Café de Nuit

Today I heard that NASA has predicted that 2012 will be the year of solar storms, powerful enough to knock out most if not all existing power plants. The time frame for restoration was about one year.

A whole year without electric light and heating, without gas to cook and heat our homes, without water flowing from the tap.

A whole year without moving vehicles like cars, trains and aeroplanes. A whole year without phones.

A whole year without the internet...

o_o Frankly, this scares me a whole lot more than anything in the Dread Realms. If anyone can offer convincing rebuttal, I would be deeply appreciative...

Rock wrote:Today I heard that NASA has predicted that 2012 will be the year of solar storms, powerful enough to knock out most if not all existing power plants. The time frame for restoration was about one year.

A whole year without electric light and heating, without gas to cook and heat our homes, without water flowing from the tap.

A whole year without moving vehicles like cars, trains and aeroplanes. A whole year without phones.

A whole year without the internet...

o_o Frankly, this scares me a whole lot more than anything in the Dread Realms. If anyone can offer convincing rebuttal, I would be deeply appreciative...

Well, come of that stuff will continue to work just fine, in the event of such flares. Yes, there would be serious problems, but not doomsday. We'll see...

There's so much chicanery and misinformation about 2012 doomsday nonsense out there that I have a hard time getting worked up about predictions of doom and gloom. Unless presented with some firm scientific evidence I've got better things to worry about.

But you are correct in that it can be very worrying to think about how dependent on technology humanity is and the social unrest (even mass hysteria) a disruption in technology might cause. That sort of thing goes to a primal fears of both the unknown and lack of security/resources, fears that are both very ingrained in the human mind.

For me, the big concern is that I have good friends that I only met and communicate with through the internet.

Solar flares! Disrupting communications among world leaders for the next 20 years!

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012.html

Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?
A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history.

Looks like more of the usual 2012 hysteria... nothing to worry about. Other than global warming, the impending ice age, terrorism, war, cancer, peak oil, heat death, the Kardashians, and other signs of the apocalypse..

I've learned to live with the rest of that ****. Not being able to turn on my computer and reach out to the world, that would hurt.

See that's exactly why I'm currently building my own golem born of obsession which will replicate in every meaningful way our merry friend HuManBing. In time, it may even surpass the original as I will no longer need the interwebs to feed my HMB cravings.

This new and improved HMB will amuse me with delightfully incisive and clever commentary on daily life, including but certainly not limited to) a long list of romantic misadventures that made him curse those darn saving throws and life's loaded die.

I wouldn't get your hopes up. Azalin did some research into the subject and found that a Bing-Golem is made almost entirely from byproducts of the human body.

Of course, being a lich located in a castle surrounded entirely by undead, he stumbled at the very first ingredient: 75 kilos of earwax.

Don't worry-computers collapsed from the Y2K bug twelve years ago, so there really isn't anythinhg this total loss of power will do to us that hasn't already been done.

Besides, worst case scenario-solar flares knock out the power and wipe everyone's records. Gee, all our credit ratings got set to zero. If I believed this crap, I'd go max out my cards fast to take advantage.

HuManBing wrote:I wouldn't get your hopes up. Azalin did some research into the subject and found that a Bing-Golem is made almost entirely from byproducts of the human body.

Of course, being a lich located in a castle surrounded entirely by undead, he stumbled at the very first ingredient: 75 kilos of earwax.

Being a creation of AD&D 2E: Championship Edition, you'd think Azalin would have storehouses full of miscalleneous spell components lying around. I'm pretty sure that carrying copious amount of human ear wax is something every AD&D mage has done at one point or another in his or her illustrious career.

I'm sure the ear wax was just the first of the ingredients. Dander, snot, eye crusts, lost hairs, spit, and other excretions are probably needed. Though I am not an expert on the subject...

Heck! My Ail and Roti golems both do little more than play patty cake all day and they only repeat the first step repeatedly... Basically they just give each other high five saying patty repeatedly...

I had just begun to question the value of their continued existence as I can still get online occasionally but my paranoia now dictates I must wait just in case of this new threat...

Guess I will put the sledgehammer away for now!!!

In regards to the 2012 predictions: I read somewhere that archaeologists realized that they had, in fact, translated the Mayan stuff wrong. The Mayan 'doomsday' date in fact probably happened fifty years ago. Or will happen in fifty years. :p

Ronia Sun wrote:In regards to the 2012 predictions: I read somewhere that archaeologists realized that they had, in fact, translated the Mayan stuff wrong. The Mayan 'doomsday' date in fact probably happened fifty years ago. Or will happen in fifty years. :p

And no matter how often communism is tried and fails "It wasn't real communism." Honestly, how often do these New Age tree-hugging dirt-munching druids have to be wrong before we STOP LISTENING?

Ronia Sun wrote:In regards to the 2012 predictions: I read somewhere that archaeologists realized that they had, in fact, translated the Mayan stuff wrong. The Mayan 'doomsday' date in fact probably happened fifty years ago. Or will happen in fifty years. :p

Or, more likely, they realized that the Mayan calendar wasn't approaching a "doomsday" but rather a large round number. Kinda like when our calendar rolled over to 2000 and significant happened.