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Expiracies and cover to the pair Red not a weegog with Jerey's stuff.

While we are going through a solar storm, a pretty intense solar storm as we speak.

So if things are feeling a bit off, that could be the reason why.

Friends from the Cool Dark depths of a secret dungeon somewhere deep in the remote Pacific Northwest.

As Friday becomes Saturday, we could still be seeing those auroras, so keep an eye out.

Maybe they will creep in during the program.

Because as mentioned, this is a strong geomagnetic storm that we are currently in the midst of.

It was all caused by It doesn't take an X class flare all the time.

In this case, it was an M class flare seven point four that ejected from the Sun from a solar flare what's known as a coronal mass ejection that headed towards Earth, and this is something that is capable of producing G three level geomagnetic storms.

G three is relatively high.

G five is extreme.

The one we had in May of last year was G four.

Just to give you an idea of what we're dealing with now, It's possible this one could reach G four status if we have a compound situation where we continue to get hit with aur auroras and CMEs and these are solar flares, but right now it's just a G three.

It follows a surprise aurora display that was caused by a weaker CME and also high speed solar wind which already pushed activity to G three levels across parts of North America and Europe.

As many as twenty two states in the US are in the firing line, if not still, they have been over the past few nights.

So this lit up skies across the northern hemisphere.

I saw some pictures and this is cool stuff.

Vivid, green, pink, and purple auroras were visible from Canada all the way to the northern United States.

As these geomagnetic conditions caused these spectacular auroras and these conditions, from what I understand, are remaining unsettled through the coming days, so we could get more of them as a solar material continues to pass by Earth.

Right now, it's a G three storm watch, as I mentioned, and that is in effect through Saturday.

I was issued by Noah's Space Weather Prediction Center a couple of days ago, forecasters that say more auroras could appear over the weekend, So keep your eyes to the sky.

I'm sure it won't be hard to miss.

It might make a nighttime light up like day, as was happening back in eighteen fifty nine.

In fact, when we didn't know what to expect, something called the Carrington event that came through witnessed across thousands of miles and in the middle of the night, people were out cooking their morning breakfast because the skies made it appear like it was morning.

Not saying that that is necessarily going to happen here, but these skies will light up, and if it happens in you know, the time hours, which is when we see this activity, typically there could be some scenarios where individuals are woken by the brightness of the light.

Nonetheless, there have been people who have captured some pretty spectacular pictures and also images or videos.

Rather, images and videos of the Northern Lights.

Sightings have been reported from Ontario, Illinois, Winnipeg.

I even saw one that was caught on a flight from Denver to Chicago.

Just to do a quick Google search, or if you don't like Google, any other one of your favorite search engines and you will find some pictures.

Over the past couple of nights, maybe Wednesday night and Thursday night, but continuing now Friday into Saturday, we could still see some more of those.

Or check your social media feed.

Perhaps one of your friends in one of these places has posted one that was the case for me.

Maybe that's all social media is worth anymore these days, is just crowdsourcing it for these cool moments in life, because otherwise it just appears to be a big, giant distraction.

But that's just my opinion.

Forecasters warned that the strength of the storm, as I mentioned, could reach G four status, which would be on par with what we had last May.

That is if multiple CMEs interact, and also additional sun spots are a possibility from this active region of the sun, which has been considerably active in the past few days could set additional CMEs toward Earth and that would really prolong this activet you would be a compound fracture type situation.

There were several strong flares within the past few days that hit us, including an end point M eight point six as well right after that seven point four, and then we had two X flares one point eight one point one just a few hours apart that originated from the active region that has been causing this AR four two seven four.

This large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster is now rotating into direct view of Earth.

Perfect timing right, so we are in the firing line.

That's the translation for you.

According to a NOAHS Space Weather Prediction Center, both X class flares caused large scale radio blackouts, while the M class flare produced a smaller but still significant event.

So it wasn't the eight point six that caused the CMA, It wasn't even the the X class flares.

It was at seven point four.

So it tells you you never know what you're going to get.

The sunny is unpredictable and it can take something as large or as small as a M class or an X class flare, depending to cause such an event.

Noah currently estimates there is a sixty five percent chance that we could get hit with additional M class flares in the coming days, and while a fifteen percent chance of another X class flare coming this week.

So we are not out of the woods just yet.

Even though NASA says there is new evidence which shows the Sun is emerging from an unexpected lull inactivity, we know that the Sun has a cycle, and that is not expected to always be the case.

This activity comes and it goes, but it does seem it's just ramping up and it hasn't really started to ramp back down.

Maybe the solar maximum, which we were expected to be in at this time, although it started earlier than scientists expected, maybe it will just last longer, and so we can expect that the effects of that might be prolonged as well.

From the cold, dark depths of a secret dungeon somewhere deep in the remote Pacific Northwest, we're talking about solar flares, about CMEs, about the northern lights tonight, and also about the Carrington event of eighteen fifty nine, which we'll tell you about more when we come back.

Somewhere between the paranormal and the abnormal, I'm Jeremy Scott.

Into the parabnormal pair of so.

Much like life, the Sun goes around and around on a cycle.

It is an eleven year solar cycle.

At one point, we didn't actually know how long these cycles lasted.

It was only through observations that we've been able to determine there is a cycle and the activity ebbs and flows.

NASA says the Sun is actually emerging from an unexpected lull inactivity.

Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory analyzed decades of solar data and found that activity has been rising steadily since around two thousand and eight.

This trend suggests that the Sun is entering a more energetic era that could last for decades.

So I guess throw out the book is as far as that's concerned.

