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In what could potentially be one of the most, or least, significant actions of his term in office, President Trump Tuesday signed an Executive Order requiring federal agencies to strengthen critical infrastructure against ElectroMagnetic Pulse (EMP) attacks.
EMPs occur for a variety of natural and man-made reasons including, most notably, Nuclear Explosions and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), either of which could potentially take out entire sections of the country's electrical grid and other infrastructure and capabilities, requiring require years or decades to recover from.
Members and supporters of the decommissioned US Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse have long warned of the possibility of an EMP attack, with some individuals, such as Peter Pry, who previously led the congressional EMP commission, asserting that an EMP attack on America could kill off 90% of the US population.
This is because a man-made EMP has the advantage of being highly asymmetrical. A small country able to pull one off would cause potentially massive disruption to a large tech dependent country such as the United States.
Past EMP related coverage here, here and here
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:10PM (7 children)
You realize you are disagreeing with NASA who concluded it was some sort of solar event... despite admitting you know little about it? I provided the source above, take a look.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 29 2019, @08:04PM (6 children)
I don't think the sources post was there yet when I first replied. Not that a one-sentance summary of a media article necessarily reflects what the scientists actually said... but it's a start. And Science was (is? it's been a while) generally one of the better ones.
But regardless, *nobody* understood solar physics all that well in 1969 - we had almost no data about the sun, had only just achieved simple laboratory fusion twenty years earlier, and had no computers capable of running any but the most rudimentary of simulations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @08:22PM (4 children)
1) Who said this phenomenon covers the entire moon? Have samples been taken from opposite sides?
2) If it is cyclic, then over time the entire surface of the moon would be hit. The period would need to be 15k years or less or micro meteorites would have destroyed these structures (according to the paper). About 15k years before the younger dryas was the last glacial maximum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum. [wikipedia.org]
3) In the paper they say the sun would have gotten 100x brighter for tens of seconds every few tens of thousand of years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @08:53PM (1 child)
Well, I'd originally dated Anunnaki first contact to about the Middle Uruk period (3800 - 3400 BCE). But it could have been earlier. This isn't Star Trek, so we have to think about how difficult it would be for a technological civilization to detect signs of a primitive technological civilization after arriving at a strange new planet.
I'd always assumed that FTL travel isn't possible (probably 0.01c tops, even for sufficiently advanced technology), but could about 5 to 10 colony ships dropping out of warp generate an EMP to create glass like that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @09:04PM
And why do you think this hypothesis is worth considering? Does it predict anything different than the solar micronova one?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 29 2019, @09:08PM (1 child)
1) Yeah, I think I fixated on "all the craters" to a ridiculous extent
2) agreed
3) Must be the pay-walled first paper, the PNAS one seems to be focused entirely on meteor impacts and airbursts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @10:12PM
The download link is here: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=30805&page=1&cid=821781#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @08:49PM
It looks like the landing sites are all on the same side.
https://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/how-to-see-all-six-apollo-moon-landing-sites/ [skyandtelescope.com]