Germ Warfare

NeilM":c1m7jaar said:

A friend of mine tried to convince me a while ago that there are huge underground cities in America where all the politicians and captains of industry will remain safe and well when massive solar flares destroy all technology. He told me that when the solar flares disrupt all electrical systems there will not longer be any electricity and civilisation will come to an end.

I gave him two flaws in his theory:

First, if civilisation did fall and we returned to some sort of bronze or iron age, then what good would it do all the politicians (who have no practical skills whatsoever) saving themselves, as they would hardly be able to take up where they had left off, if the society where they had previously held power no longer existed.

Second: Civilisation, industry, Government etc all evolved and became effective long before electricity. After all, the Victorians probably considered themselves civilised.

Some folks get some funny ideas.

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tl;dr: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdqyTmfDwk0[/youtube]

Chopper1192":264lnj7i said:

It affects rectification of AC to DC in some way.

the process takes thousands of years to complete, but along the way there are periods of stregnthening and weakening, and even multiple poles, which can expose various parts of the Earth, and aircraft in flight, to increased radiation levels.

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Rapidly changing electromagntic fields caused by solar flares could potentially cause over voltage conditions in equipment but I would have thought that the changes in the earths magnetic field we are talking about here would be far too slow to have the same affect. Our AC system operates at 50Hz so thats 50 cycles a second, a change in polarity of the earths magnetic field would need to be on a similar time scale or faster. Solar flares cause waves of electromagnetic radiation which travel at the speed of light, when they move through electrical equipment at that speed they could produce a very fast changes in electromagnetic fields which inturn could induce large overvoltage transients into said equipment. Same goes for an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear bomb or something.

I'll be honest though I know very little about the changing polarity of the poles so maybe that produces waves of electromagnetism too???

Magnetism

The magnetic poles are continually shifting, if you get into navigation you have to compensate for the difference between true North and magnetic North. This has been shifting for years and corrections are published annually so that your old charts are still useable and not land you on the shallows/rocks/housing estate.

A total polar reversal would really muck things up.

The Earth's magnetic field is believed to be due to the convection currents of molten iron within the Earth's core, the sheer scale of momentum involved would guarantee that this couldn't be a quick change.
The Earth's magnetic field prevents a lot of dangerous solar radiation from reaching us, the interaction is most visible where the field lines are most intense, viz. at the North and South Poles.

This gives rise to the Aurora Borealis in the Northern Hemisphere aka Northern Lights.

Turbulence in the Earth's magnetic field could allow such radiation in the form of charged particles to reach the ground. This has happened in the recent past and power lines have acted like giant lightning rods and overloaded the distribution network. (There are some interesting conspiracy theories too if you have a free evening.)

AC appliances create local magnetic fields quite independent of the background magnetism.

Having said all that, science is still at a loss to fully explain what magnetism is exactly and to fit it in to a perfectly balanced Grand Theory of Everything (along with Gravity).

this week I will mainly be making....

airtight watertight case, why not keep some fresh air and water in it... And hang on to the suits, the zombie apocalypse will be triggered virally via chemtrails, those suits will come in handy for sure....

We need a decent Armageddon to get rid of the wasters, junkies and hippies, so those higher up the food chain can prevail exactly as nature intended before all this left wing laws over ride natural selection.

theres a new film coming out called the purge, sounds right up your street chopper

Seen that advertised, looks right up my street!

Don't you go getting any ideas.