Maybe we'll have to rewrite the book, certainly.

If the Sun continues to behave unlike normal we may have to just go back to the drawing board here.

But it's not hard to believe, considering the current solar cycle, which began in late twenty nineteen, has already surpassed forecasts.

Scientists originally expected that we were going to have a pretty weak solar maximum this year similar to the last one, but it arrived, of course early in twenty twenty four and has been far stronger, producing the most sunspots and xclass flares that the Sun has seen in over twenty years.

Several major geomagnetic storms have also struck Earth.

You may remember, as we mentioned the event at last May those vivid auroras unlike seen in my lifetime, but it also caused more than five hundred million dollars in damages.

Researchers warned that such intense activity could become the new normal for future cycles, increasing the risk to modern technologies such as power grids, GPS systems, and satellites.

We see the impacts of this all the time, even with moderate or minor geomagnetic storms.

Right, we're always in the fire line.

This is not like eighteen fifty nine where we only had the telegraph.

No, we have modern technologies and they are all at risk of a solar flare of a CME.

Now.

The cause of the Sun's recent resurgence remains unclear, though it may relate to longer or poorly understood solar cycles spanning many decades.

As I've said, we may need to relook things all right.

In eighteen fifty nine, British astronomer Richard Carrington observed an intense solar flare later identified as a coronal mass ejection CME, that slammed into Earth's magnetic field, causing the most powerful geomagnetic storm ever recorded.

Think about that.

The Carrington event ignited telegraph fire, shocked operators, and produced Aurora's visible as far south as Panama and Italy.

I mean that is a massive, massive event.

Think of something of that scale on today's terms.

These as storms occur when magnetic energy on this Sun suddenly releases, hurling charged particles into space as the suns constantly shifting magnetic fields driven by its uneven rotation build up tension without eventually snaps and then reconnects, triggering solar flares CMEs and radiation storms.

Yeah, you've always wondered how that works.

There you go.

These phenomena vary in intensity through the Sun's eleven year solar cycle, peaking during solar maximum when activity is strongest as it is now, perhaps as it was back in the time.

During the Carrington event, experts warned that a modern event could be catastrophic, would cripple power grids, satellites, GPS, communications and critical infrastructure worldwide, and that recovery would take years.

It would cost trillions.

So when we think five hundred million dollars in damage from a solar storm just last year, this would be trillions of dollars and real damage here, but even smaller storms would disrupt power and technology.

Teams at the European Space Operation Center, which is a run by the European Space Agency in Germany, have been running simulations to prepare for extreme space weather scenarios, including a recreation of the Carrington event.

The situation unfolded in three phases.

An X forty five class solar flare, which is massive, far more massive than we have seen something like this, disabling communications and navigation.

That was a one phase, high energy particles damaging onboard systems would be the second, and the third a massive coronal mass ejection caused atmospheric swelling, satellite drag increasing up to four hundred percent, and widespread orbital instability.

In a situation like that, all satellites would be to put, not just those in low earth orbit spacecraft paps perhaps those two.

And what about us down here on Earth if this stuff comes raining out of the sky.

It has to land somewhere, friends, and that would be right on top of our heads.

You think we have a space problem now, and we definitely do have a space junk problem.

I don't know if we have a space problem, maybe we will at one day, but a space junk problem, we certainly we started to have that going for us.

And we're seeing more reports of this stuff of falling out of the skies and landing on farms and crashing through people's skylights and roofs.

By the way, but I said earlier, the cause of the Sun's recent resurgence remains unclear, though it may relate to longer, poorly understood solar cycles spanning many decades.

We should wonder how much more intense it can get, because it doesn't seem like we are understanding why it is more intense and why when it was forecast for solar cycle twenty five we under sold it.

Right, Folks who take a look at the forecasts and predict this stuff, they got it wrong.

And it's not to say haha, it's just they got it wrong.

Why did they get it wrong?

Is the sun?

Well, the Sun is unpredictable, and largely that is it, But there could be some other factors as well.

We may not know nearly as much as we do about all this solar activity.

I must say though without Richard Carrington, the English astronomer who recorded what was known as the Carrington event, and we have just the right person to talk about this with us tonight.

But I just want to say, all of this indicates that you need EMP shield because the Sun is continuing to be more active and EMP shield can protect you from this emp these solar flares, lightning, power surges, the whole nine yards.

EMP shield can protect both your home and your vehicle from this.

So it's a good product to have.

We endorse it, and if you want to pick it up, you just go to pairubnormal radio dot com slash EMP.

I mean, unless you want to pay more, you could find it somewhere else.

But if you go to pairubnormal radio dot com slash EMP, you can save fifty dollars off EMP shield, that is EMP shield pairubnormal radio dot com slash EMP.

I only make anything if you buy one of these, So there's the incentive into the pair of normal.

Somewhere between the pair ofanormal and the abnormal.

We're keeping our eye out for the northern lights.

Tonight, Pair of Normal News.

I'm George Henry.

Three Chinese astronauts are stranded in orbit after their return capsule was reportedly struck by space debris.

The crew was due to return earned to Earth this week after a six month mission aboard China's Tiangong space station.

The China Manned Space Agency is assessing the damage to the shen Zoo twenty spacecraft and have postponed the return flight for safety reasons.

If the current capsule is deemed unsafe, a rescue plan could be activated with another shen Zu spacecraft and Long March rocket already on standby.

China has completed thirty seven space flights and six crewed missions so far, with plans to send astronauts to the Moon before twenty thirty.

Pair of Normal News.

Every hour on into the Pair of Normal.

We've got a G.

