Thursday, 20 November 2014

What Could Happen

Falkayn spells out the effects of a supernova three light years away:

nuclei and electrons recombining generate asymmetrical magnetic pulses;

those forces will blast through a planet's magnetic field;

intolerable voltages will wreck unshielded electric motors, generators, transmission and telecommunications lines and computers;

every memory bank will be wiped and every operation stopped;

synchrotron radiation will blanket any surviving electronic apparatus;

there will be years of radioactive fallout, many times greater than from any war, and ecological disaster;

no food moves into the cities so the dwellers move out in starving hordes but the specialized farmers will not even be able to feed themselves;

there will be famine and fighting without medical services and, consequently, pestilences;

extra-planetary colonies will die when their apparatus is destroyed and space travel will cease;

Merseians will survive, if at all, only as a few starving primitives.

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