http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090508/ap_on_sc/us_sci_space_weather
Begin quote from above website:
A report by the National Academy of Sciences found that if a storm as severe as one in 1859 occurred today, it could cause $1 trillion to $2 trillion in damage the first year and take four to 10 years to recover.
The 1859 storm shorted out telegraph wires, causing fires in North America and Europe, sent readings of Earth's magnetic field soaring, and produced northern lights so bright that people read newspapers by their light.
Today there's a lot more than telegraph lines at stake. Vulnerable electrical grids circle the globe, satellites now vital for all forms of communications can be severely disrupted along with the global positioning system. Indeed, the panel warned that a strong blast of solar wind can threaten national security, transportation, financial services and other essential functions. end quote
The above quote is from the article by the same name as my title for this article.
In 1989 a plasma stream from the sun resulted in blowing a Canadian Power Plant off the grid until it could be repaired and the Aurora Borealis coming down as far as Eureka, California and Mt. Shasta, California.
The only thing completely safe will be non-metallic non-magnetic media like Dvd's and Cd's. They will be the only save media because just like in a EMP (Electromagnetic pulse) from a nuclear blast, all magnetic media is permanently gone.
Another thing to think about is that since a motherboard on your desktop and laptop can be destroyed just by you (or someone else) touching it without being properly grounded, all computers on earth(that I know of) presently use magnetic hard drives. So if something happens with the sun spots you can kiss everything on your hard drives good bye and everything on them if they aren't backed up onto Cd's or DVD's which are non-magnetic media storage devices not affected by sunspots, or EMP.
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