Three store a lot of energy releasing from the Sun, and this in turn has sparked this geomagnetic stormwash.

Solar storms are coming as a major solar ship continue powerful.

Light show on the surface of the Sun.

The burst of the radiation of the strongest solar player so far this year.

Hold on tight, you're about to land somewhere into the fear of normal.

Fear of.

Boy, we're lucky out again tonight because solar storms are hitting the country as we're on the air tonight.

It's amazing how this seems to happen more often than we could believe to be a coincidence, in fact, somewhere between the paranormal and the abnormal.

I'm Jeremy Scott.

It's always wonderful when we can talk with James F.

Ponder on the program.

We've been doing so for close to a decade now.

We've spent many hours with him, probably more than twenty over the years, is a safe estimate, talking about cybersecurity issues, about EMP, about solar flares.

In fact, at one particular time, and what caught my attention was when James was trying to get off the ground this concept of selling these boxes that could protect your electronics from a solar flare if the power grid was hit, if we experienced an EMP, that sort of thing.

And actually James was the first person who I had ever heard about the Carrington event from, so who better to have back on than him.

James has worked at the US Custom Service and Department of Homeland Security, investigating cyber crimes and performing computer forensics.

After retirement, he taught cybersecurity, digital evidence, and network security at the Federal Law Enforcement Center.

Well versed on the Carrington event, which obviously proceeded both James and I by quite a number of years.

Fascinating though in the sense that it was one of a kind and the impacts to that, as we've already discussed on the program.

But looking forward to talking with you more at length tonight, James about welcome to the program.

Great to be back on, Jeremy, and you picked an event that I enjoy talking about a great deal because it is looming out there like a big earthquake or a big volcano, but more like a hurricane.

We're going to have some warning when this occurs.

We'll have a number of hours, maybe even a few days, to prepare for this, and this is something I wanted your audience to know about.

But thank you for the introduction.

Please go ahead absolutely.

And so you say we will have some warning, I'm wondering if it will be like the events that we're going through now.

They're saying these are g three conditions.

Now, I believe the highest is what G five.

In that range.

Yes, that's there are different ways of measuring them, and the categories of a solar flare and things like that, and these they're pretty big.

They need to be paid attention to.

Yes, So if we're seeing something on the caliber of a G four or a G five like event that is Carrington event caliber, if it.

Is coming toward the Earth, or if it is in the band of the ecliptic that is the orbits of the planets, and it's headed out to an area in space where the Earth is going to travel to in the next couple of weeks, it's time to make preparations.

Yes, this is like a category four category five hurricane coming toward you and you live in the hurricane belt as I do in northern Florida.

Yes, okay, I know you're a survival guide too.

We've talked with you about that, and so you can tell us later on how we could prepare ourself for such an event.

This is only a G three that we've got coming.

But now the European Space Agency, of course, through their recent analysis, is saying there are no spacecraft in orbit who would survive such an event.

If you look at what we had back in eighteen fifty nine, we had the telegraph system, and of course that literally caught on fire because of the events.

If you magnify that by the satellites and everything that is in orbit, and the GPS and the communications and the whole nine yards.

In this technological age that we live in, we're screwed if we get another storm of this caliber.

That's a good technical term for it.

Or Turner used to do, used to use toasts.

Yes, very technical term.

Screwed and toast.

They are good single syllable assessments of what would happen to modern society.

Because when Richard Carrington, who was one of the Royal astronomers, was doing his solar studies and studying flares and studying these strange storms on Hassan known as sunspots, he detected a large solar flare, the biggest one he'd ever seen, in eighteen fifty nine, and about two days later, all kinds of strange things happened on the Earth.

This was the first extraterrestrial event to ever occur where something was seen beforehand and it happened to the Earth.

So this was kind of a big deal historically for astronomy people who are into the history of it as i am.

But when you consider the baby steps business was taking in electronics right then, of telegraphy, telegraphs following along railroad lines, and in fact there was just a little more maturity to happen before you had the convergence of the late Iron Age, which the middle eighteen fifties were, and railroads and telegraph lines and how they impacted the US War between the states, because you can talk about the rail advantage that the North had and the gun and weapon manufacturing advantage that the South had.

But Lincoln had an accidental advantage no one in history it had before, and that was aerial observation.

He had a balloonist, an army captain with a telegraph key above Washington, DC, and you did watch trouth movements of the North and South, which was pretty interesting.

That was in eighteen sixty three, eighteen sixty four.

We're only going back in time five years before this, and there was enough outreach around the world England, certainly western and northwestern Europe, from France to Germany and then east onward to Poland, throughout the United States, and the English Empire's telegraphy in North Africa and to a much greater extent what is now the political boundaries of India and Pakistan.

And something happened that had not been predicted before.

NY is that that we'll have you tell us when we come back back with James F.

Ponder, our guest tonight talking about the Carrington events of eighteen fifty nine.

I'm Jeremy Scott.

Somewhere between the paranormal and the.

Abnormal into the paradormal.

Parent as that we are on the cusp are actually going through a geomagnetic storm, a significant geomagnetic storm, not quite of the extreme caliber.

So if you're feeling off over the next couple of days, there actually is a correlation between the activity that is happening with the Sun.

As this energy is flung towards Earth, we will get a warning of some kind that this activity is on the way.

According to our guest tonight, to James F.

Ponder, and we'll ask him how we can prepare ourself.

There are certain things that we can do.

But back in the day of the Carrington event of eighteen fifty nine, witnessed by English astronomer Richard Carrington, this was the first time right, James, that solar flares were witnessed, what through a telescope leave, and then there were effects that followed on Earth.

