Like how you can fry your electronics if they’re plugged in when the power comes back on from an outage, why can’t we “unplug” everything so to speak?
In: Planetary Science
I’m not seeing this mentioned in the first few comments. The electromagnetic radiation that damages electronics gets here at exactly the same time as any flash of light or radiation that we could detect as a warning. You would not see a flash of light and “oh no, the EMP” run to turn off your computer before the EMP reached you. The flash of light is the EMP. Your computer’s already dead. You’re too late. The visible solar flare is gas and matter that moves slowly and lasts longer. By the time some scientist sees that flare in a telescope, the EMP has already been here and done its damage.
Fun fact: every wire is also an antenna. Radio waves stimulate a slight electrical current in an antenna. An EMP is basically a giant radio pulse from hell, which sends a huge surge through anything with wires.
A switch would do fuck all, unfortunately.
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