you though!)
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