Do solar flares kill Life?
No, not really. Solar flares happen all of the time. Of the few that are pointed our way, most are deflected away harmlessly by the earth’s magnetic field. Big solar storms can cause intense aurorae. The biggest solar storm in recorded history caused aurorae as far south as New Orleans and the Florida keys (1859). The movie ‘knowing’ hyped up the danger of solar flares, and used that as a premise in their plot. A solar flare of that intensity is fiction (at least for our sun at this point in its life). Certain scientists have been warning about the fragility of our power grid, and have published a ‘worst case scenario’ where the power grid loses many of its key transformers. While I agree that there is not enough redundancy built into the power grid, I think their scenario is over the top. In order to ‘kill life’, a solar flare would have to be much, much more powerful than any that our sun is capable of producing at this point in its life. We have a really good idea of what sun-like s
