4 ms·
Do you have any idea how quickly the corona ejection would travel, and hence how long it would take to hit earth? It would take a bit over 8 minutes for any mes
by sorbus 16y ago
Do you have any idea how quickly the corona ejection would travel, and hence how long it would take to hit earth? It would take a bit over 8 minutes for any message from a probe near the sun to reach us, and if the ejection is travelling at (random number) 0.5c, it would only give us a bit over 8 minutes to react and get the word out. Obviously, if it was slower (0.1c), we would have a lot more time. The worst case scenario would be it travelling at >0.9c, giving us under two minutes to react and do everything.
It's perhaps a much, much better solution to keep a large (and I mean really fucking large, since it might be all we had to bootstrap ourselves back up to our current level of technology) store of equipment in a large Faraday cage. Probably several, distributed for redundancy, really. This could be combined with probes, of course.