Is that correct?

That's correct.

That was the first time any cause on the Sun was seen to have an activity on the Earth.

And this was a pretty significant activity when you had all the railroad lines and telegraph poles bursting into flame.

Yes, And nobody had thought to ever study this before then, right, because we didn't know it was a possibility.

It hadn't been observed, the effects hadn't been experienced.

But now you have an event that has been witnessed and then documented and since then, you know, in one hundred and sixty some years that have gone on since then, there's been a lot of research on solar activity.

That's why we know that there are these cycles of about eleven years of which we're working our way towards the end of solar cycle twenty five.

But that's how we came to know is because of observations like Carrington's.

That's correct.

Harrington was one of the Royal astronomers and his specialty was in solar activity, and most people have only heard of him because of the event named which he discovered, but it is important to learn this and the European Space Agency detections that you mentioned.

From the recent articles that have come out, it shows there's some pretty serious activity going on.

Even though at this stage they're seeing what's called solar decay, and that is the decreasing in the intensity supposedly of solar flares and solar activity, you still get these major events that occur.

Now.

This is not unlike you being downwind of a major a volcano and century upon century it's having smaller catastrophic outbursts, but it still has one while you're alive near it.

It's kind of like that.

And there have been two since nineteen ninety that would have been world enders, and more so now than back in nineteen ninety.

One occurred that was observed to go well in front of the Earth's path in its orbit, and it had dissipated almost completely by the time the Earth went through the path of where the solar storm was, but there were a lot of auroras.

A few years later there was again a storm of equal or greater strength than what Richard Carrington observed one hundred and sixty years ago, but it was behind the Earth's orbit.

So again, it just caused a few auroras and it was interesting to scientists observing solar activity.

But if one of those, or Carrington's event from eighteen fifty nine something of that size were to hit the Earth now with multiple power grids without most of them being enheardened with so many of us modern life of most of eight billion people, even when people live in the third and fourth world, they have enough food, they have enough drinking water, and what electricity they have is because of First World events, it would be a major step down in our lives for years or even decades because what would happen to the power grid.

Oh exactly, it would implode and the effects of that would be widespread.

Everything that goes along with it, as we've talked about before, everything that requires the power, and some of that is life saving.

So just start to think about that and it will give you a sense of you think that we're in dire streets right now with people not having their snap benefits.

Imagine there's no power, there's no internet, and there's no nothing else that relies on any of that, and it's not going to be for weeks, if not months, before any of that comes back online.

This is what would happen if something like the Carrington event happened in present day.

And the reason it's relevant, well, there's many reasons it is relevant, and among them are these new simulations as we've been discussing from the European Space Agency, which suggests that something on the level of a Carrington event of eighteen fifty nine could wreak havoc on satellites orbiting Earth and is not a question of when.

Rather, it is not a question of if, it is a question of when.

Experts say your reaction to this, James.

That's exactly right.

Even if a Carrington event were not and issues me, I shouldn't even put it in terms of that strong Even if solar flare activity did not cause a Carrington authentic did not cause an EMP like effect with the power grid, with the Internet, with server farms, with the things that run our lives, hydroelectric dams, hospitals, things like that, right, just shutting down the Internet, just shutting down GPS, and I'm talking about the type of Internet that is coming from satellites, not the ground based fiber optic cable.

It would cause absolute chaos with navigation, with timekeeping, with all sorts of other things.

And I don't mean like timekeeping like you're cooking a roast.

I mean timekeeping in the specifics of running power plants, let's say, hospitals, the inner workings of major cities, traffic air traffic control.

It would cause general chaos, even if it did not take down the power grid.

If it only destroyed a significant amount of our satellites that provide Internet and GPS and time based data that we have, it would cause trillions of dollars of damage to the first world and possible a lot of starvation to the third and fourth world.

Okay, so James, I'm mean explain what I did to the telegraph system.

Yes, the telegraph system in eighteen fifty nine, not a whole lot lot, Unlike the telephone system or the Internet, is made up of tens of millions of telephone poles that have copper wire in them.

And of course copper was a very big deal during the early part of the telegraph age and all through the telephone age, meaning AT and T and long lines and things like that.

Not packets traveling along the Internet to make a telephone call happen.

These long lines actually act as antennas and these antennas capture larger and larger fractions of the solar flar's pulse coming through the magnetosphere of the Earth, meaning the longer the line, the greater the surge of electricity on both ends, which is why it many places along railroad lines, because railroads are kreosote posts rail pieces of lumber that hold up the railroad tracks.

The railroad tracks are ironed, really good conductors.

They acted as giant antennas to pick up the electromagnetic pulse from the magnetist of the Earth caused by the solar flare, and they lit the kreosote logs, the kreosote railroad posts on fire, and they caused fires all over the place throughout the world.

We're not just talking the US and England, who led the world in telegraphy, but throughout Western Europe and India and Pakistan and places in Brazil where they had railroads and telegraph and it caused all kinds of problems.

And then because so many of the telegraphs couldn't be used, they had to buy mail or by horse spread the news around of what they think might have happened.

Yeah, so imagine if we go back to the days like that, whereas Horse and Buggy, and here's your notification a Carrington event is coming or has already come.

Likely this would be the after effects James F ponder with us tonight on into the.

Pair of normal.

Can you handle another hour somewhere between the pair of normal and abnormal?

Into the pair of normal with Jeremy Scott will be right back.

There's a parallel universe fail separation.

While we received seriality.

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Hang on for the ride.

You're headed into the pair abnormal.

Do you always wonder what a solar storm, what a geomagnetic storm could actually do to us?

