Pulse

How long do we have?

I dunno – a few minutes?

And that will be it? Everything electrical will stop working?

Yeah. Pretty much! The Sun spits out a big electromagnetic pulse and its goodbye technology!

Man, that sucks! So no more internet, or TV?

Dude – you are not thinking this through! Its way worse than that!

Worse than no TV?

You are an idiot – any planes in the air are going to fall out of the sky for one thing! Anyone on life support in hospitals is just going to drop dead!

Shit!

That’s just the start of it – we are going to have no heating, no water, no way of cooking stuff. There will be no transportation because all the cars will get their electrics fried, and even if they did work, none of the refineries will be working anymore because it’s all electronic.

Serious?

Yeah – Deadly! Why am I wasting my last few minutes online talking to you anyway? I should be downloading stuff off Wikipedia and printing it off.

What stuff?

You know – how to grow your own food – how to keep warm in the winter – all the things we have forgotten how to do.

So that’s it for mankind then?

Well, the third world will probably be OK – they don’t use any of this crap.

Makes us look a bit stupid don’t it!

Yeah, it does.

One last thing before we go mate, what’s your real name?

copyright Graeme Reynolds 2009