[Enchante]

I'm not going to take any position on the threat or lack thereof to civilization as we know it, because I simply can't judge what might or might not survive such an EMP.....

but I do find it interesting that the NASA item you linked on super solar flares says it's more like a once in 500 yr. event (for that magnitude) -- although *we* don't know nearly enough to say how often it happens

that NASA web page states that the interval is more like 500 yrs, although *we* can't be sure:

""In the 160-year record of geomagnetic storms, the Carrington event is the biggest." It's possible to delve back even farther in time by examining arctic ice. "Energetic particles leave a record in nitrates in ice cores," he explains. "Here again the Carrington event sticks out as the biggest in 500 years and nearly twice as big as the runner-up." These statistics suggest that Carrington flares are once in a half-millennium events. The statistics are far from solid, however, and Hathaway cautions that we don't understand flares well enough to rule out a repeat in our lifetime."

[JasonC]

They are making it up. They always do. And always in the same stupid doom mongering direction.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

- H.L. Mencken