NASA Researchers Worried About Huge Sun Flares

resistant writes: Wired reported recently that a group of researchers assembled by NASA issued a "chilling" report expressing great concern about the potential for solar flares in 2012 to coincide with "the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth's geomagnetic shield", potentially virtually collapsing national power grids. Complicating the matter is the lack of current plans to replace the sole early warning satellite on which power grid operators rely, and the poor state of readiness in general. Full recovery from such a catastrophe might take four to ten years, and cost trillions of dollars.

The report was largely ignored at first because of the unfortunate overlap with an ancient Mayan prediction of a major "turning point" in the year 2012 (by the Western calendar).

NASA Worried

[HarryatRock]

This is my first posting so excuse any lapse of protocol. This story has two aspects which interest me. First it seems that to get funding for space (or perhaps any) science we have to scream about apocalyptic dangers, the second is that our large scale infrastructure turns out to be vulnerable to many more risks than most of the public is aware of. I won't say anything about the "Mayan" business, other than to say that the whole problem seems to be a result of the lack of understanding of basic science. I