It is certainly fascinating.

That's why we always report on them as we get news, such as what is happening this weekend with a several states in fact likely feeling the effects of this.

If not as we speak, maybe you saw some of the effects last night or tomorrow night.

Because this is not just a one night occurrence.

And in the event of the Carrington event, we're talking about eighteen fifty nine in August and in September when this occurred, the first time that solar flares were witnessed coming off of the sun, and then what we've come to know is the Aurora borealis, or the northern lights light up the sky.

And where James is from, down in Florida, that was one of the first places to witness this.

James, that's right.

It's really interesting.

I've seen auroras, but I've seen them well stationed in Alaska.

I haven't seen them this far south, but during solar storm activity, there are historic records of aurora's being seen south of Mexico City, which this was back in the nineteen sixties.

This would be a gigantic problem if auroras were seen as far south as Mexico City right now, because we have literally millions of miles of power lines up right now, and so many of these thousands of miles of power lines are connecting server farms and the new AI centers things like that that are going to I believe we said coast earlier.

Yeah, it's going to cost the corporations billions of dollars, and the corporation the US and First World economies trillions of dollars, and it will ultimately cost a lot of lives.

Because you keep looking at the logistics of it.

If water doesn't get pumped and you live in a city, where do you go?

Yeah, and if it's if you're not able to sanitize it because you don't have power.

I mean, this is all stuff that we have talked about with the James over the years at length, the fallout of all of these kinds of scenarios.

So if you're new to the show, you haven't heard James before, or you're intrigued by what you're hearing today, I just type in his name into the podcast search and you'll find many more episodes that we've done.

I would certainly highly recommend those.

That's why we're having James back here.

As I mentioned, he was the first to ever tell me about the Carrington event.

And so now that the European Space Agency is warning we're doomed if this happens again, not saying we're doomed in the sense where everyone's going to die, but this would make life considerably difficult.

It may not take us back to the Stone Ages, but as you talked about at the end of the last hour, it may take us back to the days where things are arriving on horseback.

Yeah, the carrying load of the whole world is probably only about two billion people without a power grid, because when you consider the Earth did not hit a billion people until eighteen oh two, it only took ninety eight years for the next billion people to show up.

In the year nineteen hundred, we had two billion people and still almost no power grid throughout the world.

There is a lot more telegraphy than electricity going on, and it would there would be a gigantic die off.

And I don't mean to make light of this, this is extremely serious.

It would be a world changing event for decades or centuries, but there'd be a very large die off if the grid only went down for a year, simply because of loss of clean water, loss of medication.

People live in environments right now where they shouldn't.

In the tropics was screens and ceiling fans and air conditioning, and well above the level Le'll say, in Canada, in Alaska, in Russia and northern Europe, where people could live day to day without power, it's really not tenable.

I mean, I don't know what the population of Sweden was, for example, or the northern half of Russia before nineteen hundred, but I know it's a tiny fraction of what it is.

Now right now.

I mean, consider the space junk problem we have now, James.

Imagine if a Carrington event wipes out every single satellite that is orbiting our planet and all of that rains down on us.

Yeah, well, a Caring's An event could lead to something else called a Kestler event.

Kessler was a physicist who he's when you read some of his stuff, he's almost like a chaotician, the character Jeff Goldbloom played in the first Jurassic Park movie.

He dealt with the chaos of large systems when they actually went chaotic, and the Kessler event would be an unplanned or unstoppable impact of one satellite into others, causing a domino effect throughout the belts of the populated areas populated by satellites around the Earth.

Those would fall to Earth.

And while it's unlikely that any given satellite would land on any given home or trailer or apartment building or anything like that, when you have tens of thousands of satellites up there, many of them inurse, many of them that have been dead for years or decades, there's still kinetic energy weapons.

When they fall from Earth orbit onto you and they would have death as a side effects, and there'd be a lot of them falling down.

The Earth is seventy percent water surface.

Okay, seventy percent of them are going to hit water.

That means thirty percent of everything in space is going to hit lands.

And since we live on lands, there will be a non zero number of people to be hit by these things.

And if it just hits the side of your house and caves in the trusses and you happen to be in the house, that would also be a deadly event effect.

So it would be bad, yes.

Yeah, and especially with our reliance now on technologies of the day, as we've discussed both on Earth and in space.

Other things we haven't talked about, but like the communications satellites, all of the planes, the aircraft who rely on those, a GPS for navigation.

If you take all of those out, you literally put all of these things on a collision course at the same time.

Yes, that's right.

We don't know how to deal with that moving parts at any one time, but that lack of knowledge would be mitigated because we have these things like the Internet and GPS and proper time stamps to six digits and everything else.

But oh wait, the Carrington event caused the Kessler effect, and we have no way of tracking anything unless you have an old fashioned Texas instruments or Hewlett Packard calculator and you have enough graph paper to figure things out for your little corner of the world.

Us as good as it gets.

Going back to high school, basically, remember we all used to carry around the calculator so annoying.

I'm Jeremy Scott, somewhere between the paranormal and the abnormal.

Into the paradormal parent.

Where James I ponder our guest tonight.

You've heard him talking about cybersecurity and other subjects technological wise over the years.

He's our go to as far as that is concerned, but also about the effects that solar activity would have on the planet.

And really this is a wide spread.

We could talk at length about the effects that this would have.

A Carrington event like event would be more drastic than an event that happened in eighteen fifty nine.

I mean, take into example what we've heard about the effects on the telegraph system and then magnify that with everything that is in the skies, on the ground, and a situation like even the Kessler effect in play, and this is something that we don't want to mess around with.

