Thursday 11 July, 2019 8pm to 9.30pm
ISU Cosmos Auditorium, Illkirch
Open to public

Speaker: Joseph Neal Pelton

Every 150 years or so the Earth is hit with a massive Solar blast called a coronal mass ejection (CME). In 1859 when the Carrington event occurred telegraph offices caught on fire and the Northern Lights descended to Cuba and Hawaii. Then the only electrical devices were telegraph systems. Lloyds of London have projected a similar event today could wipe out a significant part of the world's electrical grid and electronics on the world's pipelines and possibly disable many satellites that among other things synchronize the timing for the Internet. This study projected a "$3 trillion dollar" event. That is trillions--not billions. Further the world's magnetic poles are shifting and as this occurs the Earth's natural protective system against such solar storms may be reduced to a tiny fraction of what it is today. There might be a way to create an electromagetic shield out at L-1 called a LAPSE (Lagrangian Protective Shield for Earth that could avert what could be a modern cataclysmic event that creates trillions of dollars of destruction to infrastructure and ultimately hundreds of millions if not billions of people might die of the consequences. If we could build an effective space shield for Earth, it would also be possible to do this for Mars. Such a space shield for Mars would, over time, allow an atmosphere to build up on Mars. Mars does not have an iron core and thus no protective magnetic shielding against solar wind and solar storms. This talk outlines the dangers from catastrophic solar storms and technical approaches to creating solar shields, i.e. A LAPSE, that might protect the modern world from failure of its most vital infrastructure on which we all depend today.