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1 year agoI pine for the old days when you had to have technical skill to interact on the internet, and that virtually all content available was valuable.
The problem is, I am now too old and time-poor to learn new technical skills fast enough to stay ahead of the horde.
I am therefore surrounded by people who vomit their asinine thoughts into the void, and have become one of them. If I am here, then so are they.
They’re guessing, and no doubt fishing for clicks.
X-rays from flares travel at the speed of light and hit us in about 8 minutes. Solar energetic particles (related to flares) take minutes to hours. A coronal mass ejection usually takes about 3 days. At the moment we have no way of predicting them before they happen, so X-ray flares have no early warning because nothing is faster than the speed of light. We can see a CME erupt and know if it’s heading our way.
There are a couple of good sized sunspots at the moment that are facing towards us so the chances of something happening are decent, but we don’t know if and when and how much.