And perhaps it may not even take a G five.

Maybe something like a G four storm could be just as devastating.

I mean, in today's climate, you never know.

James, Not enough new technology is built with anti fragility.

I'm going to quote Seem to leave here.

He wrote The Black Swan, not the strange movie with Natalie Portman, but the book about the occurrence of unexpected large events that cause other events, and he came up with a term.

He talked to a bunch of linguists to try to find a word in some language that was anti fragile.

He could not find any culture of any language that had the term or concept or word for anti fragile.

So he wrote a book about it and it was very good.

We need to build any future infrastructure, not just robust that is, grounded lines, grounded power lines with backup generators, but anti fragile.

Any of the fragility of this modern technology must be looked at and you have to bake it into the mix as you go.

What are we going to do to make this Carrington proof EMP proof terrorist group?

I mean, the entire concept of warfare has changed since I left the army in nineteen eighty seven.

Drones were basically a dumb robot at that point, and none of them were used as weapons, and most drones that people had were called RC aircraft.

I had a remote pro aircraft.

There were a lot of fun My engineer partner had like a big two thousand dollars one that was an RC aircraft and the thing would fly for miles out over the ocean and come back and have photographs and everything.

Drones have changed everything the availability of GPS to the centimeter to drop artillery or mortars or just find somebody that is your enemy.

And artificial intelligence.

One more thing, three D printing, so you can print on the battlefield as you go any object that you need if you have the right materials.

But then again, droans have changed what used to be called the foeba, the forward edge of the battle area.

We see now in Ukraine.

There are types of warfare going on between the Ukrainians and their allies versus the Russians we've never observed before, and a lot of it's never been written before, even in military type science fiction that Jerry Pornelli used to write.

So we are once again as the birth of the Internet.

We're looking out over the future and we don't have a clues to what we're seeing.

Well, James, here is the actual scenario that the European Space Agency proposes.

The Sun unleashes a sequence of powerful solar events that starts with a massive X class flare.

Radiation reaches Earth in just eight minutes, disrupting communications radar tracking systems.

Then we get a surge of high energy particles.

These are protons and electrons and alpha particles that hit orbiting spacecraft, causing false readings, data corruption, potential hardware failures.

And then about fifteen later, fifteen hours later, a huge coronal mass ejection known as a CME hits Earth's magnetic field swells the planet's upper atmosphere.

The increased atmospheric density boosts the drag on satellites by up to four hundred percent, pushing them off core, raising the risk of collisions and shortening their operational life spans.

That is a real world situation that's not just possible with a simulation.

I mean you look at everything that is in orbit these days, starlink satellites and everything else, and that's a that's a real world scenario.

Yes to all of that, that is correct.

A coronal mass ejection takes one to four days to hit the Earth.

The solar wind travels at just about a million miles an hour, and as the Earth averages ninety three million miles from the Sun, it's sometimes closer and sometimes a little further away, but in that average, it takes just about four days of the solar wind to hit the Earth.

Normal occurrences on the Sun take three to four days to hit us, but some solar flares have been detected to you out there, damaging cloud the energy that they have in literally one day now.

The speed of light gets light from the Sun to Earth's orbit in eight minutes.

We are eight light minutes from the Sun, or the Sun is eight light minutes from us.

But a corona mass ejection is actually part plasma.

It's part plasma is the fourth state of matter, solid liquid gas plasma.

It's a semi liquid that primarily exists in space and in things like research reactors or when bombs go off or spark plugs create a type of plasma that's very brief and very tiny and localized.

But when that hits the Earth, when we've never observed an industrialized planet getting hit before.

And unfortunately, we are going to be patient zero.

We're going to have to observe what happens to us and hopefully survive to be anti fragile enough to rebuild and to move on from there.

Well, and you talk about something that would take a few days to hit Earth, and that's what we're dealing with after a recent M eight point seven flare that hit Earth within the past few days.

In the situation of the Carrington event, this went on, from my understanding for I mean the effects of this for about a week.

Yes, and it caused auroras much further south in the northern hemisphere and much further north in the southern hemisphere.

Aurora is where they are rarely seen.

And there were some electrical disturbances.

There were some GPS problems.

The new series I think it's GPS three point two or three point three.

The new generation of GPS satellites being set up are more hardened against this, but are they in vulnerable to it.

No, And because they have to communicate with other satellites, the satellites to which they must communicate aren't necessarily enhardened to modern specifications.

So even if all goes well for you as a satellite, if you can't talk to anybody else but the grounds, you still can't get all of your job done.

Yeah and back then.

This event was reported in North America as far south as Panama.

In Central America, across one thousands of miles.

It was lit up like daytime.

People were out cooking bacon and exit one o'clock in the morning.

They thought it was it was go time.

Carrington event tonight with James F.

Ponder on into the pair Abnormal I'm Jeremy.

Scott, pairubnormal News, I'm George Henry.

Two bright meteors slamming into the Moon were caught on video by a Japanese astronomer last week.

The flashes, visible from Earth for just a split second, were caused by space rocks striking the lunar surface at high speed, producing brief but brilliant explosions of light.

The collisions happened about two hours apart, as the Southern and Northern Torred meteor showers approached their peak activity.

This week, meteors are already lighting up Earth's skies and apparently that of the Moon as well.

It is not yet confirmed whether these impacts originated from the torreds or were simply sporadic meteors per pairubnormal news every hour on into the pair of normal.

The eight Pring, the largest geomagnetic storm is recorded history.

The solar flares witnessed by Carrington had just sent another massive dose of magnetized plasma on its way towards Earth.

