Panic Watch!

Load up FoxNews.com and get ready to crap your pajamas at the top story of the morning:

That's right, this is bigger news than Gaza, bigger than the economy, bigger than Obama or Blagojevich. So big in fact that it deserves a huge tabloid-style headline in Impact font.

The study by the National Academy of Sciences (not NASA) says that modern day power grids and satellites are unprepared to handle a catastrophic solar storm if one were to occur, and outlines fixes for these shortcomings (some of which are already underway). This is good to know, and good for the people who run these things to be aware of. But blaring this on the front page as some kind of impending doom is a pointless scare tactic. We've known about this for a long time (here's an identical article from six years ago by the same writer) and the study is not predicting any specific storm, despite what the big headline might imply...merely the possibility and recommendations to prepare.

There are so many potential calamities for Earth (asteroids, pandemics, nuclear war, climate change, and countless others) that you might as well pick any of them to put in place of the SOLAR DOOMSDAY warning for the morning headline unless there is in fact some reason for the majority of the population to begin worrying about an imminent solar attack, and there isn't.

The last solar activity peak was in 2000 (2000! Millennium! Y2k! Aliens! Apocalypse!) and we seem to have survived that one alright. But then again...

2012! Mayans! Aliens! Pole Shift! Planet X! Apocalypse!