That evening, the terrifying and awe inspiring lights in the sky would be seen again around the world.

If we had a Carrington level event now, it would.

Fry our grid line to the GPS systems communications.

I mean, it would really bring us to our knees.

The scariest part such as storms almost certain to describe within the lifetimes.

The truth is far stranger that we'd like to believe.

You're headed somewhere between the pair of normal and abnormal into a pair abnormal.

Getting a G three solar storm that has rolled through following a major solar flare an M seven point four that also triggered a coronal mass ejection at CMEE, which is exactly what happened with the Carrington event.

To this was the result of a CME was it not?

I mean, not as intense this is a G three storm that we're going through this weekend, but back in the Carrington event it was G five, so much more intense, but still the result of a CME right best correct.

The coronal mass ejection a solar flare is actually a small coronal mass ejection, but the mass part of it is when a huge one comes out.

It is much larger in mass in size, and it travels faster out to the Earth's orbit.

Normally, like the solar wind, things take about four days to reach the Earth.

Any event that we can see like that other than light light takes eight minutes because we're eight minutes away from the sun light speed wise.

But this would be a massive flare with a lot of charged particles, protons, electrons, other things that are charge particles.

They would hit at the speed of light initially, but again this large cloud of plasma would come in one to two days and the plasma would hit Earth's magnetosphere and that would cause all of the electrical problems, the surge in power lines.

Remember a power line, a transmissionine, a telegraph line, which is what happened during the Carrington era, acts as a big antenna and it absorbs a lot of this electromagnetic energy.

The longer the wire, the longer the antenna, which means the more energy absorbed.

And it would cause things like the creosote poles on which the telegraph lines were mounted, caused them to burst into flame, and it would cause railroad ties, which are kreosote wood, they would burst into flame.

And if you've ever seen kreosoted wood burn, it will burn for a long time, it has a nasty smell, and it will catch other things on fire.

And some of the historic California fire have happened because a small forest fire has burned over to a railroad track and the creosault lines, the railroad ties would catch fire and they would just burn for days, and they would cause other things to burn that might not have happened, might have been controlled in a regular small horse fire.

So yeah, there is a large chain of events.

But it goes back to the solar flare hitting the Sun's magnetosphere.

All right, James, So for those who haven't heard about us talk about the impacts that this would have on the power grid.

It would likely come as a result of another three letter were not CME but E M.

P very similar.

Yes, it would cause a disruption in the Earth's magneto sphere.

The thing is a coronal mass ejection big enough to be considered a Carrington event that would hit the Earth's magnetosphere, would affect the entire planet.

Now, if it brushed the Earth on the south side of the Earth, let's say the solar flare were not precisely in the plane of the ecliptic, that is, the plane of the orbits of the planets, because all the planet's orbit in a fairly shallow plane around the Earth's equator.

Then if it, let's say, went to the south, it would affect the southern hemispheres, power grid, electrical server farms, satellites more than it would those in the northern hemisphere.

But it would still be bad.

It's likely it's going to be wide enough to be enough in the plane of the ecliptic of the planets of the Solar System.

It's going to hit the Earth and affect the whole planet.

That's a coronal mass ejection.

That's the carrying to the event.

An EMP is localized over the continent where it blows up.

Now, it's going to be bad for the whole Earth economically, But an EMP is meant to take out the power grid and electronics of a military's opponent so that their civilian forces, their industries, their supply lines can no longer function.

And I studied EMP a lot when I was an officer.

I used to teach it.

That was one of the things I taught about up for I was an for a Soviet specialist, and I was one of the Soviet instructors to talk about their space program and their weapons and their EMP and their evolution of weapons and so forth.

And an EMP is a local event and really bad if you're under it.

And unless you have a pacemaker or defibrillator planted in your chest or some other medical implant that you really need to make it week to week in your life, an EMP is not going to affect you medically.

But the lack of supply lines for food, the lack of electricity, the lack of water to the tap, Yeah, those are all going to have death as a side effect sooner or later.

And as far as the impacts of this, it wouldn't just affect those of us on Earth.

Those other members of the Solar System could also be impacted well.

The members of the Solar System that we've set out there.

Let's say if a coronal mass ejection occurs on the side of the Sun where the Earth is not but Mars is, it could literally wipe out the Mars observers, the rovers that we have, the various satellite that we in the European Space Agency and other space JACKSA the Japanese Space Agency have on and around Mars.

They could all of a sudden die or go blind, or lose a significant fraction of their functionality, basically eliminating them.

And that would be interesting to watch because we could see the damage that would occur to Earth.

And there's no life support going on on Mars.

We're just observing what's there.

Life support is a very big deal here on Earth, and it requires for carrying eight billion people.

It does require a power grid running water electricity to power things that keep us alive, the manufacturing of tractors, the refining of petroleum products, to harvest our food, to move us around.

It would be interesting to watch on another planet that wasn't us, and I don't think we're going to have that advantage.

We'll wrap up our conversation tonight with the James F.

Ponder somewhere between the paranormal and the abnormal.

I'm Jeremy Scott.

Into the paranormal pairent.

You know, we have what's known as the magnetic field, which does offer protection, thank goodness.

So, say if another planet experienced an event like the Carrington event of eighteen fifty nine, the largest solar storm on record and of course the first ever to be documented.

We didn't really know what these were or the effects before.

Then if there was an event that took place out there and it hit another planet, would Earth necessarily feel those same effects, James James up ponder our guest tonight.

Not unless the Earth were in the path of it.

Also, let's say if Mars were in conjunction with the Earth, it would it would mess us up to whatever degree the strength of the CME was, and then it would also wreck the satellites and the rovers on Mars.

We have nothing to observe except what's happened in the past.

That hasn't taken us down as a society yet, And there are some things that the listeners can do to mitigate the effects to them.

But if it takes down the entire power grid, it's back to a very long hurricane season.

And what can you eat out of the freezer?

First?

Yeah?

Okay, so if we get a warning, I mean there's probably a G four or a G five solar storm.

Are there any signs that we should look for?

I mean that this could be carrying to devent caliber.

Well, certainly auroras if you're as far south as I am, and I am south of Jacksonville, Florida, So yeah, I mean if you have auroras here.

As I said, I saw Aurora as well as stationed north of Fairbanks, but not quite this far south.

There are a few things the listeners might want to consider doing though.

That is, if your data is important to you, and like most families, if you have most of your photographs on hard drives, back everything up and put them in any metal box that you have you're a metal filing cabinet or a steel garbage can or something like that.

Since people don't have EMP cases like I was trying to come up with a decade ago, the funding just wasn't there for it.

But there are things to do, and that is, the power may only be off a week or two.

That's enough to cause death to a lot of people.

So do what you do when you have a category five hurricane coming in.

Fill up everything you can, including the bathtub with drinking water.

Charge everything that's rechargeable, and in this instance, try to remove antennas.

What's an antenna, any extension cord, Unplug anything you want to save.

A television, let's say, or a computer's monitor may not be killed by a coronal mass ejiction if it doesn't have a power cord going into it.

So you want to unplug the power from the back of whatever device, and unplug everything from the wall, and throw all your power cords in one place, keep them away from you because they're still going to act as antennas.

And we don't have enough knowledge right now to know what type of power could emanate from extension cords.

If you're sitting on top of one, even if it's not plugged in, get them away from you, throw them in the garage if you have one.

There are quite a few things that one could do.

But you have to consider what would happen in a long hurricane scenario.

And this is going to be Katrina times ten or one hundred, but we don't know yet.

If we're fortunate, we'll see some thing happening on another planet like all of our Venus orbiters getting wiped out or all of our Mars observers getting toasted.

We can watch what happens there and the world can then start spending some of the military dollars on enhrdening things that we kind of need, like power and water and back up and communication, things like that, you know, minor details of modern life.

It's really interesting to see that something like this could happen.

But you don't have to sit there powerless.

There are some things that you could do, and it might just be something horribly inconvenient.

It's not necessarily the end of the world, depending on where you live, how you live, and what preparation you make.

And I plan on living through this.

As Pearson and Shaw, the great health writers fifty years ago said, you want to long enough to die of something else.

I'm planning on that with a coronal mass ejection.

Jims, why were you recommending people water down their lawns and houses.

Ah, Yes, if you live next to or within a few miles of railroad tracks, the railroad tracks are going to catch on fire.

And you can't go out and wash somebody else's railroad tracks.

I mean they're going to go for miles and the railroad tracks are going to catch gigantic amounts of energy coming from the magnisphere that have been coming from the sun.

So you want to water the lawn, water your lawn really well, and hose down the outside of your house before it happens.

So if there's any occurrence in nearby power lines, in your internet lines, if you like, we have elevated internet lines or I live here, which is nice.

They're fiber optics, so they're not going to carry electricity.

They do carry data though, but any power lines that you have that are elevated, you want to hose down things around them, and especially the outside of your house so when something out there bursts into flame, it won't burn your home down.

You at least have shelter.

That is a very good advice.

Hey, you want to have something to come back to, especially if something like an X forty five class flare, which is what they're saying in this hypothetical scenario, what they're basing this all off.

That's a pretty massive.

Well, it is.

And this is one of those things that Donald Rumsfeld talked about in two thousand and two.

He used something he was maligned for saying this but this exactly a twenty first century use of some zoo.

Don't be concerned about the things you can prepare for, look at the unknown unknowns and try to figure out what the other guy is doing.

Well, in our case, the other guy is the Sun, and how the earth and the structures we have on the Earth are going to react to a Carrington like effect or an EMP and that we can do something about it.

We can at least see, Oh, this is flammable, and there are power lines that are right across the street from me, and yeah, they can catch on fire.

And those telephone poles they are not concrete there, wood poles were creasode in them.

I need to water that side of the house, and I need to water my lawn.

Just doing something low tech like that can save you a lot of heartache later on.

Yeah, James, we really appreciate you coming on the program tonight.

Get out and water your lawn.

All right.

It's been a pleasure talking to you and your audience.

Jeremy, It's always great to speak to this audience, and I look forward to your telephone calls and emails, and I appreciate you're keeping me up the speed on what you're doing.

Thanks absolutely always get to talk with you as well.

Like I said, the first person to ever tell me about the Carrington event, when I saw that they had done an analysis on this and said, basically, in today's time, the effects would be a whole lot worse.

I knew we had to get to James a call, and that we did, and he answered as always.

And the cool thing about James is he has nothing to sell.

He does it out of the goodness of his heart.

And so not only did we have that M class flare, of course, but as I mentioned, we had those two X class flares that came less than twelve hours apart.

The result of this is a coronal mass ejection and potential northern lights and geomagnetic storms arriving across much of the United States in the hours and the days to come.

There are some impacts of that, of course, that are to be felt as well.

If you're feeling a little off, that could have something to do with it.

From the cold dark depths of a secret dungeon somewhere deep in the remote Pacific Northwest, friends, until we talk to you next time, somewhere between the pair of normal and the abnormal, I'm Jeremy